Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:19 All right. Welcome to another episode of rogue startups today. I am flying solo. No Craig, but instead I have a very interesting guest. I'd like to welcome chase diamond to the podcast and email marketing guru. Chase. How are you today?
Speaker 3 00:00:38 Yeah, I'm doing well. Thank you. Thank you for having me. How are you?
Speaker 2 00:00:42 I'm great. Thank you for asking. I'm glad you were able to join us here today. Uh, so I invited chase on the podcast here because he's working on something that I think would be very relevant to all, uh, of our listeners talking about his journey here. But before we kind of get into that, uh, chase, would you mind giving us a little bit of background on yourself and what you've been up to?
Speaker 3 00:01:08 Absolutely. So I'm a partner at an e-commerce marketing agency, so we've got about four or five divisions, everything from email to SMS to paid search and paid social, et cetera. Uh, we're a team of about a hundred people across six different countries. So most of our team is here in the us. We've got people in Canada, Mexico, the Philippines and India, and we're serving and kinda working with right around 130, 140 e-commerce brands. So all of our brands sell direct to consumer. Uh, all of them sell online. Some of them do have retail, uh, footprint, and they all do anywhere from seven to nine figures. So partner at an agency, working with a lot of cool brands, emails, really my bread and butter. And then outside of that, you know, I run newsletters, courses, events, and most recently, uh, a software business. So that's kind of the high level of what I've been working on.
Speaker 2 00:01:58 Very cool. And, uh, I can say, uh, with authority that, uh, your newsletter is a hundred percent legit, uh, I believe you market it as the most engaged, uh, subscriber, email marketing newsletter on the internet here. And I would say that that is a hundred percent true.
Speaker 3 00:02:14 Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 2 00:02:16 I haven't seen your stats and I know you post some of those things when you put things on the emails there, but I mean usually when your emails show up, like the content is just off the hook. I mean, you always put a ton of effort into all of those letters and I certainly really appreciate it cuz I learn a lot reading that as a fellow email marketing nerd there, and I find little tidbits that I can share with stores on recapture and so on and so forth. So yeah. Thanks for putting that together.
Speaker 3 00:02:41 Yeah, I appreciate it. I've I've said every single Monday now for north of two years, and I think we'll probably talk about it some point later, but it's really been a great way for me to connect with potential sass users, clients, friends, podcasters, et cetera. So I'd love to share at some point later kind of some of the, the value that I've gotten out of it, although, you know, the goal really is to provide value to other people.
Speaker 2 00:03:06 Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I mean we're both in email marketing, so, you know, the value is always about building that audience and then, you know, connecting with them, providing that value and then, you know, making your asks. So, um, I would like to hear today about your new journey here that you're working on, uh, in your SAS. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 3 00:03:31 Absolutely. And at the time I'm recording this, I actually have not shared the name of this platform with anyone. So I'm gonna be kind of sharing it with you for the first time. You know, I have had a few people in the alpha, but outside of them, I actually haven't even shared the name of it. So, uh, the name of the platform is email up. And one story we can talk about later, if you want to or not is I actually acquired the.com before I was pointing on just rock and rolling with the.co or the.io or, you know, I bought the.net. I bought basically every single ending except for the.com. And then I was like, shoot, I might as well acquire this.com before I launch or else I'm probably gonna get, you know, asked for a higher price and have less negotiations. So the platform is called email up.
Speaker 3 00:04:10 And essentially what it is, is if you think about like a Canva, um, you know, multibillion dollar company, Canva allows people to create different image assets. I'm basically building CAMBA, but specifically for email. So the, the issue that I faced is a couple things. One is at my agency. Uh, we have a team of about 10 or 15 designers and finding new designers has been really challenging. We build everything from scratch. You know, everything typically is built in Figma. Then it's either custom coded or sliced and dice and then built into the ESP of choice. And it's just a really kind of labor intensive process. It's expensive, it's time consuming. It's really hard to scale. So that was kinda one reason and kinda one thing that I was leaning towards and trying to figure out the second was in most of the ESP, uh, the design builders, the email builders themselves.
Speaker 3 00:05:00 Aren't really that great to be honest, right? I don't know the best way to explain other than they're a little bit limited. They're not super advanced, they're not super great and extensive. And I think most of the reason it is right, ESP typically focus on things like segmentation and automation and campaigns and deliverability, right? The things that you really want deliverability to be strong and whatnot, ESP to focus on. So I think email design has often been kind of an afterthought for ESP and therefore it's been challenging for, you know, marketers without a design background or copywriters without a design background to do it themselves. So long-winded, I really wanted to build this platform that was a best in class email design platform, that platform agnostic, it will work with any single ESP out there. Um, either through a direct import in some cases or through just the ability to export the HTML and then upload that file or upload that text to the ESP of choice so long Wied I wanted to scratch our own it at our agency and allow our team to be able to do more with less. And then, uh, the reason being is the ESP have not focused on it. So that's kind of a long answer.
