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
Speaker 1 00:00:20 Right. Welcome to episode 2 50, 2 of rogue startups. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 2 00:00:25 Good, man. I, uh, yeah, all good. Been very busy, but mostly in really good ways. A lot of like hiring discussions. So that's cool. But, uh, yeah, it's been, it's not slowing up for the summer, which is kind of unique around here. How about you? Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:00:44 Well, you know, like the second, so we last podcast about a little over two weeks ago, almost to the minute after we got done podcasting, like it was within an hour. One of my competitors announced that they were shutting down and all of a sudden it was like, woo, woo, woo. All hands on deck, all hands on deck brace for impact. And yeah, it has been just a colossal scramble ever since. Like I had all these beautiful plans for what I was going to be doing for June and the rest of the summer. And yeah, I was trying to do all of that plus the competitor stuff. And I would just like to say, um, I am not doing well. I'm not doing a good job across all of that. And I recognize that like, I, you know, I was, and on top of all that, it was trying to like take some time off, like not work too hard and this shit hit the fan and I'm like, God damn it. I've really got to take advantage of this. So yeah, that's been my life.
Speaker 2 00:01:54 Uh, so, so I wanna, I want to dig into that. So, so you had a competitor shutdown. I know you sent this to me in a slack group that we're in and they shut down because the parent company was acquired and they wanted to focus their efforts on the other business unit. Is that right?
Speaker 1 00:02:12 Yeah. So I mean, I can, this is all public. It's not like a great big secret. So Jilt is one of my competitors and they support Shopify, Wu and EDD. And, you know, they were one of the reasons I couldn't get in with the EDD folks for a while because they kind of had a formal agreement in there. And then in April, the EDD folks were able to say, Hey, you know, it looks like the support for Jill's going to end. And I took that to mean EDD support was going to end. I didn't think that they were shutting the whole damn thing down. I just thought it was like this one niche platform that they were kind of walking away from and I'm like, okay, cool. I can, I can totally take those customers. That's not a problem, not a big deal. And so I planned as if it was kind of that.
Speaker 1 00:02:59 And then on June 8th, they came out and said, Nope, we're shutting the whole thing down. And everybody was like a what? And I mean, it caught, it really caught everybody by surprise. So they had been acquired by GoDaddy like a year ago and when they were acquired it, you know? So I'm just going to say this comment off to the side GoDaddy is kind of the places where companies go to die. Um, not, you know, GoDaddy has never been one of my favorite hosting companies for a lot of reasons, which many of those have changed and there are no K hosting company now, but it seems like when they acquire stuff, they bring the team in and they have them work on stuff. But then the original product like gone. Yeah. And you know, I mean it acqui-hire right. So I mean, this is a classic strategy, not anything surprising or new, but this was something that like people were surprised to hear about and myself included because I felt like they were getting some traction, but then, you know, I kinda did some math based on their team size and what I think their rough customer base is and what their average price, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1 00:04:12 And they must have a pretty high burn rate. And on top of all that I clearly see that their revenue sources are not majority Jilt, which again is another surprise. So they're like, they were kind of like the WordPress WooCommerce plugin shop for a very long time. Still are I think, in many people's eyes. So, you know, they're clearly getting a ton of revenue on that side of their business. And Jill was something that they were kind of adding on to that, but their heavy team kind of made it unprofitable. They, you know, the founder, I was in the slack group for a WordPress folks, WordPress community, and the founder had sent something out saying, yeah, we were going, you know, my husband and I were going on this model where the Bain rule of 40, have you ever heard of that? No. Huh. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:05:04 I hadn't either until, uh, she put this out, but basically it was like the combination of your growth and profit rates, according to Bain capital should be 40%. And you know, I threw that out in the, um, with some folks in the big snow group and we were all kind of scratching our heads, like, okay, so what does this mean? Like what if your growth is really high, but your profit is really low. That's good, I guess. Um, but you should work towards profitability if your profit is high, but your growth is low. That's good. Okay. I guess, but you know, ideally I think what Bain is trying to say is you want to be high growth, high profit, you know, just a weird rule to go against. Anyway, that was the one that they were using as their yardstick or meter stick, depending on what country you're in.
