Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:00] Speaker B: Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host Craig Hewitt. Today I'm super pumped to have on Corey Haynes. Many of you know Corey from kind of online Twitter and and social media and Corey's just a real kind of master, I think, at B two B SaaS marketing. Corey worked previously at Barometrics, has done his own thing for a while and in this episode we're talking about Conversion Factory, his newly opened B to be SaaS growth agency.
There's only a handful of marketing people that I listen to almost kind of unequivocally. Corey's one of them. And the things that Corey and I talk about in this episode I think are really applicable and practical to almost anyone who's running a SaaS business. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Corey Haynes.
Okay, so Corey, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that you launched an agency because for as long as I've known you or known of you, it's been SaaS marketing. Right. So I know you're starting an agency conversion factory, right. Or started an agency conversion factory all around helping SaaS companies grow. But why the move to start an agency now?
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it's so funny because I was just telling another guy this morning, I was like, I swore that I would never start an agency and here I am, the most successful thing that I've done thus far. And after all this time of me, I think being resistant to the idea and kind of swearing it off I think actually still pretty valid reasons.
Now because we started the agency we're doing it a very different model. It's a little bit of an untraditional agency model. That's sort of the reason why I felt okay and actually excited to do it.
I'm happy to get into the backstory of the origins of it but it sort of came out of a realization that I'm playing the long game. I don't want to do just freelancing forever because it's hard having multiple jobs basically kind of be on the hook just by myself and having to plug into a team expected to operate like another team member when I'm not from multiple companies. It was really difficult. And even just when I would get my freelancing gigs down to one so that I could open up a lot of time for my own projects, I found that the client work always came first. And so sometimes it didn't really feel like I was getting reaping the benefits of it because I would just fill up the time that I was given with client work. And if I had 15 hours that week, I would bill them for 15 hours. But sometimes I would take 2020 5 hours. Now that's already three, four days out of my week and it's like, where does this time go? So I needed to and it's the.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Best scalable way, the best hours probably, right?
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. It's the best hours. It's a lot of my brain power.
And I think, honestly a little bit like, I just got tired of doing it alone a little bit and wanted to mix it up with some other folks.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I want to talk about kind of co founders because I'm a single founder. I like being a single founder for the most part, but definitely want to hear about yo you have a co founder with conversion factory two.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah, two co founders.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Two. Okay. And what's the dynamic there? Like, where do each of y'all kind of focus and everything?
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'm on the marketing and copywriting side. My buddy Zach Stevens is a awesome brand designer. He's also a good webflow developer as well, but he mostly focuses on brand stuff and just living in Figma all day long, essentially. And then my other budy, Nick Loudon, is a webflow developer, and we're trying to get him into kind of know, website development stuff like Framer and even just using Tailwind CSS and stuff like that. But he's basically like the implementation guy for all things web.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Gotcha. And who's like a perfect customer for you all.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Yeah, perfect customer, I would say. Again, another thing I was just talking about this morning was it's a little bit less about the firmographics of we do want to play with B to B SaaS, but it's kind of SaaS and tech in general. We've had some really interesting conversations with AI companies, with Biotech, with health tech fintech, and they all operate sort as long as they're B to B. I would say it's like B two B tech or SaaS, which is normally B to B SaaS. And then it really spans the gamut across all different stages all the way from super small bootstrapped. They're putting the vast majority of their budget towards working with us all the way up to, like, we're plugging into a large marketing team at a eight figure SaaS startup. So the value props and the way that we operate with them change drastically. But the commonality between those two usually is that they're shipping really quickly and that they already have other marketing channels in play where they're going out there, they're getting traffic, they're filling the top of funnel and then it's up to us to make the most of that traffic and convert the traffic into customers and to engage the customers, do the whole product led growth thing and turn users and leads into customers and into enterprise level accounts, all that sort of stuff. Right. So the commonality is a little bit more like, we want to work with SaaS companies and tech companies that are moving quick and have a lot on their plate that they just need to offload to someone else.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I find this kind of get people to the website, have them convert into leads, sign up for a trial, become a customer. That's just fine. But I feel like and I'm just speaking for me at Castus is like, once we do this to some extent, that doing more of it gets hard. And this is just me kind of bitching is like, I had a conversation with one of our team members yesterday is, okay, we're optimized to some extent on, like, we get a bunch of blog content. We have a bunch of blog content. We have a bunch of SEO. We get a bunch of traffic. A certain number of those sign up for trials. Let's just throw out a number. Say we do 200 trials a month. For us to get 500 trials a month, I feel like it's just not the same thing.
