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Dan Norris is the co-founder of WP Curve, and the author of The 7 Day Startup. He gave himself 1 year to build a profitable product.
Show Notes
Dan Norris is the co-founder of WP Curve, and the author of The 7 Day Startup. He gave himself 1 year to build a profitable product. After spending a year on a product called Inform.ly, with no profits to show for it, he came up with the idea for WP Curve, and made it got his first paying customer in 4 days.
Notable quotes:
- “With my first business, I just wasn’t selling something people wanted.” – Dan Norris
- “We’ve launched 4 business in the last 12 months, and 3 of them failed. We started listening to customers and focused on the 1 business that was working.” – Dan Norris
- “Don’t make decisions based on assumption.” – Dan Norris
- “Launch the business in a week; and then don’t make any more assumptions. Make the decisions after you launch.” – Dan Norris
- “With WP Curve I knew right away that people would pay for it. With my first business, I had to build it for 6 months before I could figure out that people would pay for it.” – Dan Norris
- “The only two people who can give you real feedback about your product are people who just purchased it and people who just canceled.” – Jason Fried via Dan Shipper
- “When people cancel, we ask them a simple question: what did we do wrong?” – Dan Norris
Show notes
- WP Curve
- The 7 Day Startup
- Dan Norris on Twitter
- WP Curve co-founder Alex McClafferty
PS: By the way, I’m working on something new called Product People Club. Go to productpeople.club, and sign up for the waiting list. I’ll have something to announce shortly!
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Hey, it's July 10 and you know what that means. It's time for another episode of Product People. Justin Jackson here, in Alberta. I'm on vacation now, I'm actually prerecording this. You'll hear it on Thursday, July 10.
Speaker 1:But I'm recording it seven days early here in Edmonton. Last week's episode, some people said, first of all, my microphone was quiet. It was too quiet. This is a brand new microphone that I'd never used before, and the the levels were a little off as they say in the business. So hopefully this week's a little bit better.
Speaker 1:Sorry about that. And I also probably sounded tired because I just come off that big car trip with the kids, you know. When was the last time you did a big road trip twelve hours with four kids? Let me know at m I Justin on Twitter. Let's see what else is going on.
Speaker 1:Still working on www.productpeople.club.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 1:go there and sign up for the waiting list. I'm hoping to have some more information soon. Just working with a developer right now to get some pieces built, and hopefully I'll be able to start letting in beta testers. The way to join the beta is to go to productpeople.club and sign up for the email list. This week we're going to chat with Dan Norris.
Speaker 1:He's an Aussie. He's actually a Bogan. Do you know what a Bogan is? I didn't know what a Bogan was before I chatted with Dan. But he he's an interesting guy.
Speaker 1:He's tried to build a SaaS product called Informly and that didn't work. He worked on it for over a year, nothing really happened. He wasn't making enough money and he was basically had one weekend left before he needed to go back and get a new job. So in that weekend he created a new business called WP Curve. He joined up with a co partner called Alex and now they both run WP Curve together and it's doing really well.
Speaker 1:This business that they started in a weekend, he goes through all of his revenue numbers and and all the things that they tried that worked and didn't work. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Once again, here is Stryker.
Speaker 3:All right. Justin Jackson here and I am live with Dan Norris, the founder of WP Curve and the author of soon to be published book called The Seven Day Startup. And we're going to be talking about a lot of things today, framework for evaluating ideas, but first let's say hi to Dan. How's it going, Dan?
Speaker 2:I'm good, man. Thanks for having me. I should point out that I'm the co founder because if Alex watches this and hears you call me the founder, he's going to totally lose his shit.
Speaker 3:That's true. That's true. We gotta cover all the bases here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of stakeholders.
Speaker 3:So you're the founder of co founder of WP Curve and are you guys both writing the book together too?
Speaker 2:I you know what? The the book I kind of just wrote really, really quickly. It just came out so easily because I've just been through all these struggles and we had planned to write it together. I pretty much wrote the whole thing. He reviewed the whole thing and now I got a bunch of people to give us feedback and we've got a an editor going through at the moment who's turning my horrendous writing into something that's readable.
