Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Designing the perfect SaaS business is so hard. Today I'm joined by Christopher Gimmer, and we talk about his path and his search to double down on what he's done with Snappa in building the perfect and designing the perfect SaaS business. Really interesting conversation with Christopher as he talks through the things he considered, a bunch of ideas he threw away considering SaaS or something else entirely, and how and what he really zeroed in on as the next big opportunity for him. If you're considering getting into SaaS or considering how to kind of pivot your business to achieve that kind of ideal business model, I think you'll really enjoy this conversation with Christopher Gimmer.
Christopher, I think one of the things I struggle with a lot with, just like my own, like the way I perceive myself, is that a founder is only successful if they've had an exit and then they go on and do something else. But today I want to talk about another path, which, frankly, I might be exploring. And I think you are, which is like, you don't have to exit your existing business to then have more at bats, right? You can layer on top of each other, and I think that's what you're doing. Right. Snappa is a successful, established SaaS business, and you're doing something else now, which I definitely wanted to jump into, but I think it's a fair point to start at, which is like, you see a lot of people build it up, sell it, and then start from scratch again. Whereas I think the path you're taking.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Is like, build it up and then.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Take another big swing from there. Is that fair?
[00:01:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say that's very fair in terms of what we're doing. From a bootstrapper's perspective, I'd say Snappa was pretty successful and we're kind of. I mean, we could probably get into this, but I think there's a whole discussion about selling versus keeping and layering on, but it's kind of just how it played out. And so we've obviously taken the option of keeping that existing business running and then using those profits and the cash that we've built up to launch a new venture and layer on top of that.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: And just for context, the new venture is good metrics, right?
[00:02:25] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's at Goodmetrics IO, and essentially we're building an alternative to Ga four because I, and what seems to be a lot of other founders and marketers really don't like what Google Analytics has become. And so we're trying to build something that is a lot better than that.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
It's funny.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: On the one hand, when you say that, I go, well, shouldn't be too hard to build something better. On the other hand, a lot of challenges, I think, and I want to, I want to dig into good metrics and the challenges and the opportunity you have there. But I think before we do that, I want to focus a little and continue this thread on which is a pretty cool path. And you actually see it a lot more than we realize, maybe, which is like, get something up here, get it established and then go do something else sometimes with like a productized service or a consultancy. And then you take a swing at a big SaaS as you're going into good metrics, just kind of generally what things are you taking from your experience at Snappa that you'll do like the same and what will you do differently?
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:35] Speaker C: So with Snappa, in terms of the product and business model, there was pros and cons in terms of a lower dollar, kind of low switching cost type of product. And so when it comes to paying us $15 a month and to create a couple of images, what we found is it was really easy for us to scale up our acquisition efforts and we converted very well in terms of signing up to the product less so much on free to paid. But we grew very nicely for the first four years of the product. Like when we launched, we got to about 4K MRR in about a month, and I think we're at like 20K in a year. And then at its peak, we got up to one and a half million in ARR. Unfortunately, we're doing less than that now. It's been a tough couple of years, but the downside of that was churn was just always an issue for us. And it's one of these things, you can try a million different tactics or whatever, but when you are a product that people can come in, use and cancel, and it's a low price point and you're dealing with more of the prosumers.
We didn't really have any expansion revenue. So it's one of those things where it was great in the beginning because we scaled up really well. We focused very heavily on user acquisition, which is kind of what I would say I'm good at on the marketing side of things. But then you get SaaS envy with anyone who has expansion revenue and lower churn. But on the flip side, with those people, they might be saying the same thing of like so much harder for us to acquire customers.
But having been in the snap a seat, I think from building a calm type B to b long term business, I think I would rather have expansion revenue and lower churn versus just constantly on this acquisition treadmill. So I would.
One of the things I'm probably most looking forward to with good metrics is just right out of the gate, I think, having a better business and pricing model from like, a long term perspective.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: So it's interesting. I can relate in some respects. Right. Castos is probably kind of similar to Snappa. Right. We start at $19 a month, almost no expansion revenue, but very low churn.
