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 47 of rogue startups. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 1 00:00:25 I'm good, man. I'm good. We, uh, took a week off last week just cause I was busy with family stuff and yeah, it's still still in the States and, and enjoying it and trying to, trying to get as much as we can out of this trip. It's it's been really nice so far. How about yourself? Ah,
Speaker 2 00:00:41 I'm fucking sick of winter. We've had in the last two weeks, two major snow storms, one six inches today we have four inches. The low was 16. I'm just so over it like way. Yeah. You know, I mean the sun is getting brighter and we're doing our morning walks and stuff like that, but you know, there's that teasing phase and I'm just, I'm ready for winter to be done. And it's rare that it lasts quite this long here in Colorado. So that's a little odd on the plus side, you know, for those of us that are in the gardening, nothing has come out yet, nothing big. So nothing got frozen, which will happen if it gets warm before this. So we got that going for us, but you know, just ready to be outside. I'm tired of this inside shit. So you know, it, it's given me a little, little bit of an itch. You know, we got some new bikes as a family and we're looking to go out and start riding those. But when it's icy outside, it's kinda hard to do that.
Speaker 1 00:01:43 Yeah. That's a downer for sure. But yeah,
Speaker 2 00:01:46 I mean, we're, we're very stoked for the time that's coming up here and, uh, been working on a bunch of stuff with recapture, which I'm anxious to talk about today,
Speaker 1 00:01:57 For sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean for, for us kind of person on the personal side and then we'll, I like dive into branding and positioning and pricing. So I think they all kinda run together. We're actually kind of in the Northeast right now. So it took a little bit of a side trip to go visit a few friends. So we're in Portsmouth, New Hampshire today saw Brian marble this morning for a coffee. And I was going to say, hanging out here,
Speaker 2 00:02:19 Neck of the woods, you should've said hi, but I don't need to tell you that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:02:22 Yeah. So had a coffee and they're hanging out for a couple of days here and then going up to Maine to just visit and have a lobster roll and everything. And then we'll go back to go back to Florida for the last week of our trip on Saturday. So handful more days here enjoying like beautiful spring weather. It's like 65 degrees and beautifully sunny today. So it's like really, really nice cause it's hot as hell and Florida already. So we're kind of made it a little bit of a break. So it's our first time in the States, not in Florida in five years, basically because all we ever do is come see, you know, our parents. And so we really are glad to have taken a trip, not in Florida because you know, the United States is a big old place and it's not all like Florida. So it's nice to be able to see a different part of the country. I've never been up here really. So it's, it's cool to have a little vacation within a vacation,
Speaker 2 00:03:16 New Hampshire and Maine. They're very beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I've never been in the spring. I've spent more time there in the fall, so, but it's still nice.
Speaker 1 00:03:25 Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. It's nice to be able to get out a bit. So, um, yeah, I mean, you alluded to, to kind of some of this, this pricing and brand and positioning all of what your different things, but kind of related that, that you're looking at with recapture, you want to kind of give a background on kind of where you are and we're doing some similar work to it. So I'll give context on where we are. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:03:48 So, you know, I've, I've talked about, this mentioned briefly on a few other podcasts, but we are, we're doing a launch of a big new feature here for SMS marketing. And when we were evaluating and by we, I mean me, I don't know why I keep talking to myself and in plural second person or whatever the hell that is, um, plural first person. And I, you know, I'm sitting here thinking about how I'm going to price this sucker because you know, when you, when it comes to pricing and there's like lots of, sort of classic ways to look at it, right? So the first thing that almost everybody does is you take a look at your competition, how do they do it? What are they, what are they pricing it on? What, you know, what is the metric that they're basing their pricing on? How are they pricing it?
Speaker 2 00:04:35 Are they the upscale? Are they the bargain brand? Are they somewhere in between? Who's their messaging and their targeting and all of this stuff. So, you know, I went through this several weeks ago with all of recaptures competitors only to find that, you know, everybody's all over the fucking map and that's good and that's bad because if it was, if, if everybody was doing the same thing, at least you could look at the top competitor and say, all right, they're doing this. All the other competitors down here are also doing this based on what I see. They all seem to be successful. So, you know, that might be a reasonable strategy to start with. Right. But I don't have that. I see people pricing on a lot of different dimensions. There's three popular dimensions for email marketing, for pricing. You can price per contact. This is what like drip does and MailChimp does.