I know on your website you say a lot of, like, hey, we're going to ten times your AR in two years or something. How do you all think about taking an existing customer acquisition kind of mechanism and really amplifying it? Because for me, I look at what we have and I go, fuck, I don't know how we triple this.
I'm just kind of like, this is how I know how to do marketing, and I just kind of can't put my head around how I do ten times this.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: Yeah, well, ten times is definitely an exceptional number. I'm not going to guarantee that number for any client that we work with or just anyone in general to follow this advice. But a lot of it comes back to just kind of like, a lot of experimentation. There are definitely two big differences in whether you have, like, a product Led model, a sales Led model, or a hybrid of both. So starting with the sales Led model, I actually feel like it's a lot easier to move the needle with that type of model because there's just a lot of delta to be had, a lot of alpha to be had, where it's like zero to one things. There are companies without a sales deck or without a good product demo or that just don't have any sales or marketing collateral whatsoever. And so they're hopping a call, and they're doing a lot of the sales discovery stuff, and they might even be following up, but they're just not giving people a lot to work with. And so we can come in, we'll give them a lot of product demos, a lot of collateral. We'll really help them with their messaging, with their positioning. We'll iterate through several different sales decks and a lot of different PDFs and things like that that can double or triple their lead conversion rate on the product Led side, it's a lot different because you're having to do those same things just all asynchronously within the product somewhere, essentially. Right?
We also find that a lot of those two, it depends on your mix of how you're getting people to the site. A lot of the work that we're doing right now, too, is around like, okay, everyone needs to have competitor comparison pages. You need to have solutions pages, you need to have use case pages, especially for a lot of horizontal type of SaaS where there's a lot of different types of buyers, which is mostly the case for SaaS. I don't know. The whole niching down thing is kind of a myth or maybe more of.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: The only gets you. So.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Eventually you kind of find, like, yeah, we have a lot of different types of people using, even if it's just okay, an in house person is using us versus, like, an agency is using us on behalf of their clients. Still two totally different types of buyers with different contract sizes and you always end up with two plus customer personas. So that alone gives a lot more you have to account for a lot more within the onboarding flow, within the emails and pricing.
So all that to say within the product led side of things, we start with the website and just, okay, what are the right pages we need in order to just get people to sign up in the first place? Because the home page just doesn't cut it sometimes. And if you can send people to more targeted personalized landing pages, then they'll have a higher chance of signing up. And then once they're sort of in the ecosystem they've signed up, then there's all sorts of stuff we can do around onboarding emails, upsells pricing, just different offers, different things that get people to get to that AHA moment. First runs the list goes on and on and on.
I could run through like our checklist, but it's like 100 items long.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Yeah, so a couple of questions from that. One is around use cases and I think you mentioned solution pages. So, yeah, this has been on our fucking notion list forever. Is like podcast hosting for churches, podcast hosting for realtors. Podcast hosting for is that what you're talking about? Is like the X for Y pages.
Okay, got it. Yeah, we don't have those. We should have those.
The other one is like solutions pages. I think you mentioned this is not a feature, I guess, but are you just kind of telling the story of how a product solves a problem that.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Might yeah, pretty much right. So you can kind of slice it a couple of different ways. If you think about we are the X for Y, like, you're a very verticalized SaaS where you're saying for this type of customer, we do everything.