Our net revenue churn in the last few months has been less than 1%, which for a creator kind of business is.
[00:06:19] Speaker C: Yeah, that would be a dream for us.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Well, yeah, and I know others in our industry have like 9% churn, like direct competitors of ours. And so that goes contrary to something that I kind of say, which is.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Like.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: This is just the opportunity. You are what you are. There's no sense in trying to fight it.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:06:43] Speaker C: Do you agree with that?
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Do you think there's a world where Snappa could be a very low churn business and you have a lot of skills, but y'all just aren't able to make it work?
Or is there something else about how an opportunity in a business is constructed that gives it these characteristics and then you just can't change it? Like how you acquire customers or your price point that attracts these certain types of people that have those characteristics of churn or not. I don't know. What do you think about that?
[00:07:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say in terms of what Snappa is right now and kind of the path that we went down, I would mean, maybe this is cope, but I think if you hired the best user retention expert in the world, I feel like they would have a very hard time truly getting our churn down. The way to do it would be to go upmarket and more enterprise, which is essentially what canva has done, which is like the biggest competitor in the space, because once you're dealing with huge teams and organizations, then you're charging per seat. There's some expansion revenue baked in. And I would imagine the churn on those enterprise customers are probably insanely low compared to or much lower compared to the prosumer. But in order for us to do that, we would have had to either raise a bunch of money or go unprofitably and hire a big team, and it's just not something we want to do. So, to your point, I very much agree in that initially we were, you know, should we get this churn down and this?
[00:08:22] Speaker B: And.
[00:08:25] Speaker C: I think it was something I read from, like, heat and Shaw. And essentially, it was, know, sometimes your business model is what it is. And if you're really in an acquisition game, just triple down on acquisition. And that's kind of what we did. Rather than dwelling too much on our churn is a lot higher, because, again, at the time, I knew a lot of people that had business test businesses with expansion revenue and lower churn, and we grew way faster than they did to get to a million ARR.
But like I said, the catch with that is they're now maintaining their million ARR, where we've had trouble doing that.
But at the end of the day, we've generated, I think, close to $8 million in total revenue since we launched Snappa. So I'm not going to be too upset that we stumbled into this higher churn business because there was an opportunity. We captured that opportunity.
We were successful in that period of time, and it was life changing in a sense that we now have a very long Runway to kind of figure out the next thing.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love it. And I'll just kind of add one thing, which is something that folks from our team tell me, and it's funny that they have to console me, which is building a million dollar self service, bootstrapped SaaS business is an amazing feat. And I would just not discount that to anyone, because you and I have talked and sometimes like, oh, man. Fucking, I can't believe this, or I can't believe that, but you've done an amazing thing, and it's still there, and you have it to then launch yourself into this new thing. And I know you've done several other things in the past couple of years, but to everyone, I would just say, if you can do that, that's amazing, and it gives you so many options. You can sell it and take time and start something new, or not, and put it on autopilot and go start something new. And either one of those are awesome.
[00:10:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I was just going to say, I remember when we first started, and I was thinking to myself, like, man, if we can make 20k mrr, we're set for life. This would be unbelievable. And I think it's one of those things where every time you hit a milestone, you're looking at the next one.
And the last two years have been very difficult just because we've been in this slow, painful decline from the top of COVID But again, it's like sometimes you just have to remind yourself there's not a lot of people who 100% bootstrap a business and hit a millionaire. So I've been trying to focus more on that than dwelling on all the mistakes and what have you.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Cool. Okay, so let's switch gears to I want to hear about the decision making process of evaluating new opportunities, because imagine you've been on the lookout and evaluating new products to build for a while. Walk us through what that looked like and the things you considered when coming up with what eventually was good metrics.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:39] Speaker C: So at a high level, we had some criteria, one of which being at least from a SaaS, I think SaaS has gotten very competitive and difficult and building snap on myself, I know just how hard it is. So we really didn't want to launch a new SaaS business unless we had some degree of confidence that it would succeed. And we also, at a bare minimum, wanted it to be like a bigger business than Snappa. We didn't want to launch something like too kind of niche that didn't have that longer term potential to be, again, another seven figure SaaS business.