Speaker 2 00:06:05 Well, that's super cool. And, you know, speaking as an ESP, uh, you know, it's, it's kind of a tough thing to actually design a, an email editor that really meets everybody's needs, right. And certainly in recapture, we've kind of focused on two modes and one was, we got the wizzy wig editor, which is like for the most basic tech phobic users, if you will, that really just struggle to, to, to put things in place and they want sort of a quick drag and drop way to make an email and make it look, you know, reasonable. And then there's the, okay, well, you've got the advanced users, but the, really the best and only thing that I can do there, aside from doing what you did here, which is as we're about to find out a hell of a lot of work, um, is to basically just go straight up custom HTML and be like, all right, you can do whatever you want, but it's all on you. <laugh> and that's tough. Right?
Speaker 3 00:07:02 Yeah. And I think I'm solving for like that middle to beginner group. Right? I think the folks that understand HTML aren't the folks that I'm building for, aren't really the folks that you cater to. Right? Most of the folks that do HTML typically work at large agencies or large companies. So I'm really focused on like the small to medium size players, you know, a one off freelancer, you know, a brand with three employees, you know, an agency with 10 or 20 clients, right. Where, you know, every dollar counts resources are hard to come by. Uh, you wanna be able to do more with less, especially kind of with the world that we're going in today, right. If you can kind of do more with less, you're gonna be in the driver's seat. So I'm really trying to solve for how do I allow, you know, a beginner, uh, email marketer, uh, copywriter, an account manager, a junior designer, someone that's not super designed heavy or someone that's not super technical to create a really beautifully designed email that renders properly across different inboxes and devices in a matter of minutes, right? How do you create an email and get it sent out? So that way you can send more emails. So the pieces that we're really trying to solve for and build around is how do we get people to send more emails and better emails? Cause if they send more emails and better emails, they're gonna make more money. And therefore the usage of our platform increases, which means we make more money and we all make more money as a result.
Speaker 2 00:08:18 Right. Right. Yeah. That, that better emails part is definitely, I think, a big struggle, especially, uh, for freelancers that have limited resources there. So that's really sweet. I'm glad that you're putting out, uh, the, the canvas of email here. I'm actually quite interested in talking about, uh, some integration here with recapture, cuz I think that would actually be useful, but you know, uh, moving on from that, what, uh, what would you say has been one of the most challenging things about building this here that you kind of got surprised by?
Speaker 3 00:08:53 Oh man, there there's so many my racing with all these, I think, I think one is part of the limitations is my own capabilities and my own bandwidth. So what do I mean by that? One is as I kind of alluded to at the beginning, right? I'm a partner at an agency of all these other things. So the amount of time that I could spend on this is, is limited. Right. And then two, my own expertise in building SAS and kind of the backend and the technical capabilities is also limited. Right? So non-technical founder, you know, trying to figure out something that's fairly technical, right. I wouldn't say it's as hard as building ESP cuz there's obviously more moving pieces in parts, but it's probably one of the more challenging things that I could have decided to build. And in hindsight probably should have built, you know, smaller, cheaper things.
Speaker 3 00:09:36 First got some users, got some traction then built this, but I guess go big or go home. So, uh, the, the two main things were, again, my non-technical background and my limitation of time where I'm building this as a side project where this very much should not be a side project, right. This should be like a full fledged business that dedicates the whole time. I think that's one and two. And, and with that, I think I had very unrealistic expectations. Um, you know, developers, people I've partnered with kind of were telling me the things I wanted to hear of. Yeah, no problem. We could launch this in three months at $20,000. Like that's not a big deal. That's what you want. That's what we'll do. Right. You know, we we're like eight, 10 months later, you know, mid high, uh, five figures, almost six figures into this thing between the domain and kind of the dev.
Speaker 3 00:10:20 Right. So I didn't realize how long this was gonna take and how expensive this was gonna be. And I kept making promises on social. I kept making promises to people that this thing was ready and this thing was gonna be live. And then I would go on and we'd fix one thing and they would break another. And I'm like, well shoot, like, can we just patch this up real quick? And then when we go to patch that up, so there's another leaky bucket and hole. And then it's like, oh man, I don't actually like how this turned out. I envisioned it one way, turned out another way. So I also think part of me being very perfectionistic about it and also tying a lot of like my self worth and kind of reputation into this, like has really kind of delayed things and wanted me to get slightly further along then probably just an MVP that makes sense to launch.