Now you can kind of like verticalize yourself for a bunch of different types of customers now and that would be all of those industry pages or persona pages, however you want to call them. Then you could also cut it horizontally so you could say, okay, for all these types of things people need to do, why does that matter and how do you use this? So that would be a little bit more for like, okay, we need to do, we need like a concrete example. Right, but maybe it's like project management versus podcast hosting.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Let's talk about podcast hosting.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Sure, yeah, podcast hosting, right. So it might be like an internal podcast host just for the company. Maybe like a private podcast versus a public podcast versus a paid only podcast versus so on and so forth. Right, so just all the different ways that people can use your product and those can also apply to many different verticals, many different types of personas. But you're getting more specific about the thing that the job to be done, essentially.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Got you.
I think as much as I try to be a good marketer, my mind says these are features that you're talking about. Like private podcast is a feature, but you're talking about kind of building benefit pages and not feature pages. Yeah.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: And it's a little bit more like how do you package up features together to tell a cohesive story about how these groups of features or these combinations of features work together to achieve an outcome or to describe it the way that a customer would. So maybe the job to be done is private podcast, maybe there's a feature that's like private podcast, but then what about the newsletter that they send it out through or the way that they invite people to it or if it is paid or free. So all those features kind of like wrap up together to tell a cohesive story about why private podcasting matters and everything that goes into making a private podcast happen versus just talking about one feature.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: Got it.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: And we also do feature pages as well, but it's mainly for like okay. Do you have really big features that do tell the whole story? Otherwise I think a use case page or like a solutions page actually does a better job.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Got you. Okay.
Again with your clients, not necessarily for a podcast host, but do you create these pages? I'm thinking of navigation. Do you stick these in a footer NAV or do you stick these in the top NAV? Like best, great for realtors and financial advisors and blah. Or how do you serve are these things you only run ads to? How do you service these pieces of content?
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it can be both. That's a little bit more like preference. Personally, my recommendation is always to have it in the top NAV and in the footer. Always the footer. There's no harm in the footer if someone makes it down to the footer and is looking around like they're probably a highly qualified lead anyways. And there's like absolutely no harm in putting anything in the footer ever.
But also a lot of those pages can serve a specific purpose if you're driving advertising traffic to it. Or sometimes there's like some SEO plays with that as well, where people are searching for the X four Y or they're searching for some sort of job to be done, like Descriptor or something they want to do. That doesn't necessarily describe a feature per se. It might be like private podcasting, for example, maybe someone's searching for that. And so you want to have a page for that particular and having it in the top. NAV can help people self select. That's what they're interested in. But it also can give it more weight on the on page SEO sort of signals that you're sending back to Google.
This is also me. One of the things I always try to explain to people is, by nature, I am long winded, I'm thorough, and I have a bias towards selling things the way that I want to be sold to. And personally, I'm a really thorough like, I will price compare everything. I will research, watch YouTube videos, go through reddit posts, like, I go through everything when I'm researching a new product. And that's not just for software. That's for anything that I buy.
And so that's just like me. I can't undo that about myself. I think that's part of why what you get and why someone would want to work with me is because they know that that's not how I am. So I kind of just lean into it.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think you should, because I think we talked before we started recording, which is, like, the state of SaaS. Marketing, I think, is buyers are ultra informed, and they have a lot of choices. Every industry is super competitive, and so if we think that people won't shop us versus somebody else, I think we're crazy.
And, yeah, we try to be all those places. We try to represent ourselves in all the social media and all the channels and review sites and stuff like that, and it's just like, yeah, I think it's the only way to go. I think if you're not doing that, you're probably missing out on a fair bit. So I think that what you're representing to your clients is appropriate.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Right. The way that the market's going too, just kind of being in, like, a recession, I've been thinking more about what does recession marketing look like, or marketing in a recession? Yeah, people are more price sensitive. People are looking to consolidate tools. People want to make sure that what they're buying is really, like, what they're getting, and it's kind of maximizing everything that they're looking for, and it's a little bit less of like, oh, let's just cobble some things together, and it's okay if we overpay, in a way, for some tools that have a lot of overlap. People are definitely more conscious about that. And so in order to answer that question, you have to be a more thorough shopper. But also, if it just comes down to the price, then, yeah, you need to show that you have all the other features. And if you do have a better price or maybe you're more like a premium price and you want to deter people or just looking for a bargain or a deal, then, yeah, you want to make sure that they can find everything that they're looking for, because they want to check the boxes and know that maybe it is just a price question. A lot of SAS kind of gets commoditized and it comes down to preferences, style, price, a lot of things that are less about the features. Which is ironic because it's like, well, you still need to talk about all the features so that they can check those boxes or talk about the solutions and kind of the use cases or talk about how it specifically compares to a competitor and spell it out for them.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting.