Speaker 2:So yeah. That's pretty much how it work. But he's been helping with every step but but I I did actually write the original kind of content all myself.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Now just so people don't think I'm talking to an impostor, a lot of people that have seen you in the past have seen you with this big giant ass beard. Are you the real Dan Norris? I'm
Speaker 2:actually his son. You look like I got asked for ID last night when I went to a restaurant and
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 2:That actually isn't true. It's not true. But I'm anticipating that that might happen. So
Speaker 3:you shaved the beard. You had a beard. It's gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Only yesterday too. And I gave myself a haircut. I mean, just to come on this show too.
Speaker 3:This is amazing. What people will do. It's it's so good.
Speaker 2:That's the kind of pull you've got, Justin. I really wanted to keep my beard. I've been growing it for this craft craft beer event in Melbourne in a couple of weeks but I mean, I couldn't I couldn't do that to your audience.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. We got the cleaned up version of Dan Norris. It's a whole new Dan Norris just for everyone listening or watching to the show. All right, let's start. I know your story.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of people here that might not. Can you give us the Coles Notes version of your startup journey so far? Everything from talking to Jason Kallikanis to where you are now with WP Curve and Alex.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean I ran what I would call a business for six years. I wouldn't call it a startup because it wasn't particularly innovative and it wasn't high growth and it wasn't high risk. It was just a web agency that was a pretty boring sort of a business. I sold it because I wanted to create something that was more exciting and I tried to do that with a business called Informly or an app called Informly.
Speaker 2:I managed to get a fair bit of attention for it but not many paid customers and found myself in a position a year later where I was sort of two weeks away from getting a job. Happening to get a job I should say because who knows how long it would have actually taken me to get a job especially with that beard. But yeah. And then I think I spoke to you on your podcast not long after that and I'd launched WP Curve and I just met Alex. Well, I hadn't actually met him.
Speaker 2:Still haven't actually met him. But I just joined forces with Alex and my co founder. And I mean yeah. I mean, it was just a really big turnaround. I think we did a lot of things differently with this business and we went from I think before getting a job, I was doing 476 a month in recurring revenue and I was spending that $2,000 a month.
Speaker 2:So I was losing a lot of money and now I think we're up to $16,000 a month recurring and we've got a team of nine and two fifty customers and yeah. I mean the book is really just how I started this business in seven days and how it's different from the previous ones I've started and failed.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And just to recap, you spent a year on Informly. A year on a business that and if anyone had followed you during that time, like you were doing everything quote unquote right. Seem to be following some of the lean startup methodology. You seem to be really gifted with content marketing and getting your message out there and building an audience.
Speaker 3:So why do you think you struggled with Informly and then what was the difference? Because then you created a business in seven days. Why was there a difference between those two?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean I did do one thing right in that year which was as you say, I did a lot of content and I managed to get a reasonable amount of attention for kind of one guy who was a nobody. Before that year, I think I'd written about 200 blog posts on my blog and I don't think I'd ever had a single post get more than 10 tweets. So Interesting. I mean, I've never done a piece of content that had had any kind of impact whatsoever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Before that. And for some stupid reason, thought it was a good idea to start a business and market it with content marketing. I don't know why. I I kind of thought it would work. And the content part of it did work and I kind of tapped into that a little bit, tapped into that audience and within Formly, I just wasn't selling them my product that they wanted.
Speaker 2:And as soon as I came out with something that they wanted, we kind of got that natural momentum which I had from the content. Like I had this kind of natural momentum happening with the site and the traffic and the podcast and then and all the content but it just didn't translate to the business. And so I sort of just started paying more attention to where where that momentum was happening and we've had we've launched four businesses in the last including Informly in the last twelve months, we've had four businesses and three of them have failed. And WP Curve is the one that picked up that natural momentum and then we kind of followed that and just started listening to customers and doing what they wanted and really focused in on what was working.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think this is a really good point and it's actually really hard to understand unless you've gone through it. But this idea that there's some technical people that think if you build the right thing that is like perfectly coded or perfectly designed or perfect whatever that people will naturally like it because you put a lot of work into it. There's some content and marketing people that think they can sell anything if they push it hard enough. And it seems like you learned that none of that really matters unless what?