Speaker 1 00:05:52 And they just decided, yeah, this isn't that profitable where we're having trouble making it this profitable. So we're going to shut it down. So yeah, it caught me by surprise. And you know, we're talking several thousand customers here that they have across those three platforms. So I mean, this is definitely a big deal and you know, many cool things have happened so far. Like the day I heard that announcement, I immediately reached out to the founders and I said, cause they put up on their announcement, Hey, we recommend these three other platforms. I was not one of those platforms. So I, you know, I just reached out and I said, Hey, you know, uh, you know, we didn't really have a prior rapport, but we'd kind of run in the same circles and knew a lot of the same people. So I, you know, I just reached out and asked and I said, Hey, I saw that you had the announcement.
Speaker 1 00:06:38 That must have been really tough. Would you consider putting recapture on your recommended migration list? We support all the platforms that you've got here. We'd be happy to help bring your customers over concierge service, a discount to move, et cetera, et cetera. You know, we just want to take care of your customers. And they were very surprisingly open to it. Like we started this conversation, I was talking to their head of customer care and we're working out all the stuff on the export and import formats and the help docs and, you know, uh, emails to send out, et cetera, et cetera. So we've actually had a really great experience here trying to help get Jilt customers a smooth and safe place to land, but it's chaotic as hell. Cause I'm like, I'm scrambling around with just everything. You know, I'm writing the emails. I had to write blog posts.
Speaker 1 00:07:32 I'm having conversations with partners. I was going to do this webinar in June with the EDD folks and it's supposed to be next week and they were pinging me about it. And I was like, whoa. Oh right. I don't think, I don't think that's going to happen. And I'm going on vacation, you know, this weekend too, which had been already on the calendar and plan for months. So yeah. I mean, I'm like scrambling to keep my head above water on all this other stuff. Plus I'm trying to do content marketing and I'm trying to keep the writers busy and trying to craft a strategy on that. And I'm getting a lot of conflicting information about that and the writers, I, it turns out that I screened some really great writers in the two that I have right now. They're very solid. But of course, when you get somebody who's good, they're going to be opinionated.
Speaker 1 00:08:22 And so if your opinions mesh, that's great. And if they don't mesh, then you have to have discussions about that discussion, slow things down. And you know, it's not like they don't have good points and they don't have good things to say, you know, I don't want to just sit there and hammer and say my way or the highway. So it's like, nothing's moving fast and I'm, and I'm frustrated, but we're slowly inching over the finish line. Oh, and on top of all this, I have a product launch. We still haven't launched our SMS and email broadcasts. So as of today I just, I shoved all those emails into the queue. We finished everything up, the pricing is live and all of that stuff, we got some customers onboard. We have to have these things because Jilt requires it. Like Jill became an immediate forcing function to like, get this out the door. And I was not, I was not totally prepared for all of that. I was going to release him in a different order. It was going to be SMS first and then broadcast second. I was going to space them out across two months, but then it was like, all right, SMS is ready. Broadcast is close. Now we gotta hurry up and finish broadcast. Now we've got to generate a tool. Now we've got to help migrate the customers. And also, oh man, busy, busy, busy, busy.
Speaker 2 00:09:34 Yeah. No, that's great. It's great that you're, we're able to reach, I mean, that's, that's hustle, right? Like reach out to the founder, get on their radar, get on their hopefully like, you know, preferred vendor list and help people with migrations. Like that's, that's a great way to pick up customers. I, I hope that it's like showing positive results for y'all
Speaker 1 00:09:50 Believe it is right now. Uh, you know, I'm, I'm working with them and they expanded their list from three to six and I'm now one of the six, which is great. And it seems like I'm probably going to be one of the preferred ones for EDD because the other vendors really don't support it very well if at all. So that's good. That's great. Um, and you know, EDD has already been promoting that, so I'm definitely seeing an uptick in those customers. Yeah. I just have to get them migrated over and get their templates set up and all of that stuff. So yeah, it was just unexpected
Speaker 2 00:10:21 Work. Yeah. Yeah. I can relate and I guess that's like my big update is I can relate on the, like the forcing function of the product. We, you know, so we acquired the potent, uh, platform right. In migrating all of those customers over today, actually. Uh, so I have a, I have an eye on our call and I'm an eye on slack, like with updates from our developers on how the migration is going. Um, so far so good, but, uh, knock on wood. But, um, what has been interesting is like, you know, a podcast hosting platform as a podcast hosting platform. And generally we do all the same kind of core things. Right. But then there's these edges, right? And then there's this like, Hey, but you know, they did this and you don't then, Hey, we do this and they didn't do that. So how does this, you know, how do we fit in things like pricing and packaging and features and, and things like that.
