RS360: Kill the Hippo

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I don't know how it would start today because the businesses that we built wouldn't work from scratch today. I don't think. [00:00:07] Speaker B: I think you and I were lucky. We didn't realize it at the time we started our businesses in a golden age. For bootstrap SaaS, the most popular item is not usually the best choice of thing that you should build. So then how do you decide? Problem with price. All those numbers are made up. No matter how long I've worked in the software industry, estimates are hard. Why am I doing this? I don't need to do this. Nobody cares. Do I even care? I'm just going to stop it all. [00:00:35] Speaker A: Knowing what product to build is the hallmark of what makes great SaaS companies and their products successful. And probably even more so now. In the age of AI, where creating product is so easy, prioritizing doing user research and building the right things for your audience and your customers to grow your business is paramount. And maybe nobody in my experience has more knowledge and expertise around this than my guest today, Steve McLeod. Steve literally has written a book on this with his book Kill the Hippo. And it comes from not just owning and running a successful SaaS business, but also the business is in this space. It's user research, getting feedback from customers, helping your product and development teams to understand and prioritize this data so you build the right things at the right time for your audience. I think you're really going to enjoy this discussion with Steve because it's not just, you know, writing the book and that experience and his journey as a founder, but also how really good brands are understanding what their customers want in a holistic way to build the right product for their brands so they can grow. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Steve McLeod. So, Steve, I think one of the questions I have is like, why write a book? There's so many different ways we can, I'll say, establish thought leadership and then create content in a space like why? Why write a book? [00:01:56] Speaker B: That is a very good question. And I had three answers forming in my head while you were asking. The first thing is it was going to be a lead magnet. It was going to be something very different to what I ended up writing. Two things happened. The premise of the lead magnet turned out to be not a very good premise. And it turned out that all our competitors had something similar and it was basically cheap content. I didn't want to make cheap content. Second thing is, we repositioned the whole company, my whole company, while writing the book so that the book is no longer relevant to our target audience. I have been wanting to write a book for 20ish years. I've had two false starts in the past, and once we got kind of a third of the way in, even though I realized it was no longer relevant to my company, I realized I was enjoying writing it and I wanted to complete it. I wanted to actually learn what I was learning from it and. And I wanted to learn what the process of bringing a book to completion is like. [00:02:51] Speaker A: And just for context, you run feature upvotes. You pivoted a couple of years ago from kind of just being a general B2B SaaS like user feedback tool to specifically the gaming industry and getting feedback from users in the gaming industry. Is that when this stopped being as, like, applicable to the company, when you kind of pivoted who your ICP is? [00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah. And Craig, I could talk a whole episode or more about the pivoting and marketing. [00:03:20] Speaker A: I definitely want to get. I definitely want to get into it. [00:03:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:24] Speaker A: Just to give you, like, credit where credit's due there. It's one of the best pivots of ICP I've seen of an established company. You see it a lot early when, like, I don't know who my customer is or what value we bring or whatever, but you all were like an established company when you made that move. And that takes some guts. [00:03:42] Speaker B: Thank you. I appreciate hearing that. And I can tell you I didn't make the decision quickly. It was a year of really boring. My partner was like, I think we should do this, but I don't know, I'm scared. And eventually I just told her, look, if I do this, am I making a mistake? And she said, no. Clearly, for a whole year, it's been the right thing to do. Just do it. But I also had some really good [00:04:03] Speaker A: people helping me along the way with that transition. The premise of the book stopped making sense for the business itself, and it was kind of a personal project. Is that, Is that kind of it? [00:04:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So the book covers how bootstraps offer companies decide what feature to build next. And feature upvote, that was its premise early on, is it's a way for small companies, small bootstrap software companies to gather user feedback to work out what the majority wants so that you have some idea what to focus on. But the most popular item is not usually the best choice of thing that you should build. You know, a lot of people might be asking for you to translate your software into Korean, but if you have no understanding of the Korean market, it's not the right thing to do. Right. So then how do you decide? And I went and talked to companies. I had this crazy idea of actually asking people, your own companies, how do they decide what to build next? A couple of them are or have been customers. Most of them are not customers of Feature Upvote. And it turns out that every small bootstrap software company, even the established, stable, mature, profitable ones, struggle with this. They've made mistakes along the way, and they still make mistakes, but they've also