Speaker 3:What's the missing ingredient?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a I mean, there's a few things I did wrong with that business and the book really fundamentally is about not making decisions based on assumptions and it's about doing things quickly and like with WP curve, for example, we didn't do any validation. So I didn't didn't really ask anyone. I mean, I put a thing up in a forum asking people if it's a good idea but I mean, I was launching the next day anyway so it didn't really matter what they said. You know, with Informly, spent six months on the perfect payment gateway. With WP curve, I spent thirty minutes setting up PayPal.
Speaker 2:With Informly, I spent $2,000 on a domain name. I spent 2 and a half thousand dollars on the graphic design for the website. With WP curve, I came up with a shit name. By the afternoon, I'd registered them the domain. I paid $30 for a theme.
Speaker 2:I put it up there and we used that for six months, you know, to get to $10 a month or something. Wow. Replaced it, you know, three weeks ago.
Speaker 3:And and the first name was WP Live Ninja or something. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I thought it was kinda cool, but the thing is it it didn't really matter. I mean, the name just the name doesn't really matter. So in in the book, I kind of go go through what what do you what's an appropriate amount of time to spend on something? And, like, I think, like, your business idea, if you spend one day on that, that's cool.
Speaker 2:If you spend one day on the name, you spend one day on the website, spend one day on a marketing plan, spend one day on on thinking about, like, how you're actually going to make money, like what's the business model, and then launch the damn thing and then don't spend any more time acting on assumptions because all of that is assumptions. I mean, you do have to do that. You do have to have a name. But everything you assume about your name and how important it is and your logo and all the rest of it is going to be wrong 90% of the time. So I think you should be making the decisions after you launch and part of that is having an idea that you can launch in seven days.
Speaker 2:And part of it is just working out the most effective way to test something. So with Informly, for example, like you asked what what was the difference between that and WP curve going back to your last question. One thing was, like, with WP curve, I knew after probably one day whether or not people wanted this because they started paying me for it. It was quite simple. There was no validation necessary.
Speaker 2:It was like, did you do you have this problem? Do you do you wanna pay for it? Yes. Done. I mean, we we still need to work out the business model and a whole bunch of other things but we don't need to validate the idea.
Speaker 2:With Informly, it was you know, I I spent six to eight months just building the thing just to work out if someone actually had this problem. And I could have quite easily done that probably in less than seven days. Like I could have just threw something up that looked like a live app and did a whole bunch of manual number crunching for them, asked them to pay. As soon as I realized people weren't paying, I would have known that it just wasn't the right idea. And so just just that fundamental problem of making a whole bunch of assumptions and acting on those rather than just testing it with real data.
Speaker 2:And there's a in the book, I go through a bunch of examples of other business who've launched quickly and there's a company called Bear Metrics who do Stripe analytics.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's one of the ones I like because they're it's a very similar app to what I built, but he built it in eight days. And within a month, he had paid customers. Within six months he was doing, you know, 6 or $7 a month and was a, you know, a real business.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And here's a screenshot of BearMetrix. That's what he was just talking about. This is Josh Pigford's app and really if you can read his blog post on how he went through the process of building this, it's really great.
Speaker 3:Dan, what you were just talking about reminded me of this Jason Fried quote, The only two people who can give you real feedback about your product are people who just purchased it and people who just cancelled.
