Episode 321 | How to Take Your SaaS Upmarket
Date: 2017-01-03
When you go upmarket you need a lot fewer customers to grow a lot faster.
(When going upmarket) you’ll have to deal with committees who make decisions and questions about terms of service and legal structure. You’ll have to spend time upfront creating the right answers. They will expect a lot more hand-holding.
It can be months before you get the first check so make sure you have the runway to make that work.
You can’t be selling to large customers and charging them $30 or $50 a month because the ROI doesn’t work. The time to deal with them is so substantial.
Have your phone number on the top of your page.
Get a virtual phone number with Skype or Grasshopper.
Questions that come up in the middle of the demo are questions you want to write down so you can have a better answer for them.
Don’t do custom work.
There are some questions a company will ask solely because they want to hear an answer. Not because they care what the answer is.
Episode 322 | Sex & Software (Mike-Interview with Brianna Wu)
Date: 2017-01-09
Women prefer to be called women (rather than female coders).
If you are asking somebody if they are male or female (on a form) preface with a couple of sentences as to why you are asking.
You are dealing with a culture of men who genuinely believe they are too smart to be sexist but have aggressive tendencies.
When talking (about women’s issues) men are so quick to turn the conversation to themselves and how it affects them.
We are missing a more constructive way to move forward.
We have to get past the point where our own comfort is our highest priority.
The features that get into a product are the ones your team cares about.
We need to own these problems instead of minimizing them.
A woman’s experience is discounted compared to a man’s.
H.R. exists to protect the company–not protect the woman.
The threat of sexual assault is something that men never have to think about and women have to think about all the time.
Episode 323 | Funding, Acquisitions, Firing and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-01-17
Selling a company (in a strategic acquisition) will get you three to seven times revenue.
You can use Stripe Atlas to set up your company in the U.S. if you are not a resident.
One you need to become a micromanager then that is a breaking point as (the employee) is hurting your business more than they are helping.
Sometimes you need an external force to push you in a direction.
Episode 324 | Idea Validation & Risk Avoidance
Date: 2017-01-24
You’re never going to be 100% sure (that your product will be a success).
Are you solving a problem that people actually have? If you already have people that prepaid you are probably past this point.
Who are you solving the problem for and who is paying for it? These are often two different people (e.g. a business owner pays for it but the marketing guy uses it)
Are they willing to pay for it?
Who is searching for the answer to this problem? How are they searching?
How hard is it for (a customer) to get value from your product?
What roadblocks are there before (someone can use your product)? How do they get data into it (from their existing systems)?
Your launch day should be your biggest revenue day of your first six to twelve months.
It is easier to enter a market and find a position than it is to enter a whole new market.
Try to find ways to disprove your idea.
It is easy to make assumptions and not realize that.
Episode 325 | Building a Killer Email Launch Sequence
Date: 2017-01-31
Your opener needs to be really engaging otherwise they won’t keep reading.
Use a lot of “you” words (to talk to the reader).
Add on social proof.
Offer a money back guarantee.
The entire purpose of a sales letter is to move someone from where they are today into the position where they are going to take that next step and become a customer.
The more emails you send the more money you make but you also get more unsubscribes and complaints.
Your offer needs to have a reward and be time-limited.
Do not wait until the day before (your launch) to start writing your emails.
Don’t do launches over the weekend because people are not at their computer as much.
If you don’t send emails, or only send one, it is a 5X or 10X difference in results for your launch.
A solid email list is 20% to 60% open rate.
Episode 326 | Building a Local vs. a Remote Team
Date: 2017-02-07
By having a remote team you can hire the best people regardless of location.
You will solve problems faster if you (and your coworkers) are all in the same location.
Governments don’t consider smaller businesses or ones that operate entirely online (when it comes to taxes) because it is not their concern. They have never caught up with the times of doing sales on the Internet.
Be careful hiring employees in any random state.
Not everyone is able to work remotely for sustained periods.