Speaker 2 00:11:00 Yeah. Oh man. Uh, my, uh, my heart is, uh, pounding in my chest right now with all <laugh> all of the anxiety that I'm feeling from all of those things that I've experienced as well over the years. And oh man, my heart goes out to you. I know that's tough. Especially being a non-technical founder. Uh, so how did you solve for that in order to make sure that you got the right team and that they understood your vision and that they built it, you know, to your specification? Like I know that's a big challenge for a lot of other non-tech founders in our audience and something that, you know, as a tech founder, they're like, oh, well I can just build it. It doesn't matter. But when you, when you don't have that capability, you can't pull that lever. I, I think there's a higher level of anxiety that goes with it cuz you're kind of depending on somebody else to get it right. And you're just hoping for the best, in many cases, cuz it's hard to vet for that. So how did you do it?
Speaker 3 00:11:57 Yeah. I'm still figuring this out is the honest answer, but a couple things. One is, you know, I'm like a stick figure designer. I'm not very good at design, so I'm really scratching again, my own itch, my team's itch. So, um, some of this was like realizing that I needed to be like crystal clear. So, you know, I bought a whiteboard and I literally would draw on paper or I would use something like a mirror or like a Figma and just have like very basic explanations and also have a looms accompanying in of like being very clear of what I wanted. So I realized too that like I can't just blame developers and designers, you know, for my shortcomings. Um, so I made sure that in every future interaction with new devs or the existing devs or the current team members, that it was overly thorough, that I very clearly illustrated what I want.
Speaker 3 00:12:40 So that way we didn't waste two or four days building something that they thought I wanted that couldn't be further from it. So I think one is learning to be a better communicator and communicating in a way that developers and designers understand not necessarily marketers I'm so used to working with and talking to and talking about marketers to marketers. So they get it right. We're speaking the same language, but I realized I was probably speaking English and someone else was understanding it in Spanish or whatever language. So one of the was on me, two was I found a, a design dev shop, um, outta Canada. And essentially what I did is I have them on kind of, I guess, a retainer and also they have skin in the game now. So I've incentivized them by having equity in the project. So that way, you know, in theory, they should care more.
Speaker 3 00:13:24 And I also have a reduced rate of what I'm paying. So I brought on, instead of looking for like a single individual, I brought on a team and I've kind of vetted them and saw the projects that they had worked on, asked for references. So longwinded, it's me getting better at communicating exactly what I want showing examples of how other people are doing it. Maybe in other industries, you know, making videos, literally drawing it on paper and sending screenshots, walking them through it, being very thorough and then finding a team that had skin in the game that felt like this was theirs as much as it was mine.
Speaker 2 00:13:54 Nice. Nice. Yeah. That's, that's tough. And I, I think that's a really creative way to solve it. I think you're one of the, the few I've heard who's straight up offered equity in the project up front. So I'll be interested to see on the back end what your growth looks like, because I think that will, uh, that will definitely tell you whether that strategy paid off or not.
Speaker 3 00:14:14 Yeah. It, it, it definitely will be, you know, it, I still own, you know, 90% of the business. So, you know, I owned still like an overwhelming majority and it was a great way because they've provided a lot of value. So I, I really see them being long term good partners, but yeah, I guess the, the jury is out. We'll see, we might have to do a follow up episode in a, in a couple months or a couple years.
Speaker 2 00:14:34 Uh, I would like that very much. Um, okay, so you, you weren't a technical founder, so that was a disadvantage, uh, in some circles cuz we actually, so I just got back from Microcom and one of the stats that they threw out at Microcom this year was that of all the various people that have gone through the tiny seed, uh, bootstrap funding and all of the people that have gone through micro comp they've found that there's like this huge imbalance. So there's like 90% are technical and 10% are non-technical. So you fall into that 10% there. Yeah. But I think you have different advantages because you're non-technical so what were some of those unfair advantages that you had when you decided to make this product and, and make this leap?
Speaker 3 00:15:16 Yeah, I think that's two primary things. I think one is, uh, industry expertise and two is audience or distribution. So, you know, I've been in email marketing myself eight, 10 different eight to 10 years, right. On different things from cold email to optin email, to newsletters and you know, communities, um, run an agency, right where we're working with, well over a hundred brands, you know, we've got a 70 or so people specifically on our email and SMS team and you know, the reigning 30 people across different divisions. So we're working with north of a hundred brands that do seven to nine figures, uh, have worked with hundreds of brands in the past. So, you know, I understand our challenges as an agency. And I also understand the challenges of brands. Why do brands work with agencies? Because they don't have the internal resources. Oftentimes they've got someone that maybe was marketing doing Facebook ads, but they don't understand email or more often than not.
Speaker 3 00:16:06 Maybe they have a designer that's never designed for email or a copywriter. That's never, you know, designed for email. So design, it's just this really common issue for all things. Email marketing doesn't matter what size business you are, are in most cases, doesn't matter what platform that you're doing. It's very much a universal thing. So I think really understanding how design fits into the email process and where there's kind of bottlenecks and where there's barriers and really who I'm building and solving for, I think is, is one huge advantage. I think the second advantage is, you know, I've built my personal brand literally on the back of being like the email marketing guy for e-commerce. So I'm building literally the eCommerce design platform by the email marketing guy. So, you know, I have the newsletter, as we talked about earlier, got about like 30,000 people on that, you know, across social, I've got about a hundred thousand followers, you know, podcasts, YouTube channel.