Speaker 2 00:05:29 Uh, it's also what other, uh, my largest competitor Klayvio they do that too. You can price by sins. So if you're sending out a certain number of emails, a certain number of SMS, you can do that. Um, this is what certain other competitors do. Omnicell does this, uh, Columbia does it for SMS, but not for email and so on. So there's, you know, there's definitely a mix there and then you can also price on value. And this is one of those things that, you know, I, I was actually having a hard time finding a lot of people that did this. There are some, uh, there are some ones that are out there that do it, but by far we're the minority, which I find kind of interesting so that, you know, I'm looking at these three models here, trying to figure out how I can make this work for the SMS.
Speaker 1 00:06:19 Sorry, sorry. Just to, just to clarify, I would think that both contacts and sends are a value metric because if I'm the customer, the more of either of those I'm doing theoretically, the more customers and more of my customers I'm in touch with. So it's like when you say like price by value and you're not talking about like some kind of usage metric, do you mean like feature gating exclusively?
Speaker 2 00:06:43 No. I mean, like I can tie an email to a revenue event. So my email resulted in sales. That's a direct ROI, the contacts and the sens or indirect ROI wise, I can, you know, you can definitely say, Oh, look, you're getting more sales and you sent this campaign and yeah, sure. I, I, I'm responsible for that. It's pretty indirect. It's more indirect than you think, because I have people that are doing multiple things at the same time. So they might be running some other campaign on a platform and then abandoned carts on recapture. We take credit for those things because we have no idea what they're doing over there. And then they come back to me and say, Hey, I was running this campaign over here and you guys took credit for it. I'm like, so we wouldn't really know about this other thing over here.
Speaker 2 00:07:34 And by the way, nobody else does either like MailChimp would do this. Drip would do this. Klayvio would do this. All of them will do this unless they are a hundred percent in control of everything that's going on, which is really hard. You're never going to get that perfect picture of attribution and people want perfect attribution. I would love to deliver perfect attribution. You can only deliver higher or lower than the real attribution. You can never get it exact. And so, you know, I mean, this is the problem with all kinds of marketing in general, email marketing in particular. So when I say value based pricing, I mean, I send an email, somebody converts that to that email, that sale is directly tied to my email. That's value based pricing pricing. So based on the amount of money we bring in for your store, additionally, that's what we price our tiers on right now.
Speaker 2 00:08:28 Got it. Yeah. So that's value based pricing. Okay. And those are kind of the three predominant models that are out there in email marketing. This is no great secret. And right now we're obviously in the value category. So I'm trying to figure out how I can incorporate this into SMS. And so we're adding two pieces to SMS. One is abandoned carts. Okay. That's super obvious, right? I can clearly say I sent this SMS sail, completed. Boom, it's still in the value tier, but so adding some other stuff where we're giving you transactional messaging and that transactional messaging is going to have impact with your customers, but it's not necessarily going to be direct revenue tied to a specific event. So for example, we are going to allow you to be able to send out order notifications. So you could say order created order shipped, order canceled, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 00:09:28 So you can, you know, people want to be able to send those notifications and customers really want to receive those notifications. Like that's a big deal. So not every platform allows for that. We are giving you the opportunity to do that. And then you can throw in other things into those messages. Like for example, after an order has been shipped, or you can say an order has been received, you can send some specific documentation or some onboarding thing or a video saying thanks or whatever. Like, you know, there's better engagement stuff in here, but now we're, we're very much in the indirect realm. There's no way for me to tie that to revenue. So we're incurring real costs sending out these SMS. Like it's not like email where it's a flat fee and I can kind of spread that out across all of my subscribers.
Speaker 2 00:10:20 And, and you know, it's, it's highly profitable. SMS is like roughly a penny, a message, little less, you know, it's tiny fractional parts of a cent, but yeah, it's still like, unless you're sending millions messages, which we're not there yet. Cause we're new at this. You don't get that economy of scale. And even the economy of scale, Gail is like $0.01 of $0.01. Like, you know, it's, it's a 10% discount, but it's still like, that's a pretty significant cost. It sounds like it's not, but it adds up. And so, you know, there's this conflict that I'm having right now of trying to figure out how to keep us on the map, how you scale, but at the same time price the stuff so that I, you know, I'm not getting soaked for these costs and it drags our profitability down and kills our LTV and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2 00:11:18 But there's also a third piece of this. And that is, you know, when I did the EOS values activity last October, I came up with one of the core values of recapture and that was simplicity. And I, I keep hearing this over and over and over again, customers love our tool because it's simple, it's easy to use it. Doesn't take them long, long to figure it out. They don't have to dig through tons of documentation. They don't have to hire a consultant to get it right. You know, they can just do it all themselves. And they do it pretty quickly that I value that highlight. I think that's one of our competitive advantages because other tools get super complicated, super fast. And it's easy to add complexity to add on all these cool features, but to maintain this simplicity is a big deal. So I feel like our pricing model should reflect that right now.