Episode 327 | Supporting 700+ services w/ Wade Foster
Date: 2017-02-14
Link
Find forums with people who have a like problem.
(The integration) is so needed that they took the time to write on a forum about it.
Cut off the problem areas before they get big enough to cause a real issue.
As your company grows (as CEO) you have to work harder to get the insights you learned through osmosis in the past.
Episode 328 | Updates on Drip and Bluetick
Date: 2017-02-21
In the early days lean towards not having ad-hoc (reporting).
Channel your inner salesperson and ask for the close.
Knowledge bases are so time-consuming to create.
What is going to multiply your time right now?
Episode 329 | How to Make Your Customers Successful
Date: 2017-02-28
Book: Shoe Dog
Identify three things in your app that your user needs to do or have done to be successful within an arbitrary time period.
Figure out when your customers get the dopamine rush from using your product.
First thing is to create onboarding emails.
Your emails should include links to take people directly where they need to go in your app.
More personalization equals more results.
Include data from (your customer’s) account in the emails you send to them.
Make sure that the user feels good about what they are doing (in your app) and that it is the right thing to do.
Episode 330 | Switching from Enterprise to the SMB Market, Staying Small Indefinitely, Dealing with Raises, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-03-07
Over time you can generally drive the cost of the business down.
Some products are a good fit for the SMB market. Those customers don’t want to pay as much as an enterprise customer. The reality is they don’t need it as much even if they think they do.
The key to a six-month sales cycle is to have more and more (prospects) in the pipeline.
It is hard to go cheap and go for volume.
The total addressable market (TAM) doesn’t matter if you are trying to build a $10,000/mo business.
MBA-type stuff doesn’t tend to help you when rubber meets the road. It helps you when you are raising funding or doing a pitch.
To reduce questions see if you can put wizards in or streamline.
Episode 331 | Transitioning from Productized Services to SaaS with Brian Casel
Date: 2017-03-14
The reality of the productized service model is that there are a lot of costs associated with it.
When you start a business the person that is the founder can usually do most things.
A challenge for non-technical (startup) founders is the pace of the learning curve.
Episode 332 | A Prioritization Framework to Deal With Task Overload
Date: 2017-03-21
Sprints can be helpful because they give you the feeling of actually accomplishing something.
An idea is not a to do.
Stuff that is in your issue tracker is stuff that should be in the realm of possibility to be built.
There is always ten times or twenty times more that could get done than you can get done.
Figure out what is really important to the business and what is not.
Episode 333 | The Ultimate Guide to Email Sequences
Date: 2017-03-28
Book: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Nurture sequences are a series of messages that are designed to introduce subscribers to your company.
An engagement sequence aims to deepen the relationship with your subscriber. They can help (your subscribers) take smaller actions that prime them for future conversion opportunities.
Onboarding message ensure your new customers know how to use the product they just purchased.
You are going to get people more engaged and get better results (with your onboarding sequence) if you are specific about what they have or have not done yet.
Abandoned car recovery sequence.
A re-engagement sequence is a last ditch effort to bring (an unengaged subscriber) back into the fold.
Send an email that shows, “this is the value you have got out of the product.”
An event sequence aims to encourage subscriber action which is attendance at an event. They use time-based and trigger-based emails.
Follow up sequences should be used whenever a customer completes an action.
Episode 334 | Why some products fail and others succeed
Date: 2017-04-04
Your product has to be good enough that people want to pay for it. It has to solve a problem. It has to have features they need. If it isn’t any of those things then you aren’t going to get any problems.
The first step is finding out if there is a problem to be solved.
People need to know what bucket your product fits in when they hit your website.
People need to be able to mentally identify who your competitors are. If they can’t it will be difficult to compare and contrast what you offer.
If your UI isn’t very good, and the screenshots on your website reflect that, then people will be less inclined to purchase it.