We kind of touched on this already, but really wanted something with expansion revenue and lower churn. And so I think good metrics would definitely fit into that because obviously you can charge more as people's sites grow and analytics product, people just don't uninstall them very regularly. Once you've got a tracking and you're comfortable using that, you're going to stay on.
And then I think the other thing is, I've always had this opinion that a scratching your own itch and being able to dog food your own product, if possible, is fantastic. Even with Snappa, especially over the last few years, I wasn't the one going in there and using my own product. And I'm not really big on social media. So even trying to stay up to date with what's the latest craze in social media these days.
And so good metrics, I found that it just really aligned with a pain point that I had and I did a bunch. And we can dig into this too, like digging into doing some customer discovery calls. I mean, just type Ga four into Twitter and see how many people are complaining about it. To me is like a huge signal. And it's funny, there was one tweet in particular. I don't know if you know Benji from grow and convert, and he had a tweet that said Google can make a lot of money if they just charged fifty dollars to one hundred dollars for universal analytics and everyone was just piling in the comments being like, would totally pay to go back, would totally pay for this, would totally pay for this. And that's kind of when the light, I think that tweet in particular is really when the light bulb went off, because I just had such a hard time using Ga four. And at first I wasn't sure if it was just me being an idiot or if other people had the same pain point. And so once I, at least in my head, determined that I think a lot of people would pay for this, I think it really aligns with our skill sets in terms of our development team and what I think I can do as a marketer. I have a lot of people in my network who this product could be very useful for. So just kind of stacking the deck in terms of getting some confidence just because I know how hard a SaaS product is, wanted some level of assurance that, and again, there's no guarantees that we'll be successful, but just not going into it blindly.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I like it. I like it.
Let's touch on pricing because I think that's probably one of the biggest kind of lever, like the pricing and business model because I think it's one of the biggest levers or differences. They're both on the surface, they have some similarities. Right. And with castus, like self serve, horizontal. Right. A bunch of different type of people will use this tool, relatively low price point, like not enterprise. Right. So self serve. But pricing seems to be the big differentiator where you think pricing, this will allow for expansion revenue and probably like a decent entry point, I would suppose. Are you guys planning on charging like $50 a month or something like that for this?
[00:15:31] Speaker C: Yeah. So we obviously haven't nailed down the exact pricing yet, but I would think that we would have a very low tier with people with, let's call it ten K page views a month or something like that, that we would charge 1920, $9 a month. I would expect most people would probably come in under the month page views, which maybe that's like $49 a month, and then scale up to the hundreds of dollars per month kind of thing for the big sites that are doing millions in page use. So that's kind of what I'm thinking off the top of my head in terms of pricing and doing a bit of research in terms of what some other competitors in the space are doing price wise.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Yeah, got you.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: So the value metric is page views and that's what you bill on. So like email subscribers for an ESP.
[00:16:23] Speaker C: Yeah, a combination of page views and events. So obviously, page view essentially would be considered an event. And then anything custom that you'd want to track, like sign ups and start.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: To trial opts into email, clicks a button.
[00:16:40] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So those would all be events. But really, page views is kind of what dominates, I feel like.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I think. Just the one other thing to point.
Like, I think we see pretty much the good side of this, but being business critical, I think, is really a really important thing. If I was designing the perfect SaaS, and of course, Jason Cohen's microcontroller, talk is, like, legendary around.
Like, I want to be as business critical as possible. I think you definitely tick that box. The castos kind of does, kind of just. And I think this is the other important one. You can't just quit it because you're not creating new content.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Like, if your website is up, you need analytics. If you want to keep it alive, you need podcast hosting. I can imagine a place that you suffered with Snappa was like, hey, if I'm not publishing new shit on social, I don't need social media images for sure.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:36] Speaker C: And you would have people coming, analytics.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Tool you would still need.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:39] Speaker C: And you would have people coming in doing a bulk. Like, they would sign up for a month, they would just hold bulk images or whatever, then they would cancel, and then maybe they'd come back, like four months later, do another bulk.