worked out, like, creative ways to deal with the problem. And that's the premise of the book. And that would have been great material to share with our target audience back when that was the target audience of Feature Upvote. [00:05:21] Speaker A: This is one of the biggest challenges that I think every company has. So I serve as advisor in residence with Tiny Seat. So I go and help, especially with the new companies. Every six months, they have a new batch of companies. And we just had our kickoff event in New York last week. So 10 companies, all varying degree of product, market fit. And the two questions every one of them asked is like, who do we serve and what value do we deliver? And then how do we build product to do that? So this is like the core thing of every business. And I think maybe more so now with AI because it's so easy to build product that not just doing a bunch of work in the wrong direction is so much more important. So I guess the question is, what's the answer? I guess I'm sure it depends on the company. But what have you found through all this research? Now you're the authority. What's the best way to do it? [00:06:19] Speaker B: Okay, well, first of all, there is no one size fits all. That's what I've discovered. That it is actually a hard problem with no definite answer. That's not very helpful. But that's what I've discovered. And what works depends on where you are in your company. Right. You mentioned the point of AI helping build a lot of things. And definitely it'll help you build a lot of the wrong things if you're not listening to customers. And that that is probably step one, is that all of these people have learned that. I said the book is 10 stories. It's not like frameworks or guidelines. It's just 10 stories of how these founders have evolved over time. And I think all of them have worked out that you can never talk to customers enough. No matter how much you're talking to your customers, you have to do it more. And talking to customers does not mean putting a survey in their face or putting up an NPS questionnaire or just saying, you know, on your support page we welcome feedback. It's actually talking to them like either on a call or in person and listening to what they're saying. Of course there's questions there about who are the right customers to talk to, but that's, I think that's positioning which is a whole different kettle of fish. [00:07:20] Speaker A: So we, we do all those things. We have NPS that we never look at. We send surveys. We did a survey a couple of months ago to all of our customers and paid for responses. I think it was a novel. We just gave it to like a $5 discount on their next bill. That was cool. We got a hundred responses to the survey which, which is like pretty legit. And then our, our support team and I even sometimes get on the call with customers. I think the danger is listening to the wrong customers. Yeah, there's a lot of like different accesses or Xes or definitions of wrong customer. Like they're B2B or not they're the frequent flyers and support or they're the ones that you never hear from but like secretly just get a ton of value from the company and the product. Like how do you figure out who to talk to if you're being like proactive about it? [00:08:08] Speaker B: That's a great question. And I have a story in the book of that very case. The business is. You can book me. They're a UK based bootstrap company. They've actually been acquired since we wrote the book, which is kind of fortunate for them, unfortunate for the premise of the book. And they found that they were adding features that seemed like good for the product. And it took them years to realize that they weren't right. Adding the features that actually spoke to the people who they saw as who their product was for. And it took them years to realize that their product. So it's a scheduling for scheduling calls. They weren't aiming for say teams inside big companies. They didn't want to be a competitor for calendly. Is it Karen Lee? What's the thing? Yeah, Karen Lee. Yeah. They realized that what they wanted to do, who their software was really for, was a one person, five person, ten person team at most. So it was like these very small operators. And once they realized that then they knew who to talk to. They knew who to feature in their customer stories, they knew which features to prioritize. A whole lot fell into place just by realizing exactly of exactly who they wanted their software to Be used for who was their best customers. You might call it ICP, ideal customer profile. They call it their BFFs, their best friends forever. [00:09:31] Speaker A: You and I are similar age and have been doing this long enough to where I kind of view this concept of, like, ICP as. I hate to even say this out loud, like something that I'm too good for. Like, I have a business, we have product market fit. I don't need to think about ICP. That's something that this tiny seed company that's doing $2,000 a month in revenue needs to think a lot about. That's really wrong, I think. But for. For me or you or a company that's established and is doing, you know, tens of thousands or million dollars, millions of dollars a year, how do you, like, keep this spirit of constantly kind of looking for and refining your ICP in place so it doesn't get, I don't know, like, boring, right? And kind of like, I don't need to talk to those customers and really think about who my best customer is anymore. [00:10:25] Speaker B: You keep coming up with the really good questions, Craig. That is a great one. I know. We read about how to do our positioning, and we read April Dunford's books, we watch a couple of her videos, and we talk to everyone we can, and we say, okay, this is it. We found it. This is our icp. But the market changes, and that can be more competitors or pricing pressure or other things. I realized the podcasting industry that you're in