Speaker 2 00:11:12 And it's been really interesting too, to just see all of those unfold as we really get to know the, the, you know, the platform and the customers and what they need, uh, so much better. And like, for the most part it's been really positive. It has, well, one on like on a really good point, it opened up an integration that that would have, that we would have had to wait for like months. Um, so we're, so Cassius is now integrated with de script. So I don't know, Dave, you know, like D script is this amazing tool. Like you upload or record audio to this script tool, it transcribes it, and then you edit the transcription and it edits the audio based on that transcript. Um, so like total voodoo, right? Yeah. So,
Speaker 1 00:11:59 Wow. That's like serious AI. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:12:02 So, but, but the cool thing is like, you know, we could record this, I could plug it into D script, edit all the ums and all is they have like automated tools for a lot of those things and edit it up, you know, misspeaking and all this kinda stuff, and then just publish it straight to Casos. Right. So not like, Hey, export the file to my computer and upload it and all this kinda stuff, just like push a button, it publishes it and it's live and cast us. And so this was, uh, an integration that like, we would have had to wait quite a while for cause like, you know, product roadmap, bubble of law from their end, but like potent already had this integration. And so like acquiring the platform kind of acquired this integration for us, which is really cool. And then like some of the other things that we're now building, like if you go to rogue startups.casto.com, you'll see, like we build a little webpage for every podcast on the platform.
Speaker 2 00:12:50 And it's like, I think it's really beautiful, but it's really simple. Um, but one thing that potent had was the ability to choose themes, you know, for this webpage. And we kind of had like, Hey, this is, this is it. You can pick the color. Right. And you can upload the image and that's it. But so as a, we're very hard at work right now, building out a couple of themes and a bunch of customizability to that theme with like colors and fonts and open graph tags and all this kind of stuff to really make that like a more rich feature. And, and it's cool because like one, we need to do that for, for the podium customers. But then to like all of the existing Castile's customers will benefit from it. And then three, like it's a huge marketing thing for us because we're like one of two platforms that we'll have that then, you know?
Speaker 2 00:13:39 And so it's like, it's just interesting. It's been interesting. Like some things like the descript integration is just like, that's wonderful. We'll take it. That's a fantastic integration. D script is a enormous tool and this kind of media greater space, but some other things that like, I wouldn't have thought were so important kind of because like we've always had, uh, a website for our podcast and, and it's on WordPress and we have a theme who use Elementor and all that kind of stuff there. But like a lot of people come in and say like, I don't want to mess around with that stuff. I just want to podcast you build me a little website so I can point people somewhere and it should look good. And so like, I just didn't think it was that important, I guess, but like, we've just gotten a lot of feedback.
Speaker 2 00:14:20 Like, Hey, I really liked the ability to choose my theme and customize it, all that kind of stuff. And so like, we're getting really close to what customers need there. And it's, it's really cool. I guess what I'm saying is like the additional inputs and perspectives that you have when you do something like, this is interesting, cause it's like a bunch of new perspectives all at once, you know? And, and like it kind of guides the direction of, of the product. It sounds like for both of us, um, you know, in a, in a short time span.
Speaker 1 00:14:48 Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of a time when was doing business directory and we decided, and by we, I mean, me, uh, I decided that we were going to add theme support for the directory and it happened that there was a competitor that had done that. And I felt like, you know, I was hearing people talk about, oh, I don't like the look and feel, and I don't do, you know, like that became a forcing function for us to throw that in there. And then that actually boosted our sales. So it was definitely a major boon to do that. But yeah, I mean, it's all about timing in that particular case here, you know, with the, with the Jilt stuff, you know, I definitely was not prepared to do all of the things that we were doing now. We were actually prioritizing some infrastructure stuff that I was gonna get us off of. Uh, our Mongo DB provider. That's charging us just this insane amount of month, but you know, now I'm like, okay, I gotta be focusing on like cold sales and outreach and other things like this can't even be part of my mindspace anymore. So unfortunately that got shoved in her back clock again. And, uh, yeah, so I had to bite the bullet there, but you know, if I'm growing, because I've reached out to all these extra Jilt customers and brought them over, then it's totally worth
Speaker 2 00:16:04 It. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Totally, totally. Speaking
Speaker 1 00:16:06 Of that cold outreach, I have to say that, you know, of all the things that I have to do as a founder cold outreach is definitely ranking up there as my least favorite.