Speaker 2:Oh man. That's so true. That's so true. That one of the I had an interview yesterday with Startups for the Rest of Us which is another one of my favorite shows like yours. It
Speaker 3:is a great show. It's one of my favorite too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and one of the and the topic we were talking about are, like, startup rules to live by. And one of the ones we talked about was pay attention to churn. And that's like that quote you read just there is just perfectly sums up the whole message that I've taken out of this which is like most people pay attention to a lot of stuff that is just assumptions. And, you know, you they'll kind of debate, you know, should we have a monthly service or should we just charge one off or, you know, all the thing or or how should we price?
Speaker 2:All of that stuff is assumptions. But when when you start getting people I mean, when you when you get people signing up, that that is real data. When you get people canceling, it's even better. Like we we've learned so much from people canceling our service in this business and in and in the other businesses I mentioned. Like, especially especially if you ask them, what we do is send them a one line email that says that says, did we do something wrong?
Speaker 2:That's it. And sending that email makes them reply because they kinda feel bad that we think they that we did something wrong. Yeah. And you find out all sorts of stuff from that. It's and it's not like it's not it might not necessarily that that you've done something wrong or that you've screwed up the service but there could just be a fundamental problem with your model or like the customers you're targeting or something and that's like what I would call real data and yeah, and and so so now I was actually actually thinking about this this morning.
Speaker 2:Like, we we have like an idea of of of a new angle we might take with our offering. And I was thinking, like, in the past, I would probably survey people, even survey customers and say, like, would you take up this offering or or would you just stick with what you currently got? I wouldn't even consider doing that now. I was just thinking this morning, like, a year ago I would have surveyed which is just a horrible, horrible idea. And, you now we would just put the page up and it would be live and we deal with the consequences of that and we'd actually look at who's purchasing it and who's not purchasing it, who's cancelling and why they're cancelling.
Speaker 2:And that's that's super super important. I think I think you can you can get to that stage a lot quicker than you think you can. The stage where you've got real customers even if it's only a couple and you can talk to them and get real data rather than all the assumptions.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think this is so important. And in some ways it's frustrating for anyone that is really in love with their idea or really in love with just the idea of running a business or really in love with the technology. I think we've all been in that place before where we just get something in our head and no one can talk us out of it. And we just want to do it and I think it is hard to get out of that kind of rut but there's this great freedom when you realize, Okay, I'm going to push all of that stuff aside and I'm just going to, like you say, put up a landing page and see what happens.
Speaker 3:There's a freedom in that because then if someone signs up then you know that it's real, you don't have to guess anymore.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:then you can get feedback right away. Can you give us an example of like in that email, did we do something wrong? What's something that you got out of that that you ended up putting into the product or putting into your marketing?
Speaker 2:I don't know if I can say because we're we're going to make some changes that we haven't that we haven't announced yet and I'm not exactly sure what they're going to be. So I probably I probably can't say like, there there's a very big one that we've realized. There's there's a really consistent response we get from people. And it's nothing to do with the quality of our service. It's just it's just an overall feeling that there's a group of people in the market.
Speaker 2:And I'm just gonna sound like a wanker talking about this because I know you want me to tell you what it is, but I just can't. But there's there's an overall feeling that there's there's sort of there's a there's a big group in the market that we aren't satisfying And we're saying no to a lot of people and and we're we're there's a lot of people who who want something slightly different to what we're offering. And and and we know that and we just need to figure out a way to do it. And we wouldn't have known you know, we probably wouldn't have even known that if we didn't send this email. Like, we just sent an email and said, how could we improve the service?
Speaker 2:We have nothing out of that. I mean, people just say, nothing. It's good. It's a good service. You can't improve it.
Speaker 2:Why the fuck are you leaving there? But yeah. But when you have I mean, when you have 250 customers, you're gonna get some people leaving. And I I I can give you something. I mean, I I I would like to tell you what that one is because that's a really big fundamental thing that I think is gonna have a massive impact on our business.
Speaker 2:But I'll tell you a very small one which is we get a lot of people sign up and they don't realize things about the service. And it could be something like they don't realize it's a monthly subscription even though it says that and we've updated the page so it's super clear about that. They don't realize it's not for unlimited websites. So we get agencies sign up and say, you know, you know, here's my site. I've got a bunch of other clients who want support and we have to explain that it's not unlimited and therefore they cancel.