And so, yeah, this is, like you said, with analytics, as long as your site is up and running, you're not going to cancel.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
Got it.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Cool. Let's talk about naming. I like the name. Right? I like the name. I'm assuming Goodmetrics.com was like, is it available? Is it very expensive? Did you guys look at buying it?
[00:18:13] Speaker C: Yeah, it's not available right now.
We did the same thing with Snappa. Not sure if it's a right or wrong decision, but we got the Snapa IO and then eventually we paid. I think it was like 40 grand for the.com once it warranted. So that's kind of our thinking on good metrics as well, is prove it out, actually make some money, and then when necessary, we'll bite the bully and get it.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: So we're recording this middle of February, kind of. Where are you all today? I know there's a page up. I signed up for early access. What's the status now and what's the plan for the next kind of few months?
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: So right now we've got just like a basic landing page outlining why we're building the product a screenshot of kind of essentially what the dashboard, at least the home page of the dashboard, will look like, and so people can sign up for a list.
We're already building the product.
Essentially on the development side, we figured out all the scripting and data capture. We actually have that running on Snappa and that's working really well. And then the next step is basically designing all the reporting and queries and all that good stuff. So I've known in software never to give ETAs, but we're definitely like several months away from launching like a commercially viable product. But I would love to get something out within a six month time frame at the.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: It.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: Love it.
From a customer acquisition perspective, a lot has changed since you started Snappa. And for me, if I was to start another SaaS business today, I probably wouldn't run the same playbook as I did with castos without giving away the secret sauce. But how are you conceptually thinking about customer acquisition in 2024 with fucking AI and everything?
What's the general kind of feel?
[00:20:17] Speaker C: Yeah, so I really like using a two pronged approach where you focus at least one short term channel and one long term channel.
So Snappa and pretty much every business we've built up to this point has mainly been content marketing and SEO, as you alluded to. That has gotten insanely competitive and crowded. So I'm tempering my expectations on how much we'll get out of that, right out of the gate. But I still think that it's still a very good long term marketing. Like, I don't know if you've read Nathan Berry's post on direct sales in terms of how he got convertkit off the ground. So that's definitely something that I plan to do in the beginning, especially for an analytics product where we don't really want to just open up the floodgates in terms of scaling issues and all that kind of stuff. So I literally have like a spreadsheet of 100 people in my network. You're on that spreadsheet, by the way, as you know, awesome. That basically, I think would be a pretty good fit for this kind of product. Many of those people I've already had conversations with.
So my plan is out of the gate, very manual, very high touch, like your cliche, things that don't scale.
And then another thing that we have working in our favor is that we still have this SaaS product called Snapa, which is still getting 5000 people signing up every week to create graphics. And I would like to think that a large percentage of those have a website and some of those may need analytics. So I'm tempering my expectations because I've heard a lot of people downplay the effectiveness of cross selling and cross promotion, but there's still like 20,000 people a month that are signing up for Snappa. And so even adding good metrics somewhere in an onboarding sequence marketing, I think that will go some way. So those are kind of some things that I'm thinking about and kind of growing from the start. And then you have things like integrations, affiliates, and then you can run the whole gamut of like 20 different marketing channels. But I think that's kind of what we'll focus on in the beginning.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: I can imagine. I'm sure you've thought of this. Consultants, like SEO consultants and paid acquisition folks would be a solid place. You sell one of them, it's like a channel partnership. You sell one of them and then they have all their customers sign up for it. That's interesting. Sorry, I'm going to backtrack a little bit to validation because we touched on.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: A little bit, but all we talked.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: About was like, oh, I think it's a good idea. And folks on Twitter said it would be a good idea. But you did customer interviews. Tell me about how that went. Like, you and I had a conversation. You had a conversation with Andy Baldachi, I'm sure.
Tell me about how that went. Did you read the mom test? How sure are you that your friends didn't lie to you?
[00:23:38] Speaker C: I think one of the best books on this is lean customer development.