has really changed dramatically in the 10 years or so you've been running customs. And, you know, maybe it gets to a point where you realize that, you know, one, you no longer want to compete with everybody else for the hobbyists, and you realize that now it's time to change your position to the corporate podcast, if that's a thing. I'm kind of speaking on the cuff here about something I know nothing about, but you change where you are in the business and you have to reconsider whether sometimes you have to change your icp. Maybe the answer is no. Maybe the answer is don't reposition. What you've got is fine. It served you fine, and you're happy to stay there. But I think you need to be open all the time in a business. I think you see that in really well running businesses. Did you see the Buffer story? The founder of Buffer spoke at a couple of events last year, I think at Microconf maybe. Definitely a business of software. And their story's great. It really took them years of Stagnant, even declining revenue for them to realize again who their ICP was. And it wasn't finding a new icp, it was rediscovering who it had been all along and realizing they'd been building features that were for other people. And all they've been telling their ICP with those is we don't really care about you or you're kind of in the background now. Which was a real mistake. [00:12:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And they kind of went down market again. Right. They, they, the book. Me folks were trying to go towards enterprise, which is like conventional wisdom. And they were like, no, like our, our best customers are kind of indie creators and we're just going to have a whole bunch of customers not trying to go for high acv. [00:12:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's a really interesting story because the conventional wisdom is that as a SaaS company, especially B2B SaaS, you should just generally keep going up and up market. You should be trying to land these bigger deals, those ones that end up having 6 month or 12 month negotiation periods. And. And to hear that some companies have actually discovered that was the wrong path. It's interesting. [00:12:37] Speaker A: I'd love to hear about the process of writing the book. Like how did you, how did you start? How was the kind of like, I would guess it's a collection of 10 stories. So like gathering the stories is probably pretty straightforward. But then like the writing and the editing and the publishing and now the promotion part, like, tell me about that. [00:12:56] Speaker B: Initially, I started with 10 blog posts I had written myself and then the idea was to flesh them out with some case studies by interviewing some bootstrap founders. And that would pretty much illustrate the points of the main chapters. This is all back to front. You shouldn't write a book this way. And I have a content writer I've worked with a lot on my website and I got her to help with the book because she is a lawyer by profession before she decided that wasn't for her. So she's really good at the research and interviewing phase and then putting all that information together to make some sort of cohesive structure. So I brought her in to help me do these first case studies and we discovered that what the people told us in interviews had nothing to do with what we were trying to illustrate. For example, we thought everybody was using these frameworks, like you might have heard of ICE framework or the RICE ICE framework. Turns out people were not using these. And we kept trying to find a story where we could illustrate what we were saying people do and people weren't doing It. And at that point, it's like, what do we have these chapters for that are based on just my theories or me regurgitating what I've read on other people's websites? Why don't we just do the customer stories? They're the ones who are actually. Or not customer stories. The case studies. They're the ones who are actually learning things and the reality. So that became the book. It developed over time to eventually just be these customer stories. Even then, I still thought, well, the stories will be the first half of the book, and then the second half of the book will be like a synthesis of everything we learned and some helpful chapters, some helpful lessons. And as I started trying to write those, I realized they were actually quite weak. They weren't as powerful as just the stories. When you read a story, you take your own lesson from it. You identify what's on there. And I assure you, any Bootstrap founder reading this, you're going to go and read like, oh, my God, they built something just because the loud customer asked for it. Oh, my God, they built too many features too early. Oh, my God, they ended up drowning in technical. What do we call it? Tech debt. And you at Stat, you're going to go, yes, this is exactly what we had. You ended up getting to the point where you couldn't get new features delivered with any type of velocity. Yeah. So that's all in there. I realized that actually those additional chapters I was writing were weakening the story, weakening the message. So we threw them all out, made the book much shorter, and just kept those customer stories. Once we had all of them, then it was like, how do we actually publish a book, having never done it before? So there was a lot of learning. Rob Fitzpatrick, who wrote the mum test. Sorry, the mom test, if I try to pronounce it like. An American has this amazing online community, paid but very moderately priced, for people trying to write nonfiction books, what he calls useful books. And it's all there. There's like writing accountability groups to meet with weekly. There's a whole bunch of videos he's made about the process of getting it copy edited. You have to pay a professional copy editor. Getting it proofread. You need to pay a professional proofreader. Getting the COVID