Speaker 2 00:12:12 It definitely does. Value-based pricing super simple. You know, you make, you make this much money in the month and recapture, recovered that much. This is how much it costs you. It's a very straightforward formula. There's one page. It doesn't take a lot of thought to figure that one out. You know, I rarely get detailed questions about that or lots of confusion. There's usually there's one or two a month, you know, but it's, it seems like it's mostly people that didn't bother reading it too carefully. It's there it's. So I feel like we have that value proposition nailed now with SMS, I'm trying to branch out and deal with all these concerns. And on top of this, we've got one more feature coming in the summer and that's broadcast emails, which is like the number one thing that everybody wants. And this is one of those things where people just don't want to mess with multiple tools.
Speaker 2 00:13:03 They like recapture. They like the abandoned carts. They don't want to have to do their newsletters and MailChimp. You know, they don't, they don't generally like MailChimp a lot. It's kind of a pain in the ass to use. And if they can do it all under one roof, they want to do it all under one roof. It's one of the reasons I think that I lose people to Klayvio most often is that they have all this stuff. They do it all under one roof. They just want to do it under one roof. And that's cool. So, you know, adding the broadcast emails, the SMS, the existing stuff, I've got, trying to come up with a pricing plan that still promotes simplicity is tough. Like I've been kind of beating my head up against the wall, trying to figure out what would be the best.
Speaker 1 00:13:48 So, I mean, my, my kind of gut reaction to what you said, like that's two things really is. One is like adding broadcast emails is going to change the kind of tool that recapture is quite a bit like from a positioning perspective. Like you're not going to be just an abandoned cart tool anymore. You're going to be a, you know, e-commerce marketing tool or whatever the term is. And, and in that time, I think you, you more easily could change like your, you would want to change your positioning and change your pricing and, and metric. Maybe at that time, it doesn't seem to me like adding SMS marketing and the kind of usage you probably are going to expect in the short term with this. Especially if the broadcast email stuff is just a few months away, that you should change your pricing a lot.
Speaker 1 00:14:40 Like you shouldn't change your, your pricing metric a lot, maybe change your pricing and just up it, so that each plan or each tier or however you graduate that includes SMS, just make it more expensive and keep the rest of it as it is. Cause I think that even if the attribution isn't perfect, just say, Hey, you know, for each recovered dollar, you know, we need to charge more money now because you're kind of touching your customers and w and several different channels, you know, email and SMS now. So, you know, the, the, the recovery value is higher. I think that, like, to me, as a customer, that would make a ton of sense to say, Hey, this tool now, you know, lets me communicate with potential customer several different ways or customer several different ways. As a result, I'm happy to pay more for each dollar recovered and then it's super straightforward.
Speaker 1 00:15:27 But then down the road, when you get into like, okay, this is not just an abandoned cart recovery tool anymore. This does other things I probably would go to like, like the drip model or the, you know, MailChimp model of, you know, so many, so many contacts or leads per tier because then yeah, I mean, it just, it just makes more sense that way, if you're, if you're, you're going to be adding more people there quickly, I would guess your expansion revenue would grow quicker that way. Then, then like, ultimately what you're relying on now with your value metric is like the customer getting a lot of stuff, right. With like their product being good and their pricing being appropriate. And the checkout experience being optimized, all that, like a lot of that is out of your hands, you know? So like, as you're able to just price on things that you control, like subscribers or whatever you want to call them, like, I think your life would be simpler in that respect, but I don't know that that's a lot of, that's a lot of brain dump from my end. Well,
Speaker 2 00:16:24 You were at your scene and struggled and grappled with the whole contact based pricing quite a bit. And the thing that kind of holds me back from going that direction is what peep lodge has talking about when it comes to branding. And so there was this Twitter thread and we'll link this in the show notes so people can check this out. And it's a great thread. Uh, peop has got some great marketing insights. If you're not familiar with him, definitely follow him on Twitter. There's some, some good stuff he's getting more active again these days. I think he was quiet for a while, but not so much anymore. And he was talking about branding and sameness. And of course he was able to come in and, and pound the crap out of email marketing because the whole MarTech space, the competition is up like 53000% or, uh, yeah, 5,000, no 53,000.