Speaker 3 00:16:56 So I've got a really strong network and list in audience that have built a lot of trust through courses and free content and services of, you know, five to six figures. And all these people have been really supportive. So I put a tweet out a couple months back saying, Hey, I need a few alpha users. And you know, within a couple of minutes I had to delete it. Cause I had like five or 10 people reach out to me and I didn't, wasn't ready for more, you know, the other day I posted a tweet on Twitter and it literally was up for two minutes because I said, Hey, I need three people to hop on this demo call with me, you know, tomorrow. And I had like five people DM me within two minutes. So I think my real advantages come towards getting feedback, being able to iterate, understanding the process and being able to then distribute it.
Speaker 2 00:17:39 Distribution is so huge. I think that's the one thing that I, I know my, one of my main struggles is trying to find a unique distribution channel or have that audience. And, and I've seen that before with other founders and other projects that I've worked on getting your message out there, having that distribution channel and especially in your case, owning that distribution channel. So you don't have to worry about somebody else taking it away from you. Your email list is yours. So I mean, that's, that's a true advantage there. That's amazing.
Speaker 3 00:18:10 Thank you. And yeah, one other thing to add is I, a couple months back I had some, you know, hypotheses and thesis of like, who are users or whatnot, but I put out a survey, so I threw up a survey, I think on like Twitter, maybe on LinkedIn, I can't remember, but you know, one or two platforms and had about 150 to 200 people fill out that survey, you know, pretty quickly. And some of the things that I was asking them, so I could understand like who our customers were was like, well, what email marketing platform are you using? Right. So, you know, I got all the usual suspects on there and I was able to see like, okay, so when I prioritize like the ability to import our templates into another platform or export our templates into another platform, what are the top three that I wanna prioritize?
Speaker 3 00:18:49 Uh, one of the interesting things in building the product that I didn't realize was because we're exporting HTML. We have to have obviously the unsubscribed link in that file before we, you know, upload it elsewhere or directly import elsewhere. And every S P has a slightly different way that they use the unsubscribe, right? Some is just like lowercase unsubscribe. Some is uppercase unsubscribed link. So every S P has a slightly different variance in a way that they, um, associate the unsubscribe. So then I wanted to figure out, okay, like we can't have an unsubscribe link custom for every singles ESP in the world. Like what are the five or 10 that we prioritize? So now we have a custom button in the platform, that's a block for people to select kind of one of the top five or 10 main ESP in e-commerce based off what data I've collected.
Speaker 3 00:19:33 Uh, I also was asking people, you know, what is your process done like today? You know, how do you use this? Are you using the ESPs native things? Are you using a third party tool, like a CAMBA or Figma? How are you building this? You know, what is your role? Because I think the way that people use this platform might, might vary based off role where I think, you know, if you're a designer, I think some of the advanced feature sets we have are gonna be a lot more relevant to you. Then someone that's a little bit more beginner, you know, the beginners are gonna be building mainly from templates that we have, which is kind of some of the learnings. So a lot of the research that I've done is a, my hypothesis, which again, a lot of industry expertise, but B like I almost am just defaulting to whatever these surveys say, because the data's really powerful and it doesn't matter necessarily what I think it matters, obviously what the users think. Um, so that was really helpful too, just to get, you know, 150, 200 people give feedback on all the different ways in which they build emails.
Speaker 2 00:20:24 Yeah. That's amazing. That was actually one of my next questions was how are you, how, how did you actually go about trying to find like product market fit here? So you did the surveys. Did you do anything else? Cuz obviously you started with your own, your own pain from this, right? Your own agency had this massive need to actually have easier, faster design that took less time. So what else did you do besides those things? Was there anything else or was that it and you're off to the races?
Speaker 3 00:20:49 No, it's a couple things. So yeah. Uh, own internal struggle. I'm also friends through kind of the courses that I made with a lot of other agencies and brands and whatnot. So a lot of requests for content I receive of, Hey, can you interview someone on your YouTube series coming up that does email design or, or Hey, in a future newsletter, would you mind doing something on email design? So just by being a content creator in this space, I got a lot of inbound of, Hey, would you do this video or would you do that video? And you know, a lot of the content revolved around design. So, so yeah, inbound my own agency talking with other agencies through the courses I've created around like, Hey, well, how did you guys design this email? And what do you guys use? And then outside of that, um, it was just kind of building in public.