designed. Like, I couldn't design that cover. Something that has to stand out in a thumbnail on Amazon. Right. All this stuff, all that advice is there. And then how to actually get it onto Kindle. Sorry, onto Amazon. How to actually get people to become aware of books. Spoiler. One of the Answers is to get on as many podcasts as you can to talk about the book. Thank you, Craig. And then marketing, how to choose, pricing, all that stuff. It's all in this community. So a big call out to Rob Fitzpatrick's useful full books community. [00:16:26] Speaker A: What are you hoping the book does for you? [00:16:29] Speaker B: So it's been nine years running Feature Upvote, and before that I had another product for 10 years. It can get a bit monotonous to keep running a business, especially if you don't have high ambition. Like I'm not somebody ever aiming for sky high growth. I don't want to want it to be modest, modestly growing something I can run and still have life outside of that. But that sometimes gets. Loses its challenge. So it's good to have projects to work on. So it was kind of that. That project was kind of this life. What's the phrase they use? Bucket. Bucket list item. To. To have written a book, to have something on my bookshelf that, you know it's mine. Something I wrote. Yeah, partly. It's also looking ahead that maybe one day I'm not running my business anymore and I want to already have the next episode of my life ahead. Maybe this is something I can be a. An expert in. Maybe I can speak about it or write more stuff about this or consult about this. So there's several things it's achieving, but certainly writing a book is one of these things where you're doing it by yourself or with my co writer, in my case, at times you're thinking, why am I doing this? I don't need to do this. Nobody cares. Do I even care? I'm just going to stop it all. And actually having a co writer was an important part of getting through that, especially So I own the copyright. The book is my intellectual property. So she was a paid participant in that. So she's actually done quite well from the book. I rely on royalties and it was always this idea that I wanted to get that thing done. I wanted to have this thing I was proud of doing at the end of it all. And I am really glad I persevered and I have actually learned a lot, a lot more than I expected from doing it. [00:18:08] Speaker A: I know you're a solo founder as well, so the bit of having a co writer really resonates with me. You know, I think about what the next chapter in my life will be. Whenever that comes, it surely will not be by myself. And so I think that's a. That's a challenging thing for those of us who've been solo. I was solo before. Were you solo with. You had like a poker app before, right? [00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah, Poker analytics for helping people track how bad they were at playing on. Sorry. By tracking how their performance. Online poker. Yeah. And before that I had a consultancy which also I started solo but took in a couple of business partners. And I think that having partners in that didn't work so well, which has always made me a little bit scared of getting a co founder. But just over lunch today I was talking with a friend saying, man, sometimes I wish I had a co founder to just help with the difficult decisions. [00:19:01] Speaker A: A couple of things about that. Like one looking at like Y Combinator and Tiny Seed. Like being a solo founder is an anti pattern to successful companies. Like it's the exception. [00:19:11] Speaker B: Fascinating. [00:19:12] Speaker A: Rather than the rule. Y Combinator almost won't accept solo founder companies. Tiny Seed, I think I would guess maybe it's 20% of companies are solo founders. So. And very rarely are the most successful ones. And so I think the challenge is it's just the constancy of the weight of it on you. It's just always you. It's always you paying the bills, managing the team, prioritizing the stuff. I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but it's just. [00:19:47] Speaker B: No, but this is like therapy hearing this to hear somebody acknowledge this. I can feel the weight coming off my shoulders. [00:19:55] Speaker A: Well, I, I mean maybe it kind of come, comes like full circle to like product though, right? Like as a, as a solo founder or even in a, in a co founder pair, there often is like a person that owns product. I find like there's a product and development person and there's like a sales, marketing and operations person. That's like the cleanest split that I see. Like you mentioned, so you mentioned like rice and ice and we use rice. So maybe we're, we're the idiots that don't know what we're, that we're doing. We use it to take some of that cognitive load off and say like what is, what does the data say here? But I'll just say like that's part of the equation. Maybe half. Like that's half the equation. What are customers asking for? How many. What's the impact of this? How much reach does it have? What's the kind of economic impact? The other half is like, I just think this is what we should do. [00:20:47] Speaker B: Problem with Rice as I see it. So Rice stands for reach, impact, confidence and effort. You'd multiply the. Give the first three a score. It depends on what you'd want to do it. But let's say 1 to 5 and then divide by effort. All those numbers are made up. No matter how long I've worked in the software industry, estimates are hard and it kind of can give reach, the estimate for reach and impacts and confidence. You can give them any number you want. And you're going to put your own bias there, given on whether you want this feature to succeed or not. I've actually encountered companies that have used it and just gave up because they realized that effectively. It was the second thing you said. Although they said they were using this, they were really just ending up