Speaker 2 00:16:21 Um, what part of it is your least favorite? All of, all of them. Yes.
Speaker 1 00:16:26 Well, I'm just sales isn't in my blood. You know, the way that like technology is an understanding that, and I'm okay with marketing, but for whatever reason, this cold outreach stuff is like, I feel a lot of resistance to it as I'm trying to do it. And in this particular case, I'm trying to do not just cold emails, which are not as bad, I'm actually doing cold phone calls. So I burned like two days practicing and recording myself on these videos and then trying to send out some videos where people could go and watch them before I called them to sort of make the call a little bit warmer. And let me tell you this shit does not scale to record a one minute video. It took me, it took me two days of prep. And then I was like, by the end of the second day, I finally got into a groove that in an hour, I ground out 10 of those.
Speaker 2 00:17:24 Yeah. It's totally exhausting. Isn't it? I mean,
Speaker 1 00:17:27 It's exhausting. That's exactly right. It's totally exhausting. And you know, I used to consider myself an extrovert. So I would think that this would be so bad, but I think now I've kind of shifted to ambivert. And so the introvert half of me is definitely
Speaker 2 00:17:45 What is an ambivert,
Speaker 1 00:17:47 An ambivert. So, you know what an and an introvert or an ambivert it is. It is go look it up. I promise you, it's a word ambivert like ambidextrous means both. You are both kinds of vert, so you're half introvert, half extrovert. So it very much depends on the situation. It means that, you know, you're happy to be by yourself, but if you engage in a group socially, you're okay with that, but you don't necessarily want to do all of one or all of the other all the time, an extrovert, you know, like craves that social contact and wants to be around other people all the time. Introvert wants to stay by themselves and remain in their own little world. And ambivert is kind of halfway in between those two.
Speaker 2 00:18:33 Got it, got it. I don't think that's a word, but I understand what you're saying. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:18:37 I challenge you to go look it up. If you Google it right now, you'll find it. Um, so anyway, dictionary aside, the struggle for me here is that that outreach, like just the fear of rejection and the harshness of the voice, and you're kind of dropping into somebody's day and they aren't expecting you. They don't even necessarily want you, but you know, I'm talking through with other people that are really good at cold outreach and cold sales. And they're like project confidence just sound like you belong there. You know, all of this stuff. And it sounds like that soundbite is unbelievably true. And yet at the same time, it's incredibly difficult to master that piece of it. I have definitely struggled quite a bit, sounding confident sounding, you know, like you can't make it too salesy, but at the same time, you have to make it personal.
Speaker 1 00:19:34 But promotional, that's a weird balance for me to strike. Like those two are opposite. So it's like, I can't be the ambivert of PR personal and promotional, whatever that is. Right. Promosa vert. I dunno. I'm just making stuff now. I'm just making shit up. I'm just making shit up. That does sound dangerous. Yes. As a sales guy, what would you recommend at this point? You know, aside from just shit, tons of practice, because that's the only thing I've really got to lean on at this point, which unfortunately means I'm spending less time doing the outreach and more time doing the practice.
Speaker 2 00:20:08 I would suggest hiring a sales person. Uh, I think, and, and that, that's probably just because that's what we're doing. Like I am a salesperson, I like it, but I have a whole bunch of other shit to do right now. So even though I'm spending more time on sales and sales, prep and process and, and everything, I just know that I can't be the salesperson just because it is emotionally taxing and it takes a real specialized skillset that like, I'm pretty good at it, but I hope there are people that are a lot better than me. And so like, I think you, you can do it right. And you can kind of bridge the gap between where you are now and kind of where, where you need to be in terms of like revenue and sales, but ultimately you'll hire a salesperson if it's successful. And if you kind of keep going down this path, I don't know if this is like, kind of a one-time thing because of guilt, or if you think that like your average customer value, like your average deal sizes sufficient to justify a salesperson.
Speaker 1 00:21:10 That's, I mean, that's a very good, but open question right now.
Speaker 2 00:21:15 So like ARPU right now
Speaker 1 00:21:18 Was like 60, around 60 and that's per month. So yeah, I mean the ARPU, isn't the problem, the LTV, you know, my LTV could support this, but what is sort of an open question is there is a high stickiness to email marketing tools. So once somebody kind of gets embedded in that, you got to catch them at that moment where they're looking to change, which is why the Jilt opportunity is pretty big. So like right now I went and dug out a bunch of leads that all claim to have Jilt installed on their store. So that's what I'm operating from as my, uh, my basis here. So based on that several thousand number of stores that I have there, it kind of feels like I'm doing a one-time thing here because I really need to get through that list as quickly as possible. And it's true.