Speaker 3 00:21:31 I'm a huge proponent of building in public. Um, on sometimes it gets you in trouble, right? Because I promised that this was gonna be out weeks and months ago. And I, I thought that promise was obviously gonna be something that we're gonna do. And again, I was very transparent. I had to like issue like a statement basically saying like, Hey guys, I was totally wrong. This is my first time building SAS. I thought it was gonna be this date. It's just not ready. And I'm just truthfully embarrassed. So I had to kind of retract a few things, but building in public for the most part has been really beneficial to sharing things that I'm building or thinking about building and getting feedback in real time, whether it's through literally like a native poll on Twitter, you know, I might get hundreds of people responding to something pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 00:22:09 So for me it took different shapes and forms one on one calls, my own experience, taking polls on social media. And then I've been working kind of with like a small, like limited group of alpha users to give feedback and you know, oh man, you guys, this is glitching on my end and this is breaking on my end. And I'm making people actually record themselves on loom trying to build an email. So, you know, Dave, maybe you have a template for your business. I might say, Hey, we're gonna build this template for Dave's business. I'm gonna provide like the logo, the text, the image, whatever assets they need in a folder. And I just want to watch you recording your screen, talking out loud about how you build this. And it was crazy like the exercise load of just watching people build an email without giving them any instructions and not letting them play with it was actually probably some of the biggest like light bulb moments because I realized like, oh wow, in my mind, this is so intuitive, but it's intuitive because I built it and I've been playing with it for weeks and months, but for someone that's new and hasn't spent time with it, I was able to see like the three or four things that people were getting wrong consistently and able to kind of build and solve for those.
Speaker 2 00:23:11 Wow. I mean, <laugh>, you've done more product market fit validation in your pre-launch thing than I think most SAS do in their first five years of being around. I mean, that's some pretty intense stuff. Like the deep customer interviews, the UX testing, like that's, that's a, <laugh> that one is one that I'm still working with on recapture. I keep hearing from a lot of people that, oh yeah, it's really easy to use, but you know, I just, we hired a new QA person this year and she's given me a laundry list of, oh, this isn't very easy to use and I didn't know what to do after this. Like she had the perfect fresh eyes. And so, you know, we're taking advantage of that, but that kind of feedback, that information is like, uh, it's the rarest and most precious form of feedback that you can possibly get from your users. Um, so that's amazing that you're getting it up front before you've even pushed it out the door. Like that's that to me has probably accelerated your overall customer experience, uh, several years into the future here, cuz that stuff is really hard.
Speaker 3 00:24:17 Yeah, appreciate that. And it's funny. So yesterday we did, uh, a call with some of the alpha users. So we had some learnings from that too, where like we had done most of the one, one on one. And then we did the small group yesterday of like four to five people. I had like the devs on and whatnot. And we literally went module by module block by block of every single thing within the builder. And I think this point we have like 16 or 17 blocks and that's everything from like a logo block to a called action block, to an image block, you know, an unsubscribed block, et cetera. We literally went through every single block and asked people, you know, what are your thoughts about this? You know, what are your thoughts about that? And then we had other questions of like, Hey, you know, how important is it for us to make sure that within this specific block that we allow you to leverage dynamic variables and personalization or, you know, how important is it for us to have presets, you know, preset blocks options for called action button to have different shapes and sizes and colors.
Speaker 3 00:25:07 So we literally went and blocked by block. We spent an hour on a call with about four or five alpha users yesterday. I think we need to buy 'em all dinner after that. But, uh, it was great just being able to go through and get that much feedback in real time. And just everyone on that call was differently. Either someone that does a 2 million a year in an econ business, someone that's a freelancer, someone that has a small agency, someone has a big agency. So it's also been really helpful to get like diverse groups, cuz those are our three customers, right? Agencies, brands, and freelancers. And within it, it's gonna run the gamut between someone that's about to start a business because of our platform and other people that have been scaling their business and going to be able to continue scaling because of our business.
Speaker 2 00:25:43 Yeah. I think a long term challenge for your SAS moving forward here is gonna be able to manage those three personas in parallel and still be equally valuable if you're gonna try to, you know, keep them all as customers somewhere in your, in your SAS pipeline. Right? Cause those are three very different use cases and three different ways that people are probably gonna use it. So my guess is this is the start, not the end of that feedback. And you're gonna have some, uh, interesting conversations <laugh> moving forward as you get more and more feedback cuz once you let the floodgates open, everybody's gonna come and, and you're gonna have a whole bunch of, oh, what if it did this? And I wished it could do this. And yeah. So I, I, it'd be interesting to see how much of that you've stabbed off up front and really caught the, the core 80% and how much is just gonna be a complete surprise when everybody shows up? I don't know.