Episode 335 | Lessons Learned from Unbounce’s 5 Split Tests Across 2.3M Exit Overlay Visitors
Date: 2017-04-11
Every form field you add you will have a decrease in conversion rate.
If it is exit intent (form) and (your visitor) is already inclined to leave then making it more difficult to fill out the form (by adding fields) is not going to work in your favor.
More data (from the form) allows you to better target the information you are sending (your subscribers).
Episode 336 | Key Takeaways from MicroConf Vegas 2017
Date: 2017-04-18
Treat your content as assets.
The brain activity when you see your children is very similar to the brain activity when you see your company.
Your own personal viewpoint of how things are going is always going to be worse than how things are actually going.
Episode 337 | Hacking (Customer) Acquisition with Sean Ellis
Date: 2017-04-25
Book: Hacking Growth
Marketing is generally externally focused. Growth hacking is for experimenting in anything that grows the business. A lot of that sits in the product teams.
What are all of the different levers you can pull to drive revenue and customers to a business?
The bigger a company gets, and the older a company gets, the more set in their ways they are.
Effective growth organizations build a rhythm around growth. They identify the key drivers of growth and continue to optimize them. As a team they figure out new ways to analyze and improve growth.
Every test you run you get smarter about growing your business.
Make sure you have value in the first place.
The starting point is making sure that you have a product that is a must have for users.
Start by understanding what the must have experience is.
Episode 338 | How To Rank #1 for a High-Volume Organic Keyword in Under 3 Months
Date: 2017-05-02
CAP Theorem (Consistency, Availability, Performance: pick two)
Step 1: Find a good topic (one that has good keyword volume)
If you rank first for a term you are likely to get 30-32% of the clicks. If you rank second you get 14% of the click. If you rank third you get 10% of the click.
Pick a winnable topic
Focus on keywords that are strategically relevant to your content goals.
Step 2: Write a bad ass piece of content
Look at existing content.
Look at related searches.
You don’t have to be an expert. You can do research.
Add images, headers, and subsections.
Step 3: Optimize on page SEO and engagement metrics
Fix the title.
Fix section headings. (You can use a natural question that a reader might ask.)
The longer the URL the less likely you are to rank number one.
Improve keyword density.
Add a glossary at the bottom.
Make all of this as organic as possible.
Build 4: Build internal links to the article
Link to this article from other articles you have.
Step 5: Go out and find external link targets (sites that will link to you)
Guest posting is not dead.
Step 8: Fine tuning content with TFIDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency)
Episode 339 | Updates on Bluetick, Drip and Other Madness
Date: 2017-05-09
“Start Small, Stay Small” is about headcount. You always want to be increasing revenue.
Flexible schedules is great until you have two people with flexible schedules which is chaos.
Episode 340 | Hiring VAs, Struggling with Engineering, Bootstrapping vs. Raising Funding, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-05-16
Outsource more and more of your grunt work.
ScalingSaaS.com
There isn’t just one way to run a bootstrapped company.
There are a lot of ways to be successful and there is not one true path to do it.
You should be able to build your company to the point that people want to invest without any funding.
Episode 341 | How to Deal With Toxic Customers
Date: 2017-05-23
Link
Some customers feel like they are doing you a favor by being a customer.
If someone sends you an email and then five minute later sends you another–that is the classic sign of a toxic customer.
Another possible sign of a toxic customer is that they provide way too much feedback.
Toxic customers will suck away and absorb your time.
If you have a customer that is really demanding you have to keep your cool. You have to be honest with them.
Once you know a customer is being difficult, don’t let it derail your day, week, or month.
Dealing with customers is a learned skill.
Episode 342 | SaaS Development Shortcuts
Date: 2017-05-30
When taking a shortcut in code the technical debt will get worse over time.
If you’re trying to find product/market fit it almost doesn’t make sense to build a website out because you don’t know what your positioning is, you don’t know what you feature set it.
You can put off documentation while you are building things out.