I have a whole episode in my mind about price because we're doing some interesting things around price right now. That's a little contrarian, maybe, I think, but yeah, it's certainly an interesting time. Both, I think, macro and just with SaaS and people's kind of subscription fatigue, I think we're in an interesting time. Not as easy as it was a few years ago, probably.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: No, but I think it's harder.
I feel like every year that I'm in it, I expect myself to be more confident. Like, oh yeah, I've got this figured out. And every year I'm like, dang, it keeps getting harder and I keep having more questions. And it's the more you know, the less you know type of phenomenon where the more you're in it, the more you realize you're just, like, still barely scratching the surface.
So I don't blame you or anyone else.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Let's talk about that.
You've been doing this a while.
How do you kind of stay fresh? Right? Because I think that one of the challenges. I've been doing this for eight years, probably similar for you. Learned a lot, I think. I know a lot. But I think the risk is I get detached from the customer some. I get detached from the new best ways to do things that somebody who's super hungry is devouring 50 hours of YouTube a week.
Yeah. How do you stay engaged to stay fresh? Because I think it's really important whether you're running a marketing agency or you're a founder.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Right, man. Well, I'll tell you, like, client work is a great kick in the butt. Stay afresh all the time.
Just the pressure to learn things just in time. Or sometimes it's a little bit of you don't know what you don't know, and so someone will throw a question over and you're like, yeah, I've never done that before. I need to go and do some research and push myself to learn something new or even just update what I think is true and not just run based on assumptions or kind of what I think works or has. Worked in the past, but really go back to first principles and check everything against maybe some real data or case studies or just what other marketers have done in the past.
More practically, I try to connect with marketers often still all the time. Again, the guy I mentioned earlier, we were just catching up for the first time. We've been in the same social circles over Twitter but never really talked. And he's like a B, two B social guy. I've never really been that guy at all. In fact, that's probably like my weakest area over everything. Personally, I feel like pretty good about my personal brand and I have my own style about posting on Twitter and whatnot, but I don't know very much about it at all. So I'm always trying to just now, like, watch him like a hawk. Okay, this guy's world class at this. So, yeah, I'm just going to pay attention and see what happens and see what dots I can connect with our marketers.
What else is there? I've been a little bit I don't know, I might not have the best answer for this because I've been pretty burnt out on business podcasts the last few months. So I've just been taking like a hiatus a little bit. And really for me, the biggest catalyst to just learning and staying fresh has just been client work doing it.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm kind of the same way on business podcasts.
I listen to just a couple I've been listening to a lot more audiobooks lately. Kind of getting back to first principles. I don't know why a book seems like the source on something and then I can take and expound that into my application of it.
Yeah, and not even just like business or sales or marketing books, but just like biographies, history, these things that kind of tell a story of kind of what I want to do and who I want to be.
That's been cool. It re energizes to where you can dive into the real practical learning too.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. Cool. Well, actually one other thing about that was it might be a segue, it might be a little tangent, but one other thing I just thought of was just trying to recognize my own weaknesses and then have something to tackle. So actually this year I kind of forgot, just remembered as you were talking was the beginning of the year. I kind of decided, like, I want to become a more technical marketer. I want to be able to dig into code or just understand conceptually how things work better and also just feel more comfortable. Like all right. When I'm telling someone we need to set up events to fire to send back to the Google Tracking Pixel for Google Ads, for example, I want to know exactly what I mean when I say we need to set up events and do event tracking. Where does that live? In the app? And we're talking about cross domain tracking and it's all that type of stuff that I was like, I need to get more technical.