Speaker 3 00:26:41 Yeah. That's a good question. And again, like, yeah. How do you prioritize through different groups of people and you know, different, yeah. Different people are getting different things. Like part of my worry is on the agency side. Like for us, you know, we have a hundred clients depending on how I price this. Like this might be really expensive for an agency with that many clients that like, I must price myself out of it where maybe it's better for individuals and brands or small agencies that you know, can afford to pay, you know, the 50 to a hundred bucks per month per client. So I don't know. It's, it's gonna be really interesting. Like how do you solve for pricing? And most of our pricing's gonna be based off of usage, which I think is probably the, the right way to go about with something like this. Cause our ultimate goal right. Is to get you to be able to send more emails. So in theory, the more that you make, the more that you should be able to pay for something like this and the more that you'd wanna pay. So I, I don't know. It's gonna be very interesting. There's definitely a lot of things I'm sure we're gonna have to fix.
Speaker 2 00:27:29 Yeah. And pricing is such a challenge, just trying to figure out what you really resonates with your customers and fits with how they're using the tool and what they really want to get out of it and the value that gets provided and whether it's ongoing or one time and all of those sorts of things. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see if your pricing model changes here in the next six to 12 months. Uh, it, it could very well, indeed. That's sort of a critical time when it gets into the hands of that mass adopting user base. So
Speaker 3 00:27:58 Yeah, it's interesting cuz like when you think about like the email design process, there's so many people involved in it, especially at our agency, right? Like every client that we work with gets access to five people. They have a marketer, a copywriter, a designer, an account manager and developer. Right. So if you think about like what we pay, you know, for an email to get done and what we charge and like what other people are paying, like, you know, we, we pay people, you know, salaries. So it's a little bit different, but I mean it's not uncommon for brands or agencies or freelancers that are using contractors to be paying, you know, $50 for an email design all the way up to like hundreds of dollars for email design. So kind of out the gates, like we're thinking of pricing, uh, 49, 79 and 99 and you get, you know, kind of like five emails, 10 emails and 15 emails, respectively.
Speaker 3 00:28:42 So, you know, on the five emails for 50 bucks, you're basically paying $10 per email design. So if anything might hunch is that we might have the ability over time to raise pricing for kind of new people, probably grandfather people into the existing pricing. So I'm kind of starting at like that threshold of like, how do I just get a bunch of usage, get a bunch of users to get a bunch of feedback and then build out really rich kind of feature sets, whether that's like amp accelerated mobile pages that allow emails to interact, like planning pages, um, things like solving for dark mode, right. You know, you have obviously the normal emails and you've got people have dark mode on. So there's all these other things that, you know, countdown timers that I wanna build into our platform that I think once I have those, you know, for anyone net new, you know, that was paying 49, you know, they're gonna probably have to paying 79 or 99 is kind of the base, but everyone will get grandfathered in. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about it right now is like how do people currently pay and get their emails done? You know, are they paying more? Are they paying less? Is this solution easier, better and cheaper? Okay. Yes. Cool. We'll probably have to erase prices in the future potentially.
Speaker 2 00:29:43 Yep. Yeah. I can't wait to see what that looks like here in the next six months, cuz I'm sure you're gonna be learning a lot here in the very near future about that. <laugh> so, um, we talked about some of the stuff that was really challenging or difficult here. Was there stuff that you were like, oh man, this is gonna be a real slog. And now you're like, wait a minute. That was super easy.
Speaker 3 00:30:07 Um, that's a good question. So one of the things that we were adding kind of more recently is like the ability to, uh, integrate with like Shopify. So people can dynamically pull products from like their Shopify store. I thought that was gonna be like an absolute nightmare and it, and has granted it hasn't been easy, but it's been comparatively easier than I thought it was gonna be. I thought that was gonna be like a whole massive ordeal an issue. And we're, we're more mostly through that. So like again, there's still might be things that come up that I retract this statement, but yeah, that integration with Shopify long people to bring in products and the price and the names and all those types of things from their Shopify store directly into our platform, I thought was gonna be just an absolute nightmare. And it's been, it's been a little bit easier than I thought again, I'm not the one doing it. So I guess it all is easy, but it also takes a lot of time. So in that case it's hard. So that's kind of been the one that stands out.
Speaker 2 00:31:02 That's interesting. Yeah. Our, our experience in integrating with various platforms has been that Shopify's API was the most comprehensive, the easiest to do and the best documented, um, and everybody else falls short in one or more of those three areas. Uh, and in some cases, all of those three areas <laugh> yeah. But yeah, so it, you know, just a fair warning. If you're gonna start going cross platform on this and looking for the others, be prepared for some, uh, challenges there that, uh, you weren't expecting,
Speaker 3 00:31:35 Man. Maybe I'm just gonna have to just absolutely storm through the Shopify marketplace first and then we'll worry about it later.
Speaker 2 00:31:41 Yeah. Well certainly the, the one I would've addressed first, uh, going after that same kind of a tool there, it just, it makes the most sense with the market penetration that they have. Yeah. Agreed. So all you've been building this now for almost a year, it practically makes you a SAS expert at this point. Uh, as soon as the day you launch, you will become a SAS expert. So I'll come back to you and then I'll refer to you as chase diamond SAS expert <laugh>. But uh, if you had to give somebody else advice about things that you wish you knew before you started your SAS, but you know, regret not knowing earlier, what would that be?