You don’t need as much billing logic in the early days as you think you do.
You can punt reporting down the road because (at first) you don’t know what people are going to want to be reporting on.
Build “ghosting” (the ability to log in as your customer) very early on.
Things become clearer over time (regarding what to automate and how to automate).
Episode 343 | Growing from $1k to $5k MRR, Projecting SaaS Revenue Growth, Refining Your Sales Process, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-06-06
Early stage growth is when you are scrapping for each individual customer.
Having relationships with people who can recommend your services is what tends to drive your business in a large enterprise environment.
Halt all small feature development if you find you are running into performance problems.
Use the title “co-founder” in the early days rather than corporate titles such as “CEO”.
Episode 344 | 9 Summertime Productivity Tactics
Date: 2017-06-13
Link
Timebox your work day.
Put a hard stop (time) on the end of your day.
Think of the day as three 4-6 hour chunks. Don’t work more than two of those in a row.
Keep whats working. Don’t throw away any productivity hacks that are working.
Take outdoor breaks.
Fill your free time with a hobby or you will revert back to work. That time is to rejuvenate your mental energy.
Learn something new.
Schedule fun time.
Revisit your annual goals.
Allow for cheat days.
Episode 345 | How to Get Your Emails Delivered to the Gmail Primary Tab
Date: 2017-06-20
Even if you do all of the right things you can still end up in the promotions tab due to the nature of the algorithms.
Heavy HTML email is going to go into the promotions tab.
If you are going to use HTML (email) then use HTML that looks like plain text.
Adding a price to a plain text style email sends you to the promotions tab.
Set up DKSIM.
Prune your lists.
Google will see if you have a huge list and people aren’t engaging with it.
You should have engagement rates over 20%. Pruning helps with that.
Episode 346 | Lessons Learned from Requiring Demos for New Customers
Date: 2017-06-27
Shopify has become the default choice for merchants selling physical products online.
It is hard to get a second chance with people.
If you mess anything up on a checkout page people don’t convert.
Learn who the right customers are for you.
Building the perfect product is not the solution if you don’t have enough people coming through your sales funnel.
Lead off a customer demo with asking them, “What is important to you? What are you trying to accomplish?”
There is a lot of advice but you don’t have to do any of it. Do whatever is right for your situation.
Episode 347 | How to Recover From Coding for Months Without Talking to Customers
Date: 2017-07-04
Months one and two should be for getting a certain number of customer discussions. You are trying to figure out can I reach these people and how to I reach them.
Those customer discussions are about learning rather than trying to build revenue.
If you can’t get anybody to talk to you that is a very, very bad sign.
Months three and four is the number of paying customers after you have had a direct discussion.
Months five and six are getting customers onboarded without having those direct sales discussions.
Even if something is a great idea, and it is reasonably and well executed, it might not be the right idea for you. (product/founder fit)
Episode 348 | Finding Product/Market Fit, Organizing Notes for Maximum Effect, Growing from $100k to $1M, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-07-11
There is always a page or two on your app that you are going to feel embarrassed about.
Early on in your entrepreneurial journey stick with apps with a tight vertical niche.
There are so many note taking and to do list apps because everybody works differently.
Pay what you want only works if you have a huge install base.
The bigger you get the more you want to accelerate growth.
Episode 349 | Things to Consider When Building Your Launch Plan
Date: 2017-07-18
Launch mistakes:
- Not putting up a landing page before you start coding
- Not tracking key metrics from the start
- Saying people are finding you through word of mouth (you don’t know how people are finding you)
- Running an open beta
- Launching with a single launch email (you should have between two and six)
- Having a free plan unless you really know what you are doing
- Not growing fast enough (you need to grow fast enough to keep yourself interested or else you will abandon it)
Have a written (launch) plan. Have a written checklist to work though so you don’t stop at any point and think, “What should I do next?”
The timing (of things in your launch sequence) is so critical. If you forget something you can’t go back and do it.