Speaker 1 00:22:14 Probably somebody else is going to get through it quicker than I will get through it. And now I think I've spent enough time that I understand, like, what do I need to say? How do I need to say it? You know, what are the points that you need to hit in the thing? You know, what, what are some ways that you might be able to approach this to make it more successful? Like, I feel like I have some of those things, but I don't know, like, can I still close them after that? Are they going to be interested? Are they just going to be like, fuck you click. I don't, I don't know that yet, because I haven't gotten through enough of them to figure that out. Like I figure I probably have to get through a hundred of them to really have an idea of what that rate looks like. Yeah. And that's a slog, like, you know, I'm not, I haven't been able to spend more than three days on my cold sales so far, and two of that was practice. So yeah. Practice and set up and preparing the content and thinking about what it was and talking with other people who were better at sales than I was. So, I mean, is there such a thing as contract cold sales for short term gigs here, you know, is there a fiver of gold sales up work of cold
Speaker 2 00:23:24 Sales? Sure. There is. And I, I probably wouldn't trust it. Um, I mean, if you're, if you're just talking about somebody to set up like cold email campaigns there, uh, we used a service called retriever, retriever.co that that does like prospecting. So like outbound, like lead generation. They do it a lot on LinkedIn, but they do email as well. I had a really good experience with them. They, they brought us a bunch of leads and then I just dropped the ball on them all. So, I mean, there's definitely like outbound SDR agencies that will do this kind of stuff for you. I don't know that that's exactly what's SDR sales development representative.
Speaker 1 00:24:04 Ah, okay. All right. Didn't I wasn't familiar with the lingo
Speaker 2 00:24:07 There. Yeah. So I mean, in the sales world there's, and I don't know that there is between SDR and BDR business development representative. Basically those are the folks that go get and qualify leads, and then a inside sales rep or an account executive is the person that nurtures and closes them. And then there's like an account manager who, you know, is like an onboarding and success kind of specialist, uh, for, for like, you know, enterprisey kind of customers, that's the typical kind of team. I mean, so, so you're, you're doing the videos because you're sending personalized videos, a personalized video for each email you're sending, is that the deal
Speaker 1 00:24:46 So far? That's been my approach. So what I do is I get on their store and then I do a quick recording and I throw some stats that are relevant to their vertical. The whole thing is like less than a minute along. You know, I talk about the Jilt shutdown and I talk about that. We can take over their email marketing, abandoned cart recovery, and pitch it a little bit and talk about what we're capable of doing. And, you know, I throw out some statistics about verticals that would relate to their store to make it interesting. And I just basically tell them, yeah, I'm going to follow up with you via phone, but so far I've not gotten anybody to click on the videos because Hey, we now are now trained to avoid all links that we don't trust in are considered suspicious. So, I mean, it's a big, long ugly loom link. Maybe it would be better if I disguised it as watch your personalized video here or something. I don't know if that's totally going to do it. I'd really love it. If it would embed the video in the email, like a link that looked like a video, like on YouTube with a little play button.
Speaker 2 00:25:50 Yeah. I did that in Gmail. I, I thought it did that automatically, but maybe not
Speaker 1 00:25:56 Does I'm not using the Gmail client. So I don't see it. I just see the link and, you know, it definitely looks, it looks suspect so that may not be helping my open rates there. So, I mean, there's lots of things that I'm definitely not, uh, not dialed in. I don't have,
Speaker 2 00:26:14 I mean, the easiest one maybe is like, if you have these couple thousand people, maybe just send like a hundred emails with no video and see what happens, like burning, what else? A hundred of those contacts to see if you get a response and not have to do any more work like that. That seems like a fair bet I would take. And then, you know, if it's better great, if it's worse or whatever, then I guess if no one's clicking the videos, it can't be worse. But, but like, I would just try to like see what you can do to not have to, to not have to make that video because like time is of the essence, right? All these people are going to go find another provider. And if you spend three months getting through those couple thousand leads, you'll have missed the boat, you know,
Speaker 1 00:27:00 Very much so. Yeah. So,
Speaker 2 00:27:02 Um, sounds like something, like, if you're really serious about like doing the videos, you probably could hire somebody to do that. Right? Like you have the script, you'd get the data, put it in a big spreadsheet and just have somebody run through the script and insert that data that's that does seem very hireable. And I would probably use like Fiverr or something for it. And just say like, I want to make 500, one minute videos. Like what can we work out?