Speaker 2 00:17:22 That's not right. 5,300. I can't read a number here since 2011, which is huge, right. You know, that's 50 X expansion in that time. So there are just lots of me too tools out there. And everybody's using all of the same language to say, Hey, we're the best, you know, we're the easiest, we're the fastest. They've got all these <inaudible> that they're throwing out there. The truth is, they're not right. And this is true of drip. This is true of MailChimp. This is true of Klaviyo of all of the, the big ones that are out there. In fact, when they went through and started listing all of these things, he was showing screenshots of these, uh, landing page or homepage marketing slogans. And, you know, he's like ripping every single one of them. You know, like the first one he's got here is like, promote your brand.
Speaker 2 00:18:16 Well, all email marketing tools will promote your brand. You know, you're pitching yourself as if you're the only one that's doing this. You're not it's same. They're all the same. Or, you know, they'll talk about, Oh, it's not about marketing automation. It's about customer experience. Yeah. But again, everybody does this. It's not different. Or you'll get more sales. Of course, you're going to get more sales. All of them can give you more sales or it's about customer engagement. But yeah, but we do customer engagement is just as bad as saying we do email marketing. So does everybody else more sameness or you'll say things like customer engagement, but with workflows, you know, this is again, not unique, not special. You are just the same as everybody else. You know, as soon as drip started adding the workflows out there, everybody started dragging them into their tools.
Speaker 2 00:19:11 Infusion soft, you know, had had this upfront. Drip basically took that idea and brought it into something that was more affordable than Klayvio added it. Now everybody has it. You know, it's like, it's not special anymore. It's not unique. Or things like create and send an email campaign in minutes or email marketing your way. It's like, this is a basic description of what an email marketing tool does. It's not strong strategy here. Or we, you know, work smarter, not harder or marketing smartest tool. Like nobody wants dumb email marketing. Like this is not a convincing message. This is more sameness or, you know, we help small businesses. Great. So does everybody else, this is not helpful or here are features, use them to connect with audiences, duh, you know, everybody does this. And so if I go the contact route, I'm going to end up starting to look the same as the rest. So that's, that's, what's holding me back from that because now I have to talk like MailChimp or drip. I have to price like MailChimp or drip, drip, drip, or MailChimp. And now I'm losing differentiation here and I'm, I'm struggling with that. I struggle with that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:20:38 Sorry. I totally hear you. And we're looking at a lot of the same kind of things right now. I mean, a little bit around pricing and the value proposition, but, but more like positioning and brand. And I'll just mention to Reese three resources that we're using to guide kind of this journey for us. One is YouTube video by Simon Sinek. He talks about the golden circle. I'll just, just go watch it. It's great. It talks about like, getting real lot more specific, starting with like what you do and then how will you do it and then why you do it right. And you, they use Apple as a really good example of like, what they do is, you know, make computers, how they do it is, you know, beautiful UI and design and stuff like that. And why is like to be, you know, a progressive, you know, company and make you feel like you're cool.
Speaker 1 00:21:25 Right? And so that's an over simplification, but he, yeah, he, he does a very good job of explaining it and puts you in the mindset for this. The other tool we're using is the three hour brand sprint. So just Google, it we'll include a link in the show notes. It's just a, basically like a framework of how to kind of arrive at the answer that we're all looking for with this stuff. And then like seeing this in action type form deadline, a kind of behind the scenes of them doing this kind of thing in a like in-person workshop for, for them kind of like rebranding type form, whatever a couple of years ago. So all three of those have been really helpful for us in figuring this out. But the thing I would say like around this is I think price and your value metric are related to your positioning, but they don't dictate it and, or vice versa.