Be selective about what you do. Decide what not to do (during your launch sequence).
Leverage your strengths. Know what your strengths are about talking to people about your products.
Relentless execution. Make the most of the time you have.
If your launch goes well you have so much motivation to continue. If your launch tanks it is tough to pick yourself back up.
Demonstrate how your product benefits users rather than how good the product is and what it does.
Balance your long-term and short-term goals.
Make sure you have your analytics and tracking pixels in place.
Don’t feel the need to act on every single piece of feedback.
Plan out the emails you are going to send, when you are going to send them, and what the headlines are.
Concentrate on the headlines because if the emails don’t get opened the contents are immaterial.
An explainer video can have a lot more impact than a wall of text.
Episode 350 | Launching Books, Compensation for a Side Project, Starting with A Lot of Runway, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-07-25
Stair-stepping doesn’t just take care of skill set and money but also provides confidence.
As you start adding features you start to lose the segmentation needed for a certain portion of the population because they are not interested in all of the other things.
(To compete in a big space) you need the skill set and confidence.
Episode 351 | Harnessing the Power of Your Marketing Data
Date: 2017-08-01
Make sure the data you have in each tool is accurate. If you don’t have things wired up properly you can easily miss things.
Drip differentiates between tags, events, and custom fields.
Tags are a sting that you can attach to a person. Typically used to segment groups of subscribers.
Custom fields are name/value pairs. (Mailchimp calls them merge tags.)
Events are similar to tags in that they have a name but they also record a timestamp of when the event happened. How often it happens. They also have a payload (a collection of name/value pairs).
Custom fields are a description of the person. Tags are the groupings of people. Events are the things people do.
Tags, events, and custom fields are the heart of your marketing data.
Creating custom tools is easy. It is the maintenance that is the pain.
If data gets out of sync you need to know who the master source of where that information comes from.
Episode 352 | Housing Multiple Products Under One Brand, Stair-Stepping, Pricing Tiers, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-08-08
If you ever think about selling a business then it needs to be broken out (from your other businesses) and have its own Stripe account.
Just because somebody is complaining about the price doesn’t mean it is too high.
Trying to guess at pricing early on without data is difficult.
No matter what you feel like you are getting screwed by the health insurance companies.
If you have a SaaS app your database should be the source of truth for all of the other apps that you use.
Don’t be pennywise and pound foolish.
Episode 353 | Noah Kagan’s Post-Launch Advice for Bluetick
Date: 2017-08-15
Have people you can already reach out to (before you launch).
Do screencasts (to show developers you hire what you are looking for).
Most people spend too much time building an app instead of putting it in front of people.
Take a process and implement it as a piece of software.
Most people when they are building something don’t question whether other people actually want it.
A good chunk of your early users might be people who are fed up with a competing product for a specific reason.
PPD = Who is your person? What is the price for them? What is your differentiator?
If you don’t have a goal with a timeline you can’t be successful.
The way your customer talks to their friends and colleagues is how you need to talk to them.
Proactive dashboards are when you create a dashboard of things you can do on a weekly basis that is fully controllable by you. These are things that you can control to help you hit your goal.
Hope is not a strategy.
In business things are not going to work. That is a guarantee.
Play games you can win.
Episode 354 | The Art of Product with Guests Derrick Reimer and Ben Orenstein
Date: 2017-08-22
Podcast: The Art of Product
Even people that are successful are still going through a lot of the same struggles you are when you are new to the industry.
It is possible to be a captain as a company as still be somebody who contributes code.
Episode 355 | How to answer the question: Build or Buy?
Date: 2017-08-29
As developers we know we can build anything given enough time.
You need to do a GAP analysis in order to decide whether to build (functionality) or buy (a license to a library that provides that functionality).
Try to figure out the critical features you need versus the ones that would be nice to have.
Early on in your entrepreneurial career you will have more time than money but later on you will have more money than time.