Speaker 3 00:32:22 Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think that's a couple things. I think one that kind of, I've been to toing back and forth with not for this one, but for any net new SaaS businesses, I kind of just ponder for fun on marketplaces, like flip a microwire, et cetera. I was like, what's like the actual costs, like what are the hard costs and what are the opportunity costs of building versus buying, right? Like, can I buy something that's done or, or mainly done, maybe it doesn't have much revenue, but like, can I buy something that I want or close to what I want that's done or mainly done for maybe the same money slightly more or hopefully obviously even less, but it's gonna save me the time. Like if I could have bought something that was similar to this or like this, you know, a year ago and it could have been live when I had the first had the idea and wanted to start building this, like, man that would've saved me a lot of stress and anxiety and money and you know, just chaos.
Speaker 3 00:33:16 And at this point, right, I would imagine I'd have a business doing five or six figure MRR. Right? So that's one I think about often is like, you know, I, I have a great grandiose plan in the future if I wanna roll up different email platforms, mostly outside of ESP. So whether that's countdown timers or email design tools or copywriting tools or popup tools. Um, and I don't think that I'm gonna wanna build those from scratch. Right. I think I'm gonna want to acquire something. So I think that's one, two is I think being yeah, more, more realistic with the timeframe it was gonna take and maybe be a little bit less anxious to hit, send and tweet and you know, whatnot on when something was launching. Like, I, I probably should have been launched, but not told anyone was launched and say it was gonna be coming in a few weeks knowing that it was done and kind of started hyping it that way versus saying, Hey, it's gonna be a few weeks out. And in reality it's a few months out. So think also too, like building in public and being excited, but not like jumping the gun. I think those are like the two big things that I think about like how do you fast track your growth? Can you buy something or acquire something or even partner with something in a meaningful way. And then to having a little bit more realistic expectations and adding padding to deadlines. So that way, uh, you and your team and kind of the market are all kind of in alignment.
Speaker 2 00:34:32 Yeah. I hear you on that one. Uh, the acquisition, you know, you get a lot of things when you buy something else. That was the reason I bought recapture. You basically are buying something where somebody else has gone and done the product market fit piece. They've actually established some level of an audience, hopefully more than zero. And you've got a little bit of revenue to play with there. And then you sort of had to figure out, well, what can I do to boost this? Whether that's, you know, promoted to my own audience, move it to other platforms, add features that they're not capable of doing whatever that is. So yeah, it's a very, it's a challenging decision either way. And there are definitely pluses and minuses, uh, speaking to somebody on the other side of that, you know, there's stuff that you wish that you, uh, could have done after you bought it. You're like, oh, I wouldn't have done it this way. I would've done it this entirely different way, but now you have to put the effort in to change it. And that's something you could have done if you built it from scratch. Right. The grass is always greener <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:35:31 Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's like part of what I'm thinking about. It's like, how do I find like tools as they launch start using them as a user being on that side of the experience. And then if it's something really good and great, like how do I inquire about, you know, investing or acquiring that specific tool? Right. Obviously like a lot of the tools that I use today, the big ESP, the big platforms, the canvass, the figs of the world, like, yeah, no, I can't buy them. Right. Like there's, there's no way, like I don't have those kind of pockets and no investors gonna gimme money to go buy something like that. But like, how do I find things early that are good and that I get to use and like, okay. Like for someone to exit earlier to bring me on early, before they're too big is mutual beneficial for both of us.
Speaker 3 00:36:11 So yeah. I don't know. I'm, I've been thinking about this a lot. And my, my old hobby used to be looking at Redfin every single day, even though I'm not planning on moving or nor do I wanna move now, my new hobby is like just scouring. Microwire flip on the other exchanges every night, just outta curiosity, like what people are building and what are the, uh, multiples and how, how big is their team and how profitable are they? So that's gotta become like a weird thing as I've entered into this SAS world of just like, I've become obsessed with like, understanding, like what's out there.
Speaker 2 00:36:39 Yeah. Uh, you and I share the same weird hobby. Actually. I get all the micro required emails. I've signed up for everything at all the various tiers. So I can just see what's the landscape look like for the new stuff, the moderately grown stuff and the bigger stuff, just to kind of get that feel for the multiples, the teams, the, the tech stacks, the yeah. The verticals that they're going against, what things that they're trying to build, why they're selling just all kinds of crazy data that's associated with that. It is fascinated, but I agree. It is a weird hobby. Uh, you, you and my wife would get along very well. She, uh, used to do the Redfin Zillow thing all the time, even when we weren't planning to move. So <laugh>,
Speaker 3 00:37:19 I don't know what it is. There's just a FA there's. I love learning. I think that's the core of it. Like I think through building this process through building the agency, I just love learning. And I, I just love like things that people have built and I appreciate it and I'm fascinated with it. So I don't know. I like data. So with the real estate stuff, I was always curious on like houses at it for sale now. Like what were like how long ago did someone buy? I, I just make up scenarios and play games, my head of like, oh wow. This person bought it like a year ago and they already flipped it for a million extra bucks. Like this is wild. Like, I don't know. It's just really interesting to see on the business and the asset side.