choosing the one they would have chosen anyway, the one they really felt was right in their head. Yeah. Two of the companies in the book, both tinyseed, by the way, both mentioned ICE or ice, and both of them were like, yeah, we should use it, but we don't. That was Keith Perhack. Is that how you say it? From Segmetrics, and Karen Delaney from Flat Plan is the name of the company. Right. Who, by the way, had the greatest concluding like, made a great concluding chapter, the final chapter in the book. Because part of the initial premise of the book was, at what point do you introduce a product manager into your company? And he wanted to do this. And people in Tiny Seed, in his cohort or in the Tiny Seed community were telling him, don't get a product manager until you're much bigger. You are the product manager. You are the one who has to decide what your company should be doing. You are the one who knows the customers inside out, the product history and the market. Which I think was a really great lesson for me to hear. [00:22:33] Speaker A: Did he do that? Did he not introduce a product manager? Or did he say, you don't know what to talk about doing this? [00:22:38] Speaker B: No, he didn't. He really took that on board and I think he realized that was a really good thing to learn. He's one of the best things he got out of the whole Tiny Seed experience so far. But he also had this really clever thing that happened. If I can share the story, we'll call it the Inside Person. So he was advertising a job and somebody who applied for it was working for one of his customers. She aced the interview process, they hired her and I think they managed to probably the customer wasn't too happy with that, but they explained, look, we didn't poach her. She came and applied. Then when they were contemplating building a feature, should we do this thing? She was said she gave her input and said, actually, if you had told us about that when we were buying your product, we so would have chosen to do that and would have given you a lot more money. So now he's hearing what it's like from the customer's point of view, and he says they now get her into a lot of the product decisions simply because she's been on the other side. And since hearing this, I have done the same thing in my company. I have a marketing, content marketing manager. And while she hasn't exactly worked for one of my customers, there's an NDA in place, so I can't say too much. But certainly she has been on the other side of the industry where she has been a potential customer, a potential user of the product, and she understands so much more what our customers want and the language they use and what's important to them. [00:24:03] Speaker A: This is why there are so many dev tools out there. Because, you know, it's so easy for developers to build tools for developers and podcasting people to build tools for podcasting and product people to build things for product is. I can't imagine building software for plumbers. I have no concept of what they need. That. That's such a uphill battle. I think the only way to do that is like acquire that business. You know, there's a. There's a tiny seed company that does, like, back office management, like payments, scheduling, all this for like doggy daycare. And he acquired the business because, you know, he's not like, he's not. He doesn't, you know, run doggy daycare or a grooming business or whatever. So he had to, like, acquire his way. And I think that's the only way is you, because you have that kind of critical mass of product market fit, right? Like customer feedback and product and all these things that, like, deliver value. You have to have that even then I think he probably does more talking to customers than you or I would because we are the customer and we know and we can just do what we want. And largely that's kind of right. [00:25:08] Speaker B: Well, we think we are the customer. We think we know. Probably we don't know as much as we do. I really like what he's doing. And that's another story in the book. It's another you can book me story. It's that in the early days of their business, they found this guy with anonymized them. We're calling him Simon from Canada. He is from Canada. He's not called Simon, but we'll call him Simon from Canada. He was exactly who they wanted to use their software and he was just so helpful with feedback. And in the end they started getting on a weekly call with this guy saying, look, we're thinking of building this feature next. And he would say, hey, that's great, that'll be really helpful or like why? I don't see the point. And then when they delivered the feature, he would then give them that fine tuning feedback that we so often miss out on. We deliver a feature, we write the self congratulatory email newsletter. Hey, we're so excited to announce this and then we end it there. But this guy Simon from Canada in the next phone call would say I used that new feature but it's a little bit awkward. I had to do three clicks and it doesn't autofocus there. And you know, we actually call it this, which enabled them to get the fine details right. And I imagine our doggy daycare guy, I bet he's nailing that stuff. If he's talking to customers all the time. If he's got his own Simon from Canada he's talking to on a weekly basis, I bet he's really doing better than you and me, Craig, in getting those fine details done. [00:26:27] Speaker A: Yeah. How do you think about. We have this concept of like this is our current customer and these are our ideal future customers and we kind of like at this point our product is like you said, transforming a little bit to where we have people who came in early or kind of currently, but we want to be building towards this other kind of customer. How do you think about bridging that gap or kind of keeping those two realities viable? I guess. How can you keep current customers happy but building