Speaker 1 00:22:16 Right. I think what I'm saying is, I think you can say that you are really different and use words on your, you know, H one of your website that are really different, like talking about like using the why and like the emotional, like how people will feel after using your tool, which I think what we all want to get to not say, like, we have the prettiest or the fastest, or we help you get more customers, but like you want to get to something like how a customer will feel after being successful using your tool, you know? And like, I can't think of what that might be right off the bat, but like, I think that's what all these tools are trying to get us to, to arrive at. And I don't think that whatever you come up with there means you can, or can't price like this, or like that, you know, I think that they, I think that like your value metric and like the, the thing you price off of can be one thing. And that, that the value proposition and how you talk on your site, hopefully be different. Like, like peep is talking about Ken can be something different. I don't, I don't feel like pricing by subscriber means that you're automatically the same. I think it means you could be. And maybe you have to like, kind of swim against the tide to, to, to avoid that. But to me it doesn't seem like it, it locks you in entirely into that sameness boat of, you know, MailChimp and constant contact and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 00:23:36 No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push back a little bit on that and say, I disagree with it. And here's why I disagree. So if, and this gets back to the core value thing that I was talking about earlier. So if, if I'm going to embrace the core value of simplicity and look at everything, how am I going to make sure that I'm simple? So I have a pricing plan that's simple. And that simplicity is a core value of recapture in terms of the user's experience is also simple. Now I can take this, and this is kind of where my current thinking is at. And I don't know that I'm totally set on this, but I think I'm pretty close and that is we're going, you know, and I haven't crafted the perfect message for this, but something to the effect of don't, you don't have to stress out about your email marketing, not getting done, use recapture, and you're set for, you know, don't, you don't have to spend hours on this.
Speaker 2 00:24:34 You're not going to agonize that you don't understand all of these things because of our simplicity. You can just turn it on and it's ready to go. And that's something that I'm not, I don't see that as a message and other platforms, you know, they might say we're the easiest or the fastest, but I don't think that that actually is the true experience of what people get. Like I've heard MailChimp say this. I know for a fact, MailChimp is not easy or fast. It's confusing as hell, especially now that they've redone their dashboard with all these wordless icons on the side that are vague at best. Um, so it's not easy and it's not fast anymore. Now you've got to sit there and scratch your head and look at this and try to correlate with the documentation, which by the way, their documentation is way out of date too.
Speaker 2 00:25:22 At least it was the last time I checked, uh, in, in the fairly recent past. But if I can nail that message and I have a pricing plan that resonates with that message, think I actually have a winning combination there, but I just haven't quite gotten that pricing plan yet at the moment, I'm kind of leaning towards an add on model, because I don't know that everybody wants, you know, people come to recapture, like you said, for abandoned carts and that's great. And then there are people that are like, Hey, do you have broadcasts? Do you have SMS? And so these things can be add on. So we still have the core message. We still have the core pricing, but then if they say, Hey, I want broadcast to great. Here's the add on price to do that. And it costs you this much a month to send these many messages, but it doesn't become, you know, we're not pushing that piece of it so that we look like MailChimp or drip, we are, we're an abandoned cart solution. And we have this too, if you want it.
Speaker 1 00:26:28 Yeah. I don't think we're going to agree on this. And that's cool. And I think that's, that's a healthy, I mean, if you just think about, cause we have, we have a similar kind of model, right? We have, these are our three tiers and we have add on things that are like metered, you know? So it's kind of like what you're talking about, whether you make it metered or, or you haven't tears or whatever, it's, it's kinda the same thing at the end of the day. And like, it makes billing super difficult because then you have like, even, you know, like, I don't know if you have annual plans even, but then you have someone on an annual plan of this, but then they have this meter thing that has to be billed monthly. And then like, people are saying, why the fuck did I get like $200 bill last month and a $35 bill this month?
Speaker 1 00:27:04 And like all that kind of stuff, as opposed to just saying like our pricing page is just a slider, right? Like talk about simple, you start at a hundred and you fucking slide that thing over and that's how much you pay a month. Like I just, if simplicity is your USP and I, I, I don't think that's entirely wrong. Like I think just having a slider saying, you know, we're 2 cents a contact or whatever it is is, is breaking that tie or trying to make, you know, I do think that, I mean, I think you just want to really evaluate and say like, okay, if you're going to have SMS as an add-on and you're going to have broadcast as an add on both of those will have tiers or metering to go with them. So like, then you start talking about like three different sliding scales that people can have. And then like, to me, that sounds really complicated, but yeah, but that's just my opinion and it's your business, so that's cool. Well,
Speaker 2 00:27:58 Yeah, I hear what you're saying. And I mean, you know, I haven't, the problem is this is delaying the launch like this. We've gotten everything else done and we're down to the pricing and I'm basically the bottleneck at this point. Cause I'm having trouble coming up with what I think is the right answer and
Speaker 1 00:28:15 Why not? J w so what do you, what do you charge right now? Like, whatever, what do you charge like per hundred dollars recovered or what, like, what's your, what's your unit economics.