Speaker 2 00:37:51 Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story here with us today. Chase. If folks want to learn more or dig into your story further, or even sign up for your newsletter, how do they get a hold of you?
Speaker 3 00:38:07 Yeah. Great question. I actually have one other thing that came to mind that I love to briefly talk about.
Speaker 2 00:38:12 Oh, sorry.
Speaker 3 00:38:13 No, no, no, you're good. So last, last week I had this idea. So, you know, I'm starting to think about the launch, right? And I just have this thought that like most people nowadays, they don't wanna follow brands on social media. Most people wanna follow personalities and individuals, but I also saw a buddy that made this account on Twitter and he had grown it pretty quickly. He'd grown like to like five or 6,000 people in two weeks. And he basically built this account that was like best ad of the day. And I hit him up. I'm like, dude, you, you inspired me. You did such a great job. I'm gonna do something similar, but I'm gonna do best email of the day. So I literally made this Twitter account on Thursday night. I think it was. And we're now, you know, few days out from that.
Speaker 3 00:38:52 So it's been maybe like four or five days at, since. Um, and I'm just sharing pretty much one email that's in my inbox. I think it's interesting. And I'm sharing what kind of email it is, the subject line, the preview text, what time they sent it, who the brand is, what email platform they're using and where it landed. And this, this account, again, not huge. It's only been four or five days. It already has almost 1400 followers. So it has like 13 something followers. So almost 1400 followers. And it's been a few days. And instead of now building like the email up Twitter and Instagram, I'm just gonna start building out this community of like the daily email. Um, and I think that could actually grow bigger and live outside of this, but be a great promoter of the platform. So just a random thought I had is as you think about like building SAS or as you have SAS, like maybe build a community versus just a brand page, I think more people wanna follow and be involved in communities and individuals than they do brands necessarily. So that was kinda my last thought I just was thinking about.
Speaker 2 00:39:51 Yeah, no, that's awesome. It is funny. I had no idea that you were the email of today guy
Speaker 3 00:39:57 <laugh> oh,
Speaker 2 00:39:58 You signed up for that. I did. Oh, cool. And it wasn't, it wasn't even through a retweet of you. Um, because I, you know, I've been following your account on Twitter and we've had conversations on there many times, but I just saw this pop up in my feed and I was like, oh, that looks cool. Like I'm interested in that. And I just signed up for it. I had no idea you were the guy behind it, but now it makes total sense and yeah, by the way, I, I love it so far.
Speaker 3 00:40:22 Thank you. Yeah. So I think, I think it's interesting. I don't know. I, I have like this thought, like, I, I, I want my own growth team, like for my chase diamond brands, I want my own growth team. Like I would love to be building three of those accounts, one for copywriting, one for design, one for, I don't know, segmentation. Like I, I wanna build a bunch of these communities and obviously, right. Like time is a precious resource and I don't have a lot of it being so spread thin, but yeah, I'm really curious to see too. And that could be a future conversation we have is like, how does that simple Twitter account grow? Or maybe it doesn't grow and how does it generate revenue versus the time spent and maybe how, how it doesn't. So kind of just an interesting last thought I had.
Speaker 2 00:41:00 Oh, that's incredible. Yeah, no, that's, uh, that's some cool stuff and now I've got more stuff to look forward to here in the future. So if you want people to reach out and contact you, what would be the best way then?
Speaker 3 00:41:11 Yeah, let's just do my personal Twitter. So my personal Twitter is e-comm chase diamond. So there's no a and diamond. It's just D I M O N D. And also, if you do wanna check out that account that you started following that I built, uh, the handle is email of today. So the, the title of it is email of the day, but the actual handle itself where you'll fund it is email of today. So those are the two.
Speaker 2 00:41:34 Great, we'll definitely put those in the show notes as well as a link to be able to sign up for your newsletter, uh, which I do agree is a very valuable thing. If you are in email marketing, and even if you're not like hardcore into email marketing, I'd still recommend Chase's newsletter because it really gives you some good strategies that you can follow for your own stuff. Even if you're outside of eCommerce, it could be SAS related. And I still think you would get value outta that newsletter. So thanks again for coming today. Chase appreciate it.
Speaker 3 00:42:03 Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 00:42:05 Sure. And if you wanna continue the conversation, have a question for us, hit us up podcast@roguestartups.com. If you have a minute, we would love it. If you would share this podcast with someone you think would benefit from it until next time.
Speaker 1 00:42:22 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.