towards something that's different? A pivot if you will, but an evolution. [00:27:04] Speaker B: I'm no expert on this, but coincidentally I was speaking to a founder, a co founder yesterday, just yesterday, who is in this very situation and they decided that they'll keep their existing customers happy, but they'll no longer take them into account when building and deciding what to do next. It's just like we're focusing 100% on the customers. We do want a good example. It's like adding SOC 2. This is a big dilemma for lots of us at the moment. If that's what your ideal future customer wants, you do it and you do a big announcement and make sure it's front and center on your website that you have this and other enterprise y things. And yeah, your existing customers, they don't care about that, but they're also not going to Notice, like, how often do you go back to the homepage of some site you're already a customer of? If it keeps doing what you want, you just keep using it. Right? [00:27:54] Speaker A: Yeah. I want to ask a higher level question about, like, you know, we both been doing this a while, have, like, strong degree of product market fit. One question we have often is, will more product make a real difference in the business? You know, at a certain kind of degree of maturity, the answer to that is no. But then you don't want to be stale and you don't want customers to say, like, gosh, you know, Castos hasn't evolved in eight years or whatever. Like, how do you balance that? Because, like, I know, like, your product is mature. Like, how do you guys keep things fresh? [00:28:26] Speaker B: I think I actually made that mistake of maybe for about a year just thinking, our product is complete, all we can do is make it worse by adding more stuff and just stop doing stuff. And I think that was bad because it gave those new upstart competitors something to hang on. Like, look at us, we're evolving so quickly, unlike the stagnant incumbents. So now I do try to make sure, even if it's just small polishing things or small tweaks, that we're just getting a nice stable velocity of new stuff. Clearly we're not going to add big new features, but those small things, and they don't actually take much work. Like, sometimes we'll do a day's work and that's our month or six weeks worth of feature done. But it's something we can talk about. It's really interesting to me that nobody we interviewed in the book said, talked about this. We asked them some leading questions and at no point did someone say, actually we're pretty much done with features. We're not doing anything more. And I was surprised because I really thought, aren't we just all feature factories these days? And I think sometimes we make our products worse when we keep adding things to them. But of course, as I've just said, it's a dilemma because then you do look stagnant and you raise the same thing. So, yeah, it just seems to me that the assumption is, as founders, that we just have to keep improving. Improving has some thinking allowed. I do know that a big mistake I saw in a company we compete with. So they were the dominant player in our field, UserVoice. They did not change the user interface for so long or their look, not the user interface, their design, that it looked abandoned. In fact, that's one of the Stories in the book. Let me stop talking about user voice because I should talk about people who've talked to me and assented to this Less Annoying CRM by Tyler King and I think his brother is the co founder. What a great name for a company, by the way. Less Annoying CRM. It tells you everything. And they really concentrated on keeping existing customers happy, listening to what existing customers were asking for and didn't even notice that the whole competitive landscape had changed, that there were these new must have features like Kanban boards and other stuff that had become like what he calls CarPlay features. You know, if you're trying to buy a car or rent a car, probably it has to have CarPlay or the Android equivalent. For a lot of people these are like a deal breaker. And he hadn't realized in his intense focus on existing customers that these new things had happened. He was concentrating on what he calls cup holder features, like the equivalent of adding more or better cup holders. And you know, none of his existing customers were saying, you know, the design is really getting dated. And it was only when he started listening to potential new customers who would write, hey, is this product still under development? It looks really dated that he eventually decided, look, we're going to have to do a complete redesign. So he gave the brief to the designer. I want it to be completely new but not changed at all. Which is a pretty hard brief, but I think the designer nailed it. And what happened after they did this? Existing customers complained, hey, we don't like it. Bring it back the way it used to be. But potentially this will always happen with a redesign. But new customers stopped saying, hey, is this abandoned? So I think when you are working on future product improvements, at the very least you have to keep updating the design. This is a. There's no two ways about it. If you don't do that, you will end up like looking like the dated, abandoned products. [00:31:52] Speaker A: We did a redesign five years ago, probably. It was really comprehensive all. Both like the marketing site and the application. [00:32:01] Speaker B: But. But [00:32:04] Speaker A: no, it was, it was good. It was good. I don't have any. We went through kind of a whole process. We had a head of product at the time who just because like our product velocity has slowed, we don't need anymore. But they're amazing. Who kind of walked us through the kind of the creative process of that and like why these colors and why this logo and things like that. I wanted to give my answer to like what a mature company does