Speaker 2:So we go back to the copy on the website and make sure that's super clear and put up a big sign saying no agencies allowed. So there's little things like that that you pick up and you
Speaker 3:know Have you learned that agencies are not good customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, I there's a few things because because we I get a lot of emails from people with ideas now for businesses and there's a few red flags for me and I know there are examples of people who've been able to build I mean, Jason Fried is a good example. He's the ultimate example of someone who's been able to be an agency and build a product for agencies. Yeah. But there's not that many more, you know.
Speaker 2:There's really there's really not that many there's so much competition. There's so many like so many people like you and me have come out of building stuff for other people and we come into this and we immediately think, oh, we'll scratch our own itch. But the problem with that is you're you're a very, very bad predictor of how important things are to you. And and one one thing one question I like to ask is, like, a guy yesterday emailed me about an app he's working on and so my question was, what app are you currently using to solve this problem? And often the answer to that is, I'm not using anything because they're not good enough.
Speaker 2:It's like, well, if it was a really big problem, you would be using something. You might not be happy with it but you would be paying somebody to solve the problem. So that's something I think people get fundamentally wrong is they're like, they want to build something cool for agencies. Oh, this would help agencies which is what I did but it it you know, they're they're a very difficult customer. They've got a lot of people who are trying to sell them things and they've got a lot of problems.
Speaker 2:Normally, they're not little things that, you know, little feel good things. They're usually fundamental things to do with, like, retention and am I actually making enough money and how do I differentiate. They're they're like the agency problems. They're not like, how do I write better proposals or how do I get better analytics type thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's such a good point about scratching your own itch because we always talk about scratching your own itch. And I think some people like the best way I can think of to illustrate this is a story from my early 20s where I decided to start two skateboardsnowboard jobs. And in my head I was scratching my own itch because I was a snowboarder, I hung out with snowboarders, I worked for a snowboard manufacturing company. I felt like I knew the industry, I knew all this stuff.
Speaker 3:And so in my head it's like I'm scratching my own itch, this makes sense. There's one big problem and that was I didn't really shop at skateboard and snowboard stores. I was in the industry and so I got a lot of my product through industry friends and I wasn't actually the person going in and buying stuff. And I think sometimes it's like that in the web industry. We think, Oh, you know, I really want to Exactly what you said, what product did you actually pay for that solves this problem right now that you just hate so much like it's making you bleed out of your eyeballs because it's so bad, it's ruining your life every day that you use it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. If people are saying, Well, we use Basecamp and it's pretty good. There's no real reason to change and I didn't pay for it, my boss paid for it. Well, it's not really scratching your own itch, is it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right. And I think particularly with that audience agencies like you often sort of see these apps who are saying, you know, we'll save you time or we'll make your clients happier or those kind of things that I mean obviously they care about but they've got much bigger problems and they've got thousands of different apps that they could potentially buy to, you know, save them a bit of time or make their clients a little bit happier. But that's that's not that's not a fundamental problem. And I think I think this is like scratching your own itch is fraught with danger because it's exactly the same problem that you have when you try to validate an idea as opposed to just launching and looking at what people do, which is people are very, very bad predictors of their behavior, yourself included.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I don't I don't even know if I would have paid for Informally. Like in hindsight, I thought I was building something that I really needed, but mean, I don't pay for analytics. I use Google Analytics. It's free. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2:I I had I'd never paid for a dashboard before, like an analytics dashboard. My clients hadn't paid for it. They I didn't even know if they cared about it. I mean, do you do you know what I mean? And and but but I thought I thought, like, you know, it'd be awesome to have all your stats in the one place and that's kinda what you need.
Speaker 2:But people are just very, very bad predictors of that. Like, unless unless you've done it a few times, I think you probably get better at that, like working out what the real problems are. Or if you've some sort of framework that you're working with. But just generally asking people or even asking yourself is just fraught with danger.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let's take people through this framework. First of all, how do you find a good idea? Like do you think like do ideas just come from staying up late at night and something pops into your head? Where do you think good ideas come from?