Speaker 1 00:27:27 Yeah. Certainly another way to do it. I mean, the email one is probably going to be, it's going to be a faster approach that's for sure. Yeah. So, you know, if I burn a hundred of them and I don't get any, you know, what's, what's a good response on cold, cold email. And I, you know, characterize that with like number of follow-ups too. So is that with like three follow-ups or six follow or no follow-ups
Speaker 2 00:27:50 So like paging Damian Thompson, but so Damien, please shoot us a message or something on Twitter, but I think 20% open rate is what we were going for. And then like a couple percent reply rate is, is I think like, you know, pretty good and I'm sure that's wrong. So someone correct me, but, but I think that's like what rings a bell.
Speaker 1 00:28:12 Okay. So having two responses on a hundred is what I'm looking for. Yeah. Roughly. Yep. All right. Yeah. So this isn't going to be scalable if I have to do a hundred personalized videos there and you know, the other thing about it is that coming from me, I, you know, I did say that I was the CEO of recapture, et cetera. So, you know, there was a little bit of founder gravitas there. Totally. But since nobody's clicking, nobody sees the gravitas. So I could just be wasting my fucking time here. I dunno. There's no gravitas if nobody watches, right. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2 00:28:46 True. But it is a super interesting opportunity when you have this, this is the golden opportunity, right. You have people that have to find another solution.
Speaker 1 00:28:55 Thanks. Don't make it. Don't make it more pressure than it already is here. Come on. No,
Speaker 2 00:28:59 No, it's cool. I just, I, I think you're, I think you're on the right track, man. Like I would definitely get into, try to do everything. You kind of get in touch with those folks. And it sounds like you're definitely doing that and maybe spend a little bit of money if you can, to, you know, have somebody prove those emails or an outbound specialist kind of work with you on a campaign, or I dunno, but it seems like the kind of thing that like, you probably would get your money's back out of it because all those people have like super high buyer intent right now, you know?
Speaker 1 00:29:27 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I already went, I went in and I engaged, um, a set of VA's that basically do contact enrichment and I got them to do, you know, several hundred of the clients as an initial check and they're getting me like names and emails, like personal emails. So, you know, that definitely is already improving my chances. I think of actually getting a hold of somebody real here, but, you know, to go through the whole list would, um, probably be a couple thousand dollars more than a couple thousand dollars. So, you know, I gotta, I gotta find out if this approach is gonna work. Cause if I'm getting, if I run it on a couple hundred and I find that I get four responses out of that, and at least two of those decide to sign up, it would totally make it worth it because my LTV would, would then more than make up for the cost. Yeah. But it, you know, I would love to have more than that and you know, who knows, but that's certainly, uh, I think that may be the approach I have to take starting next week when I get back. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:30:32 Yeah. I mean, just kind of rounding out those sales discussion. Like from my end, we're, we're hiring a, an account executive right now, two of them, hopefully. And, uh, it's been, it's been really amazing, like interviewing salespeople and like, you know, putting out the job application and getting, you know, people replying to it and having conversations and stuff. I mean like, first of all, like salespeople are just really good on the phone. And so it's like all the normal bullshit of like, can they communicate? And like, can I talk to this person? Is all like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And so it's, it's been actually a little challenging for me to say like, okay, what's my, like, what's my first and second and third filter for these candidates. Cause like most of what I've heard is like developers and then like support and success, you know, like in a little bit of marketing and those are all like, I've, I've got the whole, I feel like I've got the, the playbook down on what to look for and what are red flags and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 00:31:29 And with a sales person it's a little, it's just different, you know? Like I think that, um, in a way it's, now that I'm, now that I'm thinking about it in a way it's kind of like hiring a developer because it's basically just like show me your work. Right. And their work is like their previous performance, you know? Like, did you kick ass at your last company or did you leave because you couldn't cut the mustard. So, so like that, but it's just been interesting to, to be able to have really Frank discussions with people about their work performance. Like it's really refreshing to be able to say like, you know, how did you do, what did you close? What's your, you know, on outbound, what's your opening and reply rate. So it's, but it's been, it's been really interesting. And then like we're, we're figuring out things and putting together like comp plan and you know, sales quota and things like that. And it's really, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun to be putting together. Definitely like stretching my, my skillset, but, but like not 10 steps outside of what I've done before, but it's definitely like a little bit of uncharted territory.