So that's kind of like been one of the catalysts to me wanting to learn how to code, but in general, just wanting to be a more technical marketer. So I kind of just decided, like, all right, here's my theme. Be a more technical marketer. Keep my eye out for resources and opportunities for me to get in the weeds and do things that are more technical so that I'm forced to learn it and be in it and just have an excuse to go down those rabbit holes and push.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it's a really good segue and reminds me of our mutual friend Brian Castle, who learned to code just kind of a few years ago, I think.
How has that experience been for you? You said before we started recording, you learned at, like, an in person boot camp.
How long was that?
Tell me all about it, because I don't code. I helped my son learn Python, and we're on page two, I think, and it's getting hard already, so yeah, tell.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Me about it, man.
I knew it was difficult, but I have so much respect for programmers because I was thinking yesterday I was doing some prayer program with a friend at a co working space, and for some reason the analogy came to my mind. Like, programming sometimes feels like putting a puzzle together, but you're making the pieces as you go.
It's just such a like, yeah, there's so much Inception and meta to it that you really have to challenge yourself to think harder than you've ever thought in your entire life, like, you thought calculus one was hard in your senior year in high school. Programming is a whole nother level. Not because of the math per se, but just because of all the connections you have to make in your mind and being able to debug understand errors, understanding conceptually how everything ties together and just knowing how to interpret.
Here's how I want something to work and how I want it to look now. How do I go and write code that makes that happen and do it the way that the programming language and framework of my choice wants me to do it? Because everything can be very opinionated or not opinionated. So anyways, I signed up for a whole bunch of online Udemy coding courses in the past. Never took any of them. I had an app on my phone for a while that was trying to teach me some Python.
Over the years, just working in SAS, I've picked up some of the lingo, and I think I've learned bits and pieces here and there about how web apps work and just what SAS even means in the first place. But I was never looking at code, and looking at code and hearing about code are two totally different things.
So anyways, you probably know Ryan Culp on Twitter. Twitter or SaaS, founder and marketer turn developer. He's created a couple of coding courses over the last year or two and I signed up for both of them, didn't take either of them. And then he tweeted out like, hey, if I did an in person live boot camp where you had no excuse but to sit yourself in front of a computer and just learn it and do it, would you do it? So I raised my hand, was like, yes, this is what I need. I've had a bunch of false starts. I just need to be somewhere where I am forced to do it and there's someone there to help me get unstuck when I have a question or when I've done something wrong or when I don't understand the error and I just don't want to bang my head against a wall for 5 hours and look through stack overflow.
So I signed up, I went through two of his online courses before showing up to the boot camp. And then I flew to Atlanta and spent two weeks at his house with seven other strangers from the internet.
And then we went through one of his courses that basically is like a code along where he has you build an app that he's built before and then he's there to answer questions. You spend like the back half so the second week building your own app from scratch.
And we basically worked from like nine to midnight every day, just taking breaks to eat and then goof off once in a while playing poker or taking the UTV for a spin or shooting or some random stuff like that. But just having my butt in a seat, my face in front of a screen, being like, I am going to do this for two weeks, was the catalyst that got me to finally just do it and make it happen.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: I love it, man. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, because I mean, I have a lot of impostor syndrome. Like I'm leading a team, the team has developers on it. We're a SaaS product.
I don't know anything.
I run a SaaS company, so I understand MySQL and we're know PHP and Laravel Shop and I understand that and we use oh Christ, it was Bootstrap. And now it's like I understand all these words, but if you asked me to do anything, I couldn't even get the application set up on my computer. I don't think the hardest part, there's some decent risk.
Okay, good.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: No, I'm not kidding.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: There's some decent risk in being a founder and not knowing what the hell we're doing. So yeah, kudos to you, man. I'm super inspired.
I've done free CodeCamp, I've done all those and it's just like, it's not the thing that I need. And I think like what you're talking about, maybe it's like go away for a week and just have somebody teach me. That seems pretty awesome.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: I think the biggest difference too is just building an app from scratch because a lot of the other. Coding boot camps are like, here's how to be a good developer. To work at a company, you're super siloed and you're just working on maybe just back end stuff or just front end stuff. And if they're teaching you full stack, they're kind of just going through both in a siloed perspective for each one, if that makes sense. Yeah, but building an app from scratch is totally different because you need to learn how the Internet works and you need to have experience doing everything.