We are inherently overly optimistic as developers about the problems we are going to come into and our ability to solve them in a timely fashion.
What is the most important thing right now? Are there things that can be pushed off?
Episode 356 | Finding Pricing for a New SaaS App, Small Business Banking, Selling to Companies Outside the U.S. and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-09-05
Shorter trials are better.
Pitch pricing options during customer development.
Inventing a new product category is very hard and very expensive.
Most banks business offerings are going to be pretty similar.
Episode 357 | Courtland Allen – Indie Hackers
Date: 2017-09-12
As a consumer your view into a company is extremely limited.
Building something outside of work is going to take a toll on you.
You need to be ruthless with prioritizing your time.
Be able to be vulnerable and honest with people about what is going on (with you).
It is hard to get people on the Internet to care at all. If people are giving you negative comments at least they care to some degree.
Features are a big trap that a lot of first-time founders fall into that delay the launch.
Focus on revenue more.
Everything you are working on gives you an idea of three or four other things to work on.
Work/life balance if you have a home office is very hard.
Choose to do something you care about.
Episode 358 | Bootstrapping into the Enterprise, Avoiding Death by Google, Selling to Outside the U.S. and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-09-19
If you’re targeting the enterprise then look at your competitors and see how they are selling to their customers.
Enterprise level customers have a certain way they are used to acquiring software.
Episode 359 | The 3 Tenants of Fulfillment at Work
Date: 2017-09-26
Long-term (employees) need to be fulfilled or they are not going to be productive or they are going to quit.
If you do stuff that moves the business forward you feel good doing it.
Skill alone leads to toil.
The best managers are the ones who can spot in other people what they are gifted at and what brings them joy.
You need to hold yourself accountable to the results of (your employees) and what they are achieving.
Hire A-players rather than B-players who are going to hire C-players.
Episode 360 | The One Where Rob Takes Over the Show
Date: 2017-10-03
You get a network effect from Kickstarter.
Amazon is one of the largest search engines. Probably the largest for commerce traffic.
One side of a marketplace is going to flock to your site once you have the other side. You need to decide which side to get first.
Your first sale is life changing.
(Success in podcasting) is about showing up every week.
You need to ship a podcast at least once a week. Two or three times a week is even better. You will grow your audience faster.
Build up a long-term narrative that people want to hear.
Episode 361 | Planning for Better Productivity
Date: 2017-10-10
Success is fundamentally about how you spend your time. All of us have the same amount of time in the day but some are much more successful.
Categorize all of the things you need to get done.
Sleep is something that you need to be productive.
Pay attention to exercising and going to the gym.
You slowly lose willpower through the day.
Know yourself and how you work. There are certain times of the day where you are more productive.
Know your personal body clock before putting things on your calendar during the day. (So you take advantage of your most productive times.)
Track how much time you are spending in each area.
It is really easy to go through your day on autopilot.
Protect your makertime. Make it something that is scheduled, something that is deliberate, and something that won’t get interrupted.
How you spend your time is not necessarily how you spend your attention. (e.g. when exercising you can listen to podcasts)
Organize tasks by value.
Book: 80/20 Sales and Marketing
Episode 362 | Calculating Lifetime Value (Not as Boring as it Sounds)
Date: 2017-10-17
CLV (customer lifetime value) or LTV (lifetime value) is the total amount of revenue you are going to get on average from each of your customers.
For one time purchases use the average of the bottom two tiers (if you have three tiers) as your average revenue for lifetime value.
Lifetime value = average monthly revenue per customer divided by churn percentage.
As the churn rate goes up is starts to dramatically affect your lifetime value.
Negative churn rate (when your existing customer base is expanding) is called expansion revenue.
Episode 363 | Building Outbound Sales Processes
Date: 2017-10-24
In conventional businesses the (sales) process is basically telemarketers working in their own silo.
You need to have multiple touches with people over time in order to get them to convert.
All you’re doing with email marketing and Facebook ads is trying to get in front of people.