in terms of product velocity. So we're a pretty small dev team. We're kind of two and a half people on the dev team now. And we aim for a large feature once a quarter. And really, I'll say superficial in the nicest way. Like very customer facing niceties in between. So a big feature would be like, we launched something called Campaigns recently which lets you bring. We call it like it's the byob, like, bring your own beer of ads. Right. So like, I would have, like, I will like, I'm restarting this podcast. This will be, I think, the second episode of the relaunch. So I'll record a segment, then I'll attach it to the previous like 20 episodes. Hey, we're relaunching the podcast. Going live June 15th. This is the new direction we're going. So people listening to the old episodes will hear this ad. So it could be an ad, it could be a promo. We have a lot of churches, they're like, hey, Easter is coming up, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, that was like our big feature from last quarter. And then we have niceties like, oh, it's like one click to distribute your podcast or this new report and analytics or something like, it's mostly just like a UI enhancement, like tweaking this little bug, fixing this little thing to keep relaying to the customer. Like, hey, we did this thing. It's really cool. It's good for you. But under the hood, there's actually like almost no backend value, which I think is like fine because like, if you're meeting the need of the customer, they don't need it to like to reinvent the product. They just need it to be like a little better. Like maybe. I don't know if that's cup holders or maybe just making better cup holders is how we think of it. Like, we don't want to add on a bunch of croft. We just want to make the core thing that we do better. That's a lot of how we think about evolving a mature product. [00:34:20] Speaker B: I like it a lot. I really like that you're in the perfect place to dog food this new feature, by the way. This is fantastic. With your own podcast and a reason for doing that. It's fantastic. This is what I suffer from is we get a couple of pieces of feedback per week. Some of our customers get 100 per day. So we've really not, hey, we say we dog food, but really we don't know what it's like to be drowning in that level of feedback. [00:34:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:34:48] Speaker B: I have to tell you about the first chapter. This is James Kennedy from Procurement express how he chooses features to build is will it spark wow. So, yeah, we can do these features that are going to add value, this or that, but we also need something that when we demo it to a customer, a potential new customer or even to an existing customer, they're going to go, wow, that's going to make my job much easier. Or wow, I didn't realize you could do it that way. Which I thought was an interesting angle for procurement software. I mean, can you get anything more unexciting? [00:35:23] Speaker A: That seems like a high bar to me. You know, if you have a product that has like a strong degree of product market fit, I can imagine that being hard. Like, it would take a lot of effort and a lot of, you know, product design to find that wow moment consistently. Even every six months, I would imagine. I don't know. Like, I know James a little bit. Like, is he finding that opportunity consistently? [00:35:46] Speaker B: That's a good question. I should ask him next time we talk. Yeah, yeah, that would have made a great question for him at the time we were writing the episode when we were interviewing him for this chapter. [00:35:56] Speaker A: Well, maybe like to relieve some of the burden that folks are feeling if they're listening. And I am, is like, I don't think that has to happen all the time. If you have a product that's mature and you have low, you know, low churn and high retention, I think, like, looking for the wow moment is cool, but that maybe that doesn't have to be the only litmus test. Like sometimes it's just like, hey, yeah, this, you know, this thing needs to be one button click instead of three. Like, that's, that's a solid product improvement sometimes. [00:36:25] Speaker B: Cool. [00:36:25] Speaker A: Steve, I want to ask about, like, I'm not going to talk about AI because like, I think that's, that's just a hard topic. I feel like we're. Well, I will talk about it for a second. I'll just state that I feel like the pendulum has swung the most, that it will swing for a while. And I feel like we're coming back to like some sort of reality. So I'll just state that. But I want to ask you about, like, SaaS in general. Like, you know, everyone's, oh, SaaS is dead. Like, SaaS is definitely not dead. But like, how as a founder, are you viewing the business model that you deliver of, like, you know, cloud hosted software? [00:36:59] Speaker B: I'm glad I started this nine years ago and not like last year. I actually don't know how I would get a product like mine. Off the ground now, the channels we used for our first customers, part being part of a community, being very vocal in that community. SEO and content marketing stuff all seems more or less dead to me. Or the competition's greater than ever and the results are less and less. So I am really glad I'm not doing it now. And yet I see all around me, people are launching new businesses, so there must be some things still going on there. We're obviously still giving value. When people do find out about us and adopt us, they stay with us for years. So there must still be value from the model. I'm finding part of our repositioning to the games industry was because SEO was becoming really, really hard for us to make work anymore. And the video games industry is very insular, and it's based a lot on knowing people, on going to events and demoing in real life, which has become a bit of a moat. It's a lot of work, but because it's a lot of