But it's also the best way to learn, I think, because it allows you to see everything come up from the ground. Because even I think a lot of developers who are working within companies, their knowledge is just siloed to building on top of a foundation that was already set by someone else who stood the app up for the first time. So when you stand the app up for the first time, then you understand all the different ingredients, like what's really in the foundation, what you're interacting with, how it works, why it and that's what I needed too. Even going through, there's like a fundamentals Ruby course that you go through before heading out to the camp, and it's good to go through and it's very valuable, but then the whole time I'm there actually building apps, then it clicks. For me, thinking back from past lectures, being like, oh, now I understand what a class is and what an object is, and I can see the difference between a string and an array and how this applies, how it actually used this. So you just have to get in and start doing it for it to really click and make sense. Otherwise, again, going through the python stuff, you're just like, this is cool, but I don't understand how to use this to make an app.
Because you don't.
It's two very different things.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's something. And you're actually building things now, right? You're building SaaS applications.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: To be clear, I am a terrible, terrible developer. I'm still complete garbage. I know next to nothing. But it's just enough, amazingly, to be able to build stuff, which is I think the coolest part is like, every day I sit down and I try to chip away at some things and I'm like, I know nothing and I still can do stuff. Which is so cool, I think, especially just where programming, the state of programming today, it's never been easier. There's so many things.
It was funny because this is like one of the AHA moments. Moments for me. I tweeted while I was at the camp. I said, Rails is no code. Like, change my mind. And a bunch of people jumped on it and were like, what are you talking about?
But for me, having a no code background and using things like Webflow and I don't know, XANO and Airtable and whipping things together, to me, a no code tool is anything that generates code or performs code functions for you. And so you use a tool like Rails on top of Ruby and it's generating Ruby code for you. And that's why there's this whole idea of Rails magic where it just works and it just happens because someone went and did all the hard work of writing Ruby. That happens below the surface and it does it all for you. So there's a lot of stuff where I'm like, I didn't do anything, it just happened. I just clicked Rails G scaffold new podcast, and now all of a sudden I have a controller and a model and a bunch of views for adding a new podcast. And it has full HTML forms and it's all connected to my back end to postgres. And I did not code that, Rails did.
And there's also tools like Chat GPT, and I'm using this IDE called Cursor, which is a fork of Vs code, and it basically has a sidebar that has Chat GPT directly within it. So it has all the context of your code. And I'm using GitHub Copilot, so it's doing autocomplete functions for me. I'm like, dude, this is a cheat code. It's literally cheating. I have literal superpowers just with the tech stack that I'm using to code with.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: Do you think you're a better marketer because you learned how to code?
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Yeah, 100% one, because I know SaaS better now and I understand what's possible, but I still haven't been able to apply this as much. But, yeah, I want to get in, make some onboarding tweaks and changes, and I want to go in and set up events and analytics, and I want to go in and just do, like, raw database exports to answer. My own questions about product usage and things like that that are like I feel more enabled now, even just knowing what to ask for and what's possible. But also there's a lot of things that now I can theoretically do myself. It's a lot easier for me to do within the context of my own apps because I know them and I can't just go and do that for anyone else's app because I only know Ruby on Rails and Postgres and tailwind and but in theory, I know what to ask for now because I understand web apps.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: Yeah, interesting.
I want to go back to Conversion Factory and your co founders.
So I see this as a big trend these days is you'll have kind of subject matter experts maybe, right? You got a marketer and you got a developer and you got an Ops person maybe coming together to do something. And from the beginning it's a joint venture kind of thing. I guess that's just how most businesses are, a bunch of people come together and stuff. But I guess the difference is it's happening for part time projects a lot more now that I'm seeing or where it's not someone's main thing. You have a bunch of things going on. Presumably your partners do too. Is that a source of friction, that you have some other stuff going on? You're trying to learn to code and build SaaS on the side? Are you all in the same boat in that respect?
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Not really.
I'm all over the place all the time and always have been, so that's kind of just like a given. People know that when they work with me too. That's just the reality of what it's like to work with Corey. At the same time, though, it's very clear, like, Conversion Factory is going to be my job, this is my full time thing. Everything else is just extraneous side projects, side gigs, fun experiments.