Map out not just every (communication) that goes out be every outcome (from those communications).
When you’re prototyping software gets in the way.
Keep tweaking your email messaging until you find something that works then start making phone calls with that same messaging.
Episode 364 | Plateauing at $1k MRR, When to Spend on SaaS apps, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-10-31
Book: Masters of Doom
Book: Hatching Twitter
Book: Snowball (about Warren Buffett)
Book: Angel by Jason Calacanis
Book: Petty the Biography
To (break a $1k MRR plateau) you have to have a differentiator or own a traffic source.
It is hard (to market effectively) with (1,000-word) blog posts today.
Be more focused (on marketing) and spend more time on it.
Why are you blogging? Are you really going to get customers from that?
Episode 365 | The Real Impact of Revenue Expansion
Date: 2017-11-07
It is easier to get more revenue from your existing customers (because you are keeping them happy) than it is to acquire new customers (which is expensive).
If you can increase the rate that someone uses your product by decreasing friction that is effectively delivering more.
Have different upsells.
You are not going to have the luxury of complex pricing because nobody is going to want to deal with it.
Try to keep (your pricing) simple in the early days.
Episode 366 | Building an MVP as a Non-Developer, Gaining Traction with Stair-Stepping, and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-11-14
Focus on people that are willing to pay something.
When you’re selling something that is really cheap distribution has to be pretty much free. You need to rank high in Google or Amazon. You don’t have enough money to do paid marketing,
Put time pressure and people will make a decision.
Episode 367 | MicroConf Europe 2017 Recap
Date: 2017-11-21
Record your sales calls and then listen to them.
Do a lot of open-ended questions on sales calls.
End your call by asking for a sale, a demo, or whatever the next step is.
Treat people on the other end of the call like they are a real person.
Make content on your website for people rather than spiders (keywords and SEO).
Analyze the data you are getting and make sure you are not going in the wrong direction.
Question your data sources.
How can you be sure the information you have is accurate? If it is wrong then you can make the wrong decision.
Don’t go for a hard sell right at once. Show that you care and that you are an expert in your space.
Trying to push people too hard too quickly through your sales funnel is not going to work. This is a reason that Facebook ads don’t work.
Longform posts work better than short-form posts. Give people an explicit reason why to listen to. Give them a story about the solution you came across.
Episode 368 | Improving Your SaaS Onboarding Emails
Date: 2017-11-28
The rule of one: write your copy for one reader. Get them to do one thing.
Make sure your call to action is measurable. Somebody needs to know when they have done it.
“Explore my account” is not actionable.
Talk about what is going to happen as a result of (your call to action).
Communicate why somebody should do what you are asking them to do.
Episode 369 | Staying Motivated, Improving Onboarding and More Listener Questions
Date: 2017-12-05
Focus on the things you do best and leave everything to everybody else. You don’t want to be everything to everyone. You have to focus.
Part of being a good founder is that you care a lot.
The fundamental piece of time management is figuring out when you are going to be effective at certain things.
Add email reminders (for people that sign up but don’t convert).
Episode 370 | Our Predictions for 2018
Date: 2017-12-12
Entitlement is a deal-breaker (when hiring somebody).
You need to like the people you work with because you spend too much of your life at your job.
AI can work but there are certain approaches you need to take with it.
Episode 371 | Launching to $4K in Monthly Revenue with Laura Elizabeth from Client Portal
Date: 2017-12-19
Don’t wait until you have something to sell before testing the waters (with selling it in various mediums).
Just put yourself out there early without waiting until you have something to sell.
Independence (freedom) has three axis: location (mobility), income, and time.
Give people urgency (to buy your product).
Episode 372 | Our Goals for 2018
Date: 2017-12-26
More meetings is a symptom of growing a team.
It is hard to get noticed by conferences.
(Speaking) is something that if you don’t do enough in a year it is easy to lose the experience (and get rusty).