Okay. And the biggest takeaway is what you don't want to do is say, hey, I'm building this. Do you think it's a good idea? Because, like you kind of alluded to, if you're just having conversation with your friends, 99% of them are going to say, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
So during those conversations, what I tried to get at is like, what are you currently doing for analytics?
What are the specific pain points that you're having with Ga four? What were you doing with universal analytics and why can't you do that with GA Four?
What would your ideal analytics product look like? So basically really trying to understand what their pain points are and what they're trying to get out of an analytics product before ever telling them, this is what we're building, this is how we want to do it, this is what it's going to look like. Do you think this is a good idea? Would you use this product.
And so the recurring theme that I heard from almost everybody was that GA Four has just made it so difficult and complicated to understand conversions and specifically what content on their site is performing well and where those conversions are coming from.
And that was like, literally 99% of people can't figure out what are the pages on my site right now that are actually driving revenue to the business.
And so after hearing that, like, ten times, I'm like, okay, I think if we can solve this main problem, I'm reasonably confident that people would pay to use our product.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Coincidentally, we hired a consultant to implement Ga four for us. And three months after that, Ed, it was done. And he showed me around. I said, okay, great, got it. And I have a looker studio panel and all this kind of stuff. And then I was like, hey, I want to see this data. And I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. And just like you, I'm like, a reasonably smart guy. And so I had to pay this guy like $100 to hop on a call with me to show me where this report is. And I'm like, the fuck? I think I tweeted about it, even. It's like, you know, it's a good sign when there's software, you have to have a consultant to use to go in and disrupt it.
[00:25:56] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: It's insane.
I want to touch on something. Okay. So my first business podcast, motor, definitely had competitors when we launched and was heavily inspired by other people, right? And I think that's like, the smartest way to do are. And then cast us too, right? Fucking Libson and simplecast and all these guys existed. And even with our WordPress integration, like a direct analogy to what we do existed, we just thought, hey, we can do this better. Which is like, what I'm hearing. But one thing I'm hearing from you is there's definitely a hated competitor in GA four. But then there are, I'll say, like, new breed analytics tools out there too, right? How did you think about, what is the opportunity for this, aside from the big hated incumbent, with these new upstarts? And how can you all compete against them effectively?
[00:26:52] Speaker C: Yeah, so most of the upstarts you're probably alluding to have actually been out for several years now. And what they did differently from Google Analytics at the time, which they all came out when there was still universal analytics, they came out well before J four. And their angle has always been privacy. And so if you care about user privacy, you don't want to use cookies.
And then obviously over the past few years, there's all this GDPR regulations that have come out and what have you, and so their angle was we are the privacy friendly alternative to Google Analytics. If you care about privacy, you should use our products. And most of them have built very fantastic businesses purely from that angle. Obviously I'm biased, but what I feel like, and I've actually asked during some of these customer discovery calls whether or not other people have used these products. And essentially they all kind of fall short around this conversion tracking because most of them, and some of them are kind of improving this too. So I don't want to make like blanket statements, but really what they're focusing on is on the privacy angle. And so essentially we think there's an opportunity to kind of slide in the middle of still being privacy friendly and not using cookie based tracking, but focusing much more on actually measuring your conversions and again, figuring out what pages are actually driving revenue and which sources of traffic are driving revenue to your business, as opposed to just use us because we're privacy friendly and Google is evil.
And so I think that's where we're going to kind of slide in in terms of differentiation.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense.
[00:28:41] Speaker A: And I hear you on marketing. I think that the content marketing and SEO playbook can definitely still work. We're still investing pretty heavily in it, and I think it's still like a solid place to come from. One thing we found with the podcast motor and castos dynamic was you can build links from one to the other. That's pretty effective. We saw pretty solid crosssell.
It's the exact same.
But you have a subset, I think, with Snappa that is the exact same audience. Like you said, everyone has a website, whether they need analytics or not. I don't know.