And that gives me the freedom to post freely on Twitter and be like, hey, I'm building a new app because it's not competing with my time or attention for Conversion Factory.
And I try to be clear about that with clients as well, where they're not confused, like, oh, is this just his side thing? No, this is my full time thing for my co founders, for Zach, and like, this is their full time thing and they really don't have anything else going on on the side, so, like, they're entirely more focused.
I wish I could be more focused, to be honest. I just can't help myself to some degree.
But yeah, to answer your question, it's treated like a full time thing. I do consider it my job and everything else that I do is on the side.
But we also know, and the three of us have talked about how when we do have downtime and there are some days where one of us inevitably will have the majority of the workload just with the way that client requests come through. And one or two of the other of us will have virtually no workload for that day, maybe.
So in that case, we can either work on building a Conversion Factory and marketing it ourselves, building marketing assets and writing content and creating templates and stuff like that, or we can work on our own things. And that's just the freedom that we bought ourselves by building a business instead of having a job.
So we've talked about that too.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: How have you found the sales process and the value prop of a productized agency like you have versus you consulting?
Presumably easier because you're selling this thing and you have two or three plans or something like that. But is it easier than, hey, come work with Corey Haynes and I'm a freelance marketer and we'll do this stuff?
[00:38:26] Speaker A: Yeah, surprisingly, but maybe not surprisingly, it's been a hundred times easier. I'm like, why didn't I do this a couple years ago? I'm glad that it didn't because I think I probably would have tried to do it alone and I wouldn't have had my budies to come along with me and also provide things that I can't do and I would need to outsource and would be a lot more difficult for me to manage that process. But yeah, I'm doing the same type of work that I've done freelance, and it's 100 times easier one because I think the expectations are super clear. And so even just the way that it's structured previously, I would join as a freelancer and I would say, okay, I can bill you hourly or on a retainer. Here's my scope of work of what I think we should work on.
We can tackle X, Y, and Z first out of the list of five or eight things that I think need to be improved on, and then we can just take it from there and chip away at those.
And then I would just have multiple plates in the air. I was always spinning with each client who was like, I'm just constantly trying to move the needle on these things that are entirely in my control, saying, okay, we're going to stand up Google Ads and we're going to create a new page. I'm going to do copywriting for this email newsletter and yada yada. And they all need to be done at the same time.
And that was really difficult because, again, just like building hourly, I hated tracking my time, doing a retainer. Then I was working extra hours for things that I was really just like, putting pressure on myself to do because I always feel a lot of anxiety around just making sure that clients are happy and doing a good job and not feeling like anyone is like, I'm being behind in any way. I always want to feel ahead.
And then with the agency, it was just like a complete flipped 180 where it was like, now the onus is on the client to make a request for one specific thing.
And actually we were more productive that way because just working on one thing means that we can turn something around to them within one to three days, and that thing will be done. It won't be spinning in the air for one to two weeks. As I work on these other things simultaneously, it's just out the door and back in our hands. And now it opens up space for a new request. That request comes through, now I can work on that thing with my undivided attention, knock that out, get it back into their hands. So we've been able to move really fast, do really good work, because we're really focused.
That's also one of the reasons why we decided to try this whole productized service thing was because we didn't want to always have to scope out new work for ourselves, for clients, and we wanted to have more focus. So we tell them, you can only make one request at a time. That's for your benefit and for ours.
It's not just for us. It's not just for them. It is a mutual benefit. It's a win win where one plus one equals eleven. With that kind of workflow, it's been way better and easier and I think more productive too.
[00:41:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it.
I kind of happened into the product I service thing a little bit by chance, and it worked out and we're still running it inside Castos. We call it Castos Productions. And it's amazing, man. It's just such a clear value prop. You record, you send us your stuff, and a week later you get a podcast.
I think that's the thing is with the recession and whatever tailwinds or headwinds that we're having is people want a thing and sometimes jobs to be done, they'll hire software to do a thing. But a lot of times it's beyond the scope of software. Even AI and things like Descript in our world or whatever, it's like people just want this thing done and they want a website that performs better and so they want to pay somebody to fix their problems.