Speaker 2 00:28:24 We basically charge on tiers of recovery. So between zero and 2,500 it's 29 bucks a month, 25 Oh one to 5,000. It's 49 a month, 5,000. And one to S I don't remember if it's 10,000 or 7,500 it's 99 a month, you know, and so on.
Speaker 1 00:28:42 Like, would it totally screw up things if you just made that like 49, 79, one 29, two 99 or whatever, like just bump it up 30%. So, and include us unlimited SMS marketing to your contacts in each of those plans, but that's the simplest thing. Right? Cause everyone already understands it. They're getting additional functionality. The metric doesn't change. It is simple. You could do it today.
Speaker 2 00:29:08 Yeah. I hear what you're saying. It is simple. Here's my fear. Somebody actually takes me up on this unlimited SMS messaging and sends a million messages, which now encouraged to meet $10,000 of real cost. And that's
Speaker 1 00:29:21 Yeah. So we just cap it. We just kept that and say, you know, send as many messages you want up until kind of this, this point.
Speaker 2 00:29:29 Not really unlimited though. Right? When you say unlimited cap, that's not unlimited. So you got to say something like up to this many messages, and then we could say this many messages, uh, and then after that it's X per message or something.
Speaker 1 00:29:45 Yup. Yup. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:29:48 Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1 00:29:49 And you'll find that 99% of your customers fall in that allowance. You know,
Speaker 2 00:29:53 What happens when I go to broadcast emails,
Speaker 1 00:29:56 Then I would move to subscribers because then you're not, that's just not the same product anymore, you know? Right.
Speaker 2 00:30:03 That, I mean, the closest that one of my competitors does right now, which is Klayvio, they do separate pricing for emails versus SMS. So they, SMS is pretty much per send and they have packages, that'll say up to this many messages for this price, but their emails, they do it per contact. So that's a weird hybrid. And then Omnicell does it straight up on the, send the sens dimension, but they're sending tiers basically say this many emails and this many SMS, and then they also have ad hoc per SMS because people can go over that because it's,
Speaker 1 00:30:43 Yeah. I mean, I think the thing, when you, when you go to, when you go to, uh, you know, marketing messages, you're not gonna be able to attribute that ROI anymore. So I think that just has to go because if people or just charged, like, I don't know, some kind of flat amount, which is the opposite of what I just said as like an add on, but I think, I think there, the question might be like, how many of your customers want to use recapture for marketing emails? And like, if it's a substantial amount, then I would bake it into the pricing that everybody gets. If it's a tiny amount than having it as an add on kind of module would make sense, because then you could keep the, the core value metric that you have, which is like recovered sales, and then just add marketing messages for, you know, whatever based on number of subscribers. If it's the, if it's the, you know, the exception that people want to do that, then make it a little more complicated for those few people, but everybody else it's still straightforward and simple. You also don't need to decide that.
Speaker 2 00:31:45 Well, no. I mean, if, if I had the power to decide this today and this certainty that th that one of these was an absolute slam dunk, I would have, you know, slammed my hand down in the middle of the podcast and been like by JoVE Greg. You've
Speaker 1 00:31:59 Cool. Fucking we're outta here.
Speaker 2 00:32:03 Um, yeah. Uh, so that's, I I've clearly got some more thinking to do about it, but I mean, you, I think this has been a good discussion here, and you can see that, you know, there's a lot to go into this and that pricing is not always the straightforward, Oh, let's just do the cost plus model, or I'm just going to randomly pull this number out of my ass and throw it up on a website and I'll three tier it from here. So I've got a bottom, a middle and a, an enterprise price. It's it's it definitely is not that simple. It's definitely not that.