Speaker 2:Well, I yeah. So in the book I have a chapter on how to choose the best idea as opposed to how to find a good idea because I don't really I mean, unless you're kind of like a Steve Jobs type person then I don't think it's gonna be the like, think the idea is important but I don't think it's necessarily gonna be the idea that determines whether or not you succeed or fail because I think what what is going to happen is you will pick, you know, whatever idea is fundamentally the best and then you'll work on that and then you'll change it so much based on what people tell you that it'll be unrecognizable, you know, in a year's time. So I don't spend really any time in the book on talking about how to find ideas. Like I kind of I I kind of feel like most people have a fair idea of what they could work on but they don't know like which idea is better than the next idea. That's that's the that's the angle I've approached it from.
Speaker 2:So like I provided a like a framework where I've got nine criteria that people can look at to say, okay. Like like when I launched my business, I had four different things I could have worked on. I could have worked on a surfing app, analytics dashboard, an SEO app, or or a pot plant stand. That was the that was the fourth one that I wanted to work on.
Speaker 3:Why didn't you work on that?
Speaker 2:Well, because I knew nothing about pot plants or manufacturing. But but the I mean, in hindsight, none of them were good ideas. But I didn't really know at the time. I kind of I didn't work on that because I didn't know about manufacturing. I didn't work on the surfing one because I really had no idea how I would make money with it.
Speaker 2:And I think in hindsight again, that was a classic thing where, like, I thought this was solving a problem but I hadn't tried to solve it in other ways. So I think I was actually just trying to build something cool. The SEO app was was designed to give people ready access to a bunch of link building tactics that ended up being squashed by Google. So thank god I didn't work on that. And the analytics dashboard ended up failing, but I think yeah.
Speaker 2:So same so in terms of, like, choosing the best idea, I think I would've if I could've gone back and used this criteria on those ideas, all of them would've failed so miserably. I would've gone back to the gone gone back to the scratch and just thought, hang on a second. I need to actually work on something that is going to be fundamentally a good idea. I can go through some of the points in here if you like like around Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're talking about this this post right here, right? The nine elements of great bootstrapped business ideas?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this so my with the content of the book, I'm putting it all up on the web or I'm doing interviews like this or putting it on the blog or on Medium or whatever. It's all the content's out there. But yeah, I've got a post on my blog which is the nine elements of Bootstrap Business Ideas. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And in there I provide a Google doc that people can use. But a lot of these things came as a result of me me kind of screwing businesses up and trying to wonder like how I managed to screw them up and why. And most of them you can trace them all the way back to the idea because they're they're just fundamentally wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So what are some of the elements of a good idea that you describe in that post?
Speaker 2:Right. So yeah. I mean, maybe going through all of them is too much but the first one I have in there is like enjoyable daily tasks. So I started one business that was sending cheap iPhone cases to people like selling them online via a discount store which I'm sure everyone has thought about doing at one point. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it was it was a horrible business because I I didn't wanna sit there packing iPhone cases. Like the work involved with doing that business was just not enjoyable to me. So you need to visualize what you're actually gonna be doing day to day. And even if I think about my last business, like, there was actually a local consultancy. Like, if I was to envision, like, what I would be doing every day, it would be going out and presenting at workshops and having coffee with the people and trying to convince them that they need a website and like I hate doing that kind of stuff so why would I start a business doing that kind of stuff?
Speaker 2:Eventually, it's gonna get you. You're going come up against people who love doing that kind of stuff and they're going kill you. So that's just fundamental.
Speaker 3:That is such an important thing. That's like usually the first question I ask people when they come to me with an idea is they'll say, I'm building an application for lawyers. And I'll go, Well, do you hang out with lawyers all the time right now? And they'll go, Well, no. Do you have any friends that are lawyers?
Speaker 3:No. Do you even like lawyers? No?