I think productized services are such a good opportunity, both for new people. If you want to quit consulting, productized service hands down, like the best way to do it. If you want to scale a business and make it ultra profitable, it's amazing. I mean, it's still the most profitable thing that we do, which is pretty cool.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really interesting.
Yeah, I'm amazed just at how well it's worked. Even I was scared.
I didn't want to make our scope of what we do too narrow, and I also didn't want to make it too broad. So we put a lot of thought into the types of things we say yes to and the types of things we say no to, and I worried that we were saying yes to too many things.
Not because it would be bad for us, but just that maybe it would dilute the message. That's still kind of like an open question mark a little bit. We don't know exactly how to gauge whether that's true or not, but like you said, people want a thing.
We're like, look, if you want any one of these things, all you have to do is create a new notion card with that thing in the title, and then you will have that thing three days later at the latest. And that seems to work really well. Okay, yeah. Cool.
[00:43:41] Speaker B: My experience is the more strict you can stay to that thing you do, I think you having the conviction about it transfers the belief and the value to the customer a lot. Like, hey, this is what we do, and this is all we do because we're fucking great at it. And if you wanted us to build you a wooden boat, we probably could, but it would be terrible. If you want Craig to build you a SaaS app, I probably could, and it would be terrible. But if you want to make a podcast, fucking, I know how to make a good podcast.
And I think it's so obvious to customers when you have that conviction in sales or just in implementation fulfillment.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: And it's made the project management especially has been way easier because it kind of forces the client to work with us instead of us having to work with them. And the difference is that when they work with us, we loop them into our world and we say, here's your client dashboard, which we do all through Notion, and these are the communication channels that are okay for you to use, and these are the types of requests that are okay for you to make. Whereas when you're working with a client, they're looping you into their project management system, into their communication style channels, and they're normally telling you, like, here's what we want. And it's harder for you to say no because they're kind of just waving money in front of you and or saying, like, well, if you can't do it, then we'll find someone else.
You're a lot more likely to say yes to a lot of things that maybe you should say no to because you're sort of like plugged into their team. In that way, you're working with them turns into a yes man a little bit. So anyways, looping clients into our world, having them work with us, completely changes the dynamic for the better.
And again, I think also because it puts a little bit of pressure in a healthy way for the client to want to get the most out of us and so to always be thinking about what's the next thing we can ask for them, we can ask from them.
Always keeping the pipeline full of things versus when you're freelancing for a client, it can be a little bit more hands off. Some clients can be needy and very prescriptive, but for the most part, especially if you're a good freelancer and you're like senior level talent, normally they're coming to you being like, what do you think we should do? Okay, cool. Go ahead and run with it. Let me know if you need any help. And then it's just totally on you to make all those things happen and manage yourself and get all the right resources. And you have to bug them for that. You have to really draw it out.
[00:46:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
Awesome, man. I'm so happy for you that you're having such a good experience pretty early on, right? You guys are only a few months in.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: Yeah, we launched July 10, I think it was, so yeah, we're about two, three months in. Awesome.
[00:46:35] Speaker B: Two and a half months. Yeah.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Honestly, it's gone.
[00:46:37] Speaker B: Awesome. Cool, budy.
[00:46:39] Speaker A: Phenomenally. Better than I would have either expected.
[00:46:44] Speaker B: Yeah, when I saw it, I was like, yep, that's that's a home run. It's just so obvious. Like, you guys are really niche. Really clear what you do.
Yeah, awesome. Good to hear.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: Appreciate that.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Cool, buddy. Folks who want to follow up with you is Twitter best place still, as long as it's still around.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: Yep. Twitter x.com at corey Haynesco forever. Though if you want to not be platform dependent or worried about losing me somewhere else, just go to my personal site. It's Corey Co. I spend a lot of money for that domain so that people just have a really easy way to find all the links to everywhere that I am and all the things that I do. So Corey Co to make it easy.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: Awesome, buddy. It's good to chat. Thank you.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: All right, man, thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun.
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