work, somebody in their bedroom, dorm room, garage is not able to start up what we're doing. I think people are having to find really new ways of reaching to the target market. [00:38:20] Speaker A: We've experienced the exact same thing. You know, we've been flat for a couple of years. For us, it's two things. One happened beef, one. One is the market. Podcasting is just not growing. It's a relatively small market anyhow. It's about $3 billion for the whole industry. Much of that is advertising. And the hosting side of the market, I would guess is 20 million, maybe. Yeah, if you look at all the players together, I bet they do 20 million, maybe 25. And so, you know, our kind of, like, whatever that is, is a solid chunk of that. I also think that to your point of, like, getting started now, the way people find participants in a market, all, almost all is coming from AI now, right? Like, whether that's Google and Google AI overview or just ChatGPT and perplexity and stuff like that. And to show up there, and I'm not a AI SEO expert, but like, to show up there, you have to be mentioned a ton in a bunch of different places. And that kind of only happens for the market leader. And so, like, we're not the market leader. Like, we're second tier, unfortunately. And so, like, I think if you had already won three years ago, you probably see a big tailwind now from all this. If you were kind of where we are, or maybe, maybe where you are, where you're like, hey, we're a solid player. In the market, but we're not the leader. We find it really difficult. And I think that's. I talk to so many people that say like, gosh, the shit that worked to get us here doesn't work anymore. And for us it's like, yeah, content marketing, SEO was our channel, that's harder. And podcasting is just not growing. So it's like, gosh, that makes it, that makes it kind of tough. And I gave a talk at microconf this year that was much more negative than maybe it had to be. But I think that people there needed to hear this side of things which, which is like, you're fucked. Like, we're all in really big trouble. If your goal is to 10x your business, like, I think that will be very difficult. I think it'll be reasonably possible for you and I to maintain our business like plus or minus 20% for the next couple of years. I think the biggest thing is just that the channel like you mentioned for us to acquire new customers is really hard. And there's not another viable one for self serve SaaS. I don't think outside of Organic Social, which I think is probably the best channel these days. [00:40:35] Speaker B: Organic Social, okay, interesting. [00:40:38] Speaker A: I don't know if you're listening, Rob Walling, but like, I think he would be like, oh, but don't, he says, like, don't build an audience, build a network. I agree, but I just think that like finding customers is so hard. Even if it's not an ideal channel, it's better than some of the other ones. I think the other part of this is like the definition of SaaS is changing. And that's why I asked you about cloud hosted software, because I think what increasingly a lot of new companies are delivering is basically call them like rapper AI wrappers. You can build a really solid business as an AI wrapper. Look at Harvey or a lot of these companies, all they are is an interface on top of a model. I think that's what people want to buy now. And so I think if you're a new company, I would lean into that as much as possible and not try to run away from it, but like lean into it. Be like, yeah, we're a wrapper. We're going to move fast. We're going to acquire customers in a really scalable way and maybe have like some of these viral loops and things like that have pricing that meets the current reality of like what people want from these tools, which means everything has to be freemium, which is like, that's all really challenging. So, yeah, Echo, echo, what you said, which is like, I don't know how it'd start today because the businesses that we've built wouldn't work from scratch today, I don't think. [00:42:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you and I were lucky. We didn't realize it at the time we started our businesses in a golden age for bootstrapped self. Sorry. Bootstrapped SaaS. It was a golden age. We thought we were really good at business. Thought probably we were pretty good at business. But also we had this tailwind lifting us up, and now we're back to probably. What's the reality for most industries, not SaaS, but across the board, is that studying any business is really, really hard. And you need to work hard. You need to be good at a lot of things. Our golden age is over. [00:42:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, Steve. So Kill the Hippo, available on Amazon. Where's the best place for folks to find it and grab it? [00:42:46] Speaker B: Killthehipo.com you go there, there's a link buy now which will do geolocation to send you to the right Amazon. If you do buy it, please give a review. That's like the number one thing people can do to help me with the book at the moment. Turns out that's one of the secret number two of marketing the book. Number one is to get on podcasts. Number two is to get people to review it on Amazon. And yeah, I'm really happy to. If anybody wants to contact me and ask me more questions about it, I'd love the chance to talk about it some more. [00:43:15] Speaker A: Awesome. And what's the best place for folks to reach out? Where can folks find you? [00:43:19] Speaker B: Steveeatureupvote.com is number one. [00:43:24] Speaker A: Steve, it's great to chat. Congratulations on the book. That's a huge achievement. To get the book published and being on the podcast tour and promoting it, that's really cool. So congratulations and best of luck with it. [00:43:34] Speaker B: Thanks, Craig. I really appreciate hearing that and thanks so much for the opportunity to talk and catch up.