Speaker 1 00:32:35 Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think a lot of people talk about like, you should be experimented with all the time. I find that very difficult because like, it's a big lever to pull and if you're doing anything else in the business unit releasing features or doing a marketing campaign, then, then all of that gets muddied with changing pricing because that's just such a big effect on, on everything. So like for me, you know, I mean, we haven't changed our pricing and probably too long, but, but I, I certainly wouldn't think about changing it a lot. So I think you're right to say, take the time to really figure this out, but it doesn't have to be the last decision you ever make around this. So you can try it. The business is not going to tank if you don't have that metric, like a hundred percent. Right. Cause I think either of these options you're talking about are fine, you know, um, maybe give it a couple of months and see how it goes and you can iterate from there. But like, this is not an undoable one-time decision, neither. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:33:26 Yeah. And we're going to have a legacy pricing on this one. I'm not going to force everybody into it right away. I will, at some point probably six to nine, maybe 12 months down the road. I'll basically look at anybody who is, you know, on really old pricing at this point, like pre I still have a handful of people that are on lower than $29 a month, which is just embarrassing. And there's like, I know one customer in there is making like five figures a month on that. And they were just an early customer. They signed up, they've gotten a ton of value out of it, but now it's sort of like, all right, you know, this was five years ago, you signed up now it's time to raise the price on this. When you're getting a ton of value out of this, we've added a ton of features. The tool has changed substantially. So now it's time to move that up. And if they leave, I only lose 19. If they upgrade, I stand to gain quite a bit. So, yeah. But I want to wait until I got these other things in place here, so I can really hammer that value proposition home. Like it's a bulleted list of some big things. So it's not just one big thing and five little things, right? Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:34:33 Yeah, yeah. We had, um, we had planned to do a price increase on our oldest, you know, kind of original traunch of customers, uh, right around the time COVID and, you know, I think rightfully postponed that. Um, but at this point feel like certainly in Florida COVID is over, um, even here in the Northeast, like folks are, folks are venturing out in restaurants are open and stuff like that. So I feel like, uh, we'll probably schedule that for, I know we're in the middle of April, sometime in may maybe to give folks, cause we had sent the email, even that, Hey, we're going to do this. And like 60 days or something, we'll probably give folks the 30 days heads up again here pretty soon that, that this will be happening. I mean, it's just, you know, that was a year and a half ago, you know, at this point.
Speaker 1 00:35:17 And so like it's a smaller number than it was then, but just to simplify, like we just want to clear up some of these old plans and, and yeah. It's not a huge change that we're looking at. So probably, probably we will be doing that too. And I think that's natural. I mean, I think, I think almost in a way that is, uh, a good sign for your customers that, Hey, like we've added all of this stuff since you signed up, you're even paying the same thing. We have all of this stuff planned for the next year, you know? And, and the value that you're getting from the tool reflects that. And because of that, like we need to charge a little more and you're not talking about tripling the price on anybody. You know, talking like ours is up, you know, 20% increase. It's not, it's not crazy
Speaker 2 00:35:55 Triple the price on some of these customers that are paying 19. Cause if they go to charge based pricing and they're, uh, they're making five figures a month, that's going to hit the highest tier. So that's going to be a pretty big jump, 15 X
Speaker 1 00:36:09 Well, but you, you, you kind of say like, you know, you to yourself at least, Hey, if there's any kind of major issues, we can grandfather coupon people from there. Right? Like that's what I would say is like, this is what it is. If there's major kind of blow back or someone's, you know, really uncomfortable with that, then we can address those on an exception basis.
Speaker 2 00:36:28 They wouldn't put that in the email. Cause everybody's going to start saying I'm the exception. So I just leave that as a tool in my pocket for sure. But yeah. Yup, yup. Uh, nothing like the stress of raising your prices. Haven't done that in four years. So I guess I'm due for some pain.
Speaker 1 00:36:44 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's usually we make a bigger deal, a bigger deal out of it than it ends up being like customers are pretty, pretty understanding. I think you do it right? Yes. If you do it right. Yeah, exactly. If you do it right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so just kind of circling back to like this brand and positioning exercise, and I guess we should have given some definitions for this, like brand is like colors and fonts and the way you use words, you know, on the site, like to me, that's, that's what it is, is like what somebody thinks of your company based on what they see. And then positioning is like where you try to sit in the market and the value that you try to relate to customers. That's how we think of it at least. Yeah. So, so we, we had kind of a call with like, you know, we're a small team, but what I would consider kind of leadership of the team, you know, handful of folks that are kind of like the leads in different kind of functional areas of the company and our designer actually kind of walked us through like an abbreviated version of the three hour brand sprint.
Speaker 1 00:37:42 And yeah, it was really cool. We all kind of had homework to go and do, um, like a pretty lengthy kind of questionnaire on our own to say like, you know, who is cast us? What do we do? Where do we try to set the market? Who are our competitors? What do we think our brand portrays to visitors and customers, a bunch of questions like that everybody should have given kind of their responses to that. And then we're going to put that into like a Miro board and review it again as a group here, like later this week. And then from there, hopefully that kind of gives the inputs to like kind of who we are, who kind of, who we want to be, where we, where we try to sit and kind of what we want our brand to look and feel like. And then we're going to be kind of embarking on a pretty big, like style refresh as a result of this.