Speaker 1 00:32:37 All right. So wait a minute. I have to go back to that sales discussion for a second there and hiring that person. You're an ex sales guy and you're telling me that it's harder for you to hire other sales people than it is for non sales. And that surprises the shit out of me. What I mean, like I would think so as if you're going to ask me like, oh, so as a developer, who is it easier for me to hire a writer, a marketer or a developer always tell you developer, because I feel like there's some instinctual thing there where I can listen to what they're saying and sniff out the bullshit and, you know, know whether they're a good developer, not a good developer, whether, but for like a writer or a marketer, that's harder because my bullshit detector isn't nearly as developed, I guess, in those areas. So it, it kind of shocks me to hear you say that for sales, because I would have expected you to say the opposite of that.
Speaker 2 00:33:31 Well, I think it comes down to like one it's the first time I've done it in a long time, you know, like we hired Chris back at podcast motor, and that was just like a perfect fit, like third applicant, perfect fit. Let's do it. This one I've had 13 or 14 first round interviews, like zoom calls with candidates because, and this is where the hard part comes in. Like with, for me, like, or the developer or a support person or marketing person, like the application itself has a bunch of these filters, right. Is like, you know, did the answer all the questions? Do they have the level of experience that I'm looking for? You know, all these things or the salesperson, like it's, it's a lot less clear, you know, like there's, you know, one filter maybe that I can apply. And then from there there's just a bunch of, you know, salespeople look like a bunch of different things and have different backgrounds and experiences and areas that they sold to and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 00:34:28 And so we're talking to a much broader set of candidates and that's the challenge, you know, like once I've had the people on the phone, yes. It's very easy. Like ope their experience is with this kind of sales and that kind of sales and that's not right for us, you know, they've worked primarily like transactional sales, whereas we're selling to enterprises. Okay. That's not a good fit. So like when you get on the phone yeah. It's, it's great. And it's easy. And I do kind of know that rapport or whatever I've been there, you know, but like, it's the on-paper stuff that I just don't have the like second and third degree filters that, that we have in most other things, even before you get on the phone to somebody okay. That makes, I've just been having a fuck ton of conversations. And like half of them were like, oh my gosh, no, this is, you know, this is not going the right way.
Speaker 2 00:35:19 But then like, I mean, I think, and I, you know, I know at least one of them listens to this podcast. I think that like, salespeople are really good at selling themselves too. So, so you get like the right person on the phone and you're like, this is great. This one's great. This one's great. One's great. And so we have like five or six, it we're into like bringing him back for second round interviews and they're all fucking great. So I'm like, I gotta, I gotta pick one or two of these. This is, this is tough. So yeah. But I mean, it's, I think, I think at that point it just comes down to like performance, which is relatively black and white, you know?
Speaker 1 00:35:56 Right, right. I mean, so sort of a secondary question here, when you're, when you're interviewing a developer, I've noticed that you can usually tell the ones that are bullshitting on their resume. When you just dig into, like, how did you build the system? Why was this decision made? Like, especially senior developers, the ones who claim to be senior full-stack developers, you can tell pretty quickly if they really are senior full stack, or they just wrote that down in their resume and said, you know, they were part of a team and they were senior because they happened to be there the longest, but not because they were the ones making the decisions and driving the solutions and stuff like that. So like for sales, what's your, what's your bullshit detector on that?
Speaker 2 00:36:40 Of like level of experience.
Speaker 1 00:36:43 Yeah. I mean, just like level of experience. And do you really think they did what they say they did? I mean, they could say, oh, I drove a million in enterprise sales last quarter. Like how do you, how do you really verify that? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:36:57 Yeah. So it's all like the numbers, right? It's like, how many, you know, how much did you close? Okay. How many calls did you have to close that amount? How many leads did you get to have that many calls? How many unqualified leads did you throw out? Because they weren't ready to move on to the, to the point of having a call with you. Like all of that math should add up and then how they describe a customer walking through the process is really insightful. So like, the question is like, okay, walk me through the sales process for like someone coming into to your site, to them, to you closing a deal, you know? And that should be like, okay, they come in here and they fill this thing out and then we'd lead score them on this. And then, you know, these kinds of leads are, you know, put on automated something. And the other ones go to a call and on the call, we do this and weeps in the proposal with this and HubSpot that like, you know, all of that should make sense and I should be impressed. And that's like, yeah, those are the experience.