What else did you consider? It sounded when you were describing the opportunity and how you evaluated this, you're like, SaaS is like fucking hard and it takes a long time to build it, but once you get it going, it's great. And that's where we are, is like, cast is a great business in a lot of ways. It's going and it's a machine and we have people come and sign up and they do and they get value and it's all great, but it's the first five years that's so hard.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Did you guys look at.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Even offline opportunities or not SaaS?
Because I think that it's not the only way to make business or to make money.
[00:29:57] Speaker C: Yeah. So we actually did launch some, I would almost call them more of like side projects along the way. Okay, so one of them was a bitcoin dashboard, Bitbo IO, which we actually ended up selling for multiple six figures. So it was pretty sweet outcome in terms of what was required to build it, but wasn't life changing and sunset money, as Rob walling likes to say.
But the thing with that was, I think Mark built it in like a month maybe, and then we just kind of put it out there and it just kind of took off. So there was very minimal effort in terms of grinding.
I didn't look at that the same way as something like good metrics where.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: This is going to be at least.
[00:30:48] Speaker C: Six months to build and this is going to be like several years of blood, sweat and tears to get this thing off the ground.
Another side project we launched was like a daily golf newsletter, when newsletters were all the rage, which we ended up shutting down to kind of focus on good metrics. So there's kind of little things that we evaluated, but again, there wasn't anything that we felt confident enough in terms of the opportunity to really devote a lot of time and energy to actually pursue in a meaningful way.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: One thing that I think we've kind of hinted at, but want to be really clear about it. For me, in designing the perfect SaaS business, I think you're ticking a lot of the boxes. But one we haven't touched on is evergreen demand.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Right?
[00:31:42] Speaker A: You touched on. Everyone with a website is going to need this. But also, what you're saying is websites just aren't going away. It's one of the things I worry about with castos. Not that we don't really have platform risk, we don't have integration risk.
We kind of have genre risk, I guess, which is like podcasting just becomes less popular. People stop podcasting because they go to fucking blogging or YouTube or something like that. I think that's about the only big risk we have.
I don't see that with this opportunity for you all. People are going to have websites and they're going to need metrics on it.
Maybe something like a GDPR could come in and just change how you all collect data. But I like this a lot. Just like I like help desks or CRMs or ESPs, where as long as there's business, people are going to be doing these things.
So I think that's just worth stating for folks who are going through the same kind of mental exercise of like, is there a possibility that fucking AI comes in and just destroys your whole category of business here? I'd say probably not.
[00:32:49] Speaker C: Yeah, it's funny because AI was actually one of the major things that we were considering as well, because I think it's only a matter of time in terms of snap. I mean, we're already there. You're already seeing a whole bunch of tools where you can type in a prompt and an image is generated. Now, it's not there yet, but it will be there like within the next five years. I think these generative AI tools will probably be good enough where you can literally type anything and it could design what you would have had to do manually in Snappa.
And so that was definitely one of the things that was very appealing to us with good metrics is like, AI is not going to be able to install a script and store all this information in a database and feed you all these reports.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: And so that was very attractive.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: Know which events to trigger.
[00:33:38] Speaker C: Yeah. We basically want to play in a space that is a big enough opportunity for a bootstrapper, but not big enough for big VC competitors to come in. And I think this kind of fits that goal.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to challenge you on one thing.
I sent a tweet about this after listening to an episode of built to sell. It's a really, really great podcast. John Warlow, and he had a guy from private equity on, and the guy was saying, hey, our thesis is we buy vertical SaaS businesses and then fucking run them and cash flow and all this kind of stuff. This is definitely not vertical. Right? Just like castus is not vertical. We get a lot of shit about it. Hey, you got to niche down. You got to be podcast hosting for churches or whatever. What's your retort to that? To say, like, hey, a horizontal business can be really powerful. I've done it before. This is just the difference in how you do it.
[00:34:38] Speaker C: Yeah.
Again, I think business is hard because there's never a right answer for every person who tells you vertical SaaS is what you have to do. There's going to be a bunch of people that have built horizontal SaaS businesses. I'm sure private equity probably isn't going to look at Snappa as the most successful business in the world, but we were horizontal and it worked to the.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: Level that it did.