Speaker 1 00:38:31 And like that will be a kind of medium length process, you know, a couple months to kind of redo the website and redo the app design and everything. And then alongside that, we'll be doing like a positioning update too, to kind of coincide with that. And I think like the example that a lot of us use, like the counter example, a lot of us use is like when drip went to like the yellow and hot pink and stuff, but I like, we don't want to go to yellow and hot pink and everything. But like I do think they made like a pretty big deal out of it and made like they stuck the flag in the ground and said, this is who we are like it or not. And, and I think we're, we're planning on a pretty similar kind of like pivotal moment, you know, to say like, this is the new design, this is the new positioning statement. This is the new kind of brand look and feel like we don't want to iteratively do each of these over a month. So that's, that's what we're looking at, you know, really into the summer probably.
Speaker 2 00:39:29 Yeah. You know, with, uh, uh, I'll just, I want to say something about the branding for a minute. You know, I've had the same kind of branding with recapture since it was started. And you know, I don't feel a strong need to change that at the moment. And I think the positioning is far more important than the branding. So having all of the lipstick on the pig is great, but you still gotta deal with the pig. Right. So, you know, if I'm prioritizing one of the two I'm PR I'd prioritize the positioning, but you know, since you're doing some major work to the website and you guys are feeling like you need that refresh, I'd say go for it. But yeah, I mean, based on the brand refreshes that I've experienced between MailChimp drip, Klayvio, you know, half a dozen others where they've gone in and refresh their stuff, you, the uniform response that I've had to, all of these is what the fuck.
Speaker 2 00:40:26 I'm not getting anything different now than I was before. You've just changed the colors in the locations and the icons, if anything, it kind of introduced confusion for me. Cause I got used to the old way of doing things. And I'm not saying it's good or bad to do that, but it does introduce confusion and confusion. Isn't good for customers. Confusion makes them question whether they should be with you anymore. It makes them wonder what the hell they're doing. Is there, are they doing it right now? Did something get added that they're missing? I mean, you know, all of these things are definitely things to think about. I haven't seen somebody do a brand refresh where I was like, wow, that's so much better. Like, so I, you know, if you guys can pull that off, that's great. But I'd probably tuck that in the back of your mind to try to figure out what, you know, what can you do to do the brand refresh, but not introduce those elements that typically make people mad and talk about it in a negative.
Speaker 1 00:41:21 No, that's really good advice. That's really good advice. I mean, I think that's kind of like the, the price, the price update email, right. Is like, it needs to be like a compliment sandwich kind of thing, right? Like we're doing this thing to improve the look, feel of the site and we're doing this, this and this so that we can kind of do this in the future is how we're thinking about it. But it's definitely something we need to keep in mind. Cause I do think we, we think this is more important than our existing customers think it is maybe. And I think it's like, we want to do this to allow us to more kind of naturally and easily talk about certain aspects of the market and, and, and get to certain segments that, that I feel like right now we would have a harder time doing it.
Speaker 1 00:42:04 So I think that it is the goal and the end is to open up some opportunities in the future, but got to consider like, and that's a big one is like, and for you too, probably is like, anytime you, you tweak your positioning is like, how can we do this to kind of rotate to address this new segment of the market without alienating kind of where we came from and the people that are still our customers, you know? So I think that's a, that's a whole another topic, but that's definitely something else we're really, really thinking about. And you know, worrying about a lot is, is like, how can we do this to where yeah. People don't say like, what the fuck? Why did you do this? It was fine before. Um, yeah, but, but still serve like a business purpose for us. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:42:45 Yep. I, I think as long as you've got that in your mind, you're probably doing better than, uh, some of the other ones that I've seen so far. And, you know, I float it in front of a few customers, like pick some top customers that you have a good relationship with and see what their reaction is and you know, and then after you get their direct initial impressions, lead them through the discussion where you think you're going and see if that resonates with them at all. Because if they're like, what, then, then you've, you've missed the Mark and maybe you want to rethink it so better to do that, then roll it out and have a hundred people go whiskey, tango Foxtrot dude.
Speaker 1 00:43:25 Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's all, that's all another topic is, yeah. We're, we're looking at introducing, you know, a pretty decent system of like feature flagging and phased releases and things like that that we just haven't had yet. So yeah. All, all fun stuff. Good times. Can't wait to see it. Yup. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope this is, uh, interesting and helpful for everyone. If you have any kind of questions or comments or suggestions for Dave and I should just message podcast@roguestartups.com and as always, if you're enjoying the show, share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. And we'll see,
Speaker 0 00:44:01 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