Speaker 1 00:37:53 Experience speaks for itself by the depth of knowledge about the entire process and being able to quote real numbers. So somebody, somebody who's making it up is going to be sussed out here pretty quick. But unfortunately it sounds like you have to ask the questions in person to get that, which makes it a lot more time intensive.
Speaker 2 00:38:12 Yeah. Yup. Yup. And I think that's, I think that's where it is. Like, but, but I mean, honestly at this point, yeah, we're going to have five or six people come back for a second round interviews. I mean, on paper, they're all Brock stars, which is really cool. Um, it makes, it makes it tough. Right. And I think that that decision might be really challenging, but, um, yeah. Yeah. It's I tell you, man, it's like, even me saying like, Dave, you should go hire sales person. Like, that's so exciting to me to say like, oh, fucking do this and have someone just go drive revenue. And like, for us, like, it's really exciting to to think like, oh, we can have one or two people who just wake up every day and think about, you know, making the company money, uh, is super cool. Cause I'm like that, that's a big thing I worry about, but that's like one of 10 or 15 things I have to worry about all day. Um, and like a person that's all they think about, you know, is super powerful.
Speaker 1 00:39:06 Right. I mean, the thing that I'm noticing now that the most, I think that I've been freed from freelance work is the fact that I have a lot to think about. And I now have more time to think about things, but I still have a lot to think about, and I'm still being pulled in all these other directions before it was like, okay, I got to focus on just the tactical shit, cause that's all I've got time for. And it was easy to sort of blow off the rest. And I kind of forgot how much I was blowing off. Uh, I now realize I was blowing off a fair amount. Um, so yeah, it just, it makes it very hard for me to be that person's focusing on just one thing. And if I had somebody that was driving revenue to the company, that would be great.
Speaker 1 00:39:54 You know, unfortunately I am slightly limited by my revenue at the moment to get that. So I kinda, if I saw that this was a channel that was convincing enough that it would drive growth for me pushing it a couple of months, I might be inclined to hire somebody because then I would know that the growth would eventually catch up to their salary. And I could probably bootstrap that in between, but I have to prove it out enough to know that I could do it. I can't just like throw it out there and say, all right, we're going to spend 6,000 this month and hope for the
Speaker 2 00:40:26 Best, oh, come on. Why not? That's not,
Speaker 1 00:40:29 While I'm already doing that, that's the thing I'm doing it with content and I'm doing it with ads, Facebook ads there's turns out, let's turn the ads off and try sales. Well, I mean, I've already, oh God. Yeah. We should have a whole other thing about my Facebook, um, outreach attempt here. But, uh, I, it would be better to actually have some real results. So it's taken like so long to get this thing set up. I mean, we're on the order of months at this point to get the audience warmed up, to have all these campaigns ready, the creatives in place. I mean, it just took so much longer than I ever expected it to. And it's not because of incompetence or anything like that. It's just, it's a slow thing to build an audience that's going to be effective on Facebook. And you've got to drive your numbers down to get clicks that are at a cost that you can afford.
Speaker 1 00:41:20 Otherwise when you push them down later in the funnel, your cost per click is jumping up way too high, and then you can't afford the whole thing. So yeah, I mean, it's just brutal. It's brutal to be in paid right now. So I mean, I may be in this experiment for another two months and then find, all right, fuck it. We're just bailing on paid acquisition, but I'm not quite there to say one way or the other yet. So, you know, I only have so much budget to experiment and my experimental budget is currently booked.
Speaker 2 00:41:51 Yup. Yup. Well, man, I look forward to hearing, uh, the update next week on, on kind of how, yeah. How all that is going of content paid acquisition sales, all that super, super interesting. I'll definitely give an update on, on our hiring process and progress and kind of see how things are going. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:42:10 Sounds good. And if you have any hot tips out there for cold sales or marketing leads or how to hire a salesperson, shoot us a message podcast@roguestartups.com. Tell us how wrong we are because please, dear God, we need to help. And if you have a chance, drop us a review on iTunes. We'd love to hear from you until next week.
Speaker 0 00:42:32 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.