[00:35:05] Speaker C: One thing that is interesting, though, that I have thought about is I suspect that good metric, even though, especially from day one, we're not planning to be analytics for X or analytics for ecommerce. But something tells me that the problem that we're solving for seems to really resonate with people that have either content sites on their own or a business that heavily depends on content marketing and SEO.
So my gut tells me that even though, and who knows, maybe down the road we will be the marketing solution for content sites, I'm not going to shut down that possibility. But I think you can still be horizontal and maybe have, there's creative things you can do. Like you can have solution pages, right? So you can create pages on your site where you're ranking for analytics for ecommerce businesses. And then you specifically spell out if you have an ecommerce business. These are the reports that are going to be very attractive to you if you have a content business or a SaaS business. So I think there's ways that you can still have a quote unquote horizontal SaaS business but still sell it as a vertical solution in a way. I don't know if that answers your question at all.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: No, it does. And I largely think of it as the same way it's on my marketing to do list. Like we have the use cases or kind of vertical pages that we just haven't built yet. But yeah, podcast hosting for churches, podcast hosting for nonprofits, podcast hosting for whatever, or even from an SEO perspective, how to start a podcast for X.
That's like an option.
I agree. I tend to think that you all, especially at the beginning, will niche yourselves down, probably around your existing audience and stuff like you and I are talking will probably become customers. So, like, SaaS might be it, you might find it in ecommerce and that just takes off. It might be from channel partners. Like, you get a bunch of e commerce marketing agencies on board and they decide they can do their job so much easier.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: And then you can kind of verticalize from there. I think that's, know, I. I indirectly get shit about being a horizontal tool, and it is harder. I think that one of the things that Rob actually said on Twitter was that it's pricing power and it's churn typically that being a vertical tool solves. And I think it goes back to mission criticality, right. Is like, if you're website builder for gyms, fucking the gym has to have your thing and so they'll pay $200 a month, right. And they're never going to leave. I think that what horizontal brings in are more kind of amateurs a lot of times.
And you talked about it with canva, right? Canva probably saw that and then they're like, shit, we got to go up market to just build a bunch of different verticals. Probably is what they did right, with their sales process.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: Cool.
What are you most worried about with this? Because I can tell you've given it a lot of thought. Really, smart guy, you're approaching this, I think, in the right way. But as you're getting ready to launch in the next few months, what are you like, shit, we got to get over this hump.
[00:38:33] Speaker C: Yeah. So the thing I'm most worried about is for the same reason that I think this is a very attractive long term business opportunity.
I think it's going to be a grind in the beginning, because, again, with low churn, if you have a product that's very low churn, what that means is you have to fight to get that person to cancel their existing product in order to use your solution. So for us, really, what it's going to come down to is just how painful is this problem for people that have Ga four, and if they're going to do the legwork, to actually install the script and start using our tool instead of Ga four? And then the other thing is, in some sense, we're competing with free, right? Ga four is free. And so, again, how valuable is it to actually be able to properly track conversions and figuring out what's driving revenues now, I would like to argue that that is worth $50 a month to a business if it can generate them many multiples on that revenue. So, yeah, in terms of what I'm most worried about is just like, how much of a grind is it going to be, especially in the beginning, to just like I'm imagining there's going to be a lot of calls and handholding and try to push people over the edge. But like I said, for those same reasons, I like it as a long term opportunity. If we can kind of jump that hurdle in the beginning.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: Okay, Christopher, folks who want to follow along and see kind of how this all evolves and check out goodmetrics, where is the best place to go and stay in touch with you?
[00:40:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:16] Speaker C: So just head to Goodmetrics IO, put your email and sign up for the list, and then you can also follow me on Twitter. My handle is at seagimmer.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Awesome. Cool, buddy.
[00:40:29] Speaker A: Thanks for coming on and good luck. We'll have you back on in six months for, like, an update, and I want to hear how it's going.
[00:40:34] Speaker C: Sounds good. Looking forward to it.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: All right.