Speaker 2:Hang on. You don't have to ask that question. No one likes lawyers.
Speaker 3:But can you imagine, the reason they're building an app for lawyers is because they think lawyers have money, so I'm going to build an app for lawyers. But they don't realize you're going have to serve lawyers, hang out with them, write content for them, answer the phone for them, answer their phone calls, answer their emails every single day for as long as your product exists.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you're not going to be good at it because you don't like it and there are people who will be really good at it because they do like it and they're going to win.
Speaker 3:Exactly. So that's a great point. I love that one.
Speaker 2:What's another one? So the I mean, this this as I say, won't go through all of them but these just come from fundamental mistakes that I've made and and one of them was can't operate profitably without the founder. And by that I mean, like, with my agency, if I was to take myself out of the business at any point and replace myself with staff, the whole thing would have gone it it would have died instantly because the just fundamentally, like, the jobs required to run that business were very, very expensive to replace. So, you know, I I did SEO. I did I mean, sales even though I wasn't good at it.
Speaker 2:Was still the person who had to do it. We did some some sort of copywriting. We did design. We did development. We did hosting.
Speaker 2:We did content. I I did all the content for the blog. So if I was if I was to get like seven different people to do those jobs which we would need to to keep the business going then, it would go underwater. So you can think about that at the idea stage. You can really like part of my fundamental aspects of choosing WP Curve was I had to choose a business idea where I could get people to do the work that would still enable to me to maintain a profit margin.
Speaker 2:So that's why we chose WordPress support and small jobs because I can hire WordPress developers very cheaply and they have all the skills required to service our customers. We don't do any design because you can't hire good designers. I'd have to charge charge 10 times as much if we did design. We don't do any content content for our clients or you name it. You name the service, it would have fundamentally changed what I was doing.
Speaker 2:So that kind of stuff you can think about at the idea stage. Like it's fine to create a job for yourself and, you know, okay, I'm gonna do conversion optimization for clients but happens when you get to the point where you really do need to replace yourself for whatever reason? It could be that you're just not motivated doing the work. It could be you've grown to a point where you just can't physically do it anymore. It could mean you're not making enough money so you need to grow.
Speaker 2:What happens at that point? And it might the answer might not be just doing tasks that can be done by cheap staff. I mean, the answer might be doing jobs that can be automated or it might be charging 10 times as much. But you really need to think about that at the idea stage, think.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Is also a very really good point. I've talked to quite a few people who have set up businesses and then they're six months in or a year in and they just realize the grind to keep that thing going, the way they set it up, is really difficult. And in some ways this is what if you remember the WooThemes guys ran into this. They started selling themes with unlimited support that never expired.
Speaker 3:And they came to a realization, We can't do this anymore. If we're going to make money and this is going be sustainable, we have to charge more and we have to put a limit on the amount of support that we give.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what I do in our business is I have a spreadsheet where I can and I provide these resources in the book as well and they'll be free on the web. The book's free. I don't know if I've said that already but it'll be free when it comes back. Oh, I
Speaker 3:didn't I didn't know that. No way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just like a e book version. And all the resources will be free as well. So so one of them is like think like people hear the advice you have to work on your business, not in your business. And I think that's bad advice because you do have to work both.
Speaker 2:Early on you definitely have to work in your business. I mean, you need to be the one who's on the live chat talking to customers. Mean, the idea of getting like outsourced live chat, you know, at an early stage business, I think is just crazy. Like it needs to be you. You need to really fundamentally understand what the problems are of your customers.
Speaker 2:And you need your business needs to be so heavily dependent on you that it would fail without you. I believe that early on. But there needs to be like a you need to have some understanding of what happens when you when you get out of that stage. So like in our business, we know our profit margin at the moment is a certain percentage because we're doing a lot of the customer support stuff and, you know, we haven't we haven't hired project managers or whatever. We know that profit margin will go down once we do that but we know it won't go down to a point where we're unprofitable.
Speaker 2:So just just even just having a spreadsheet to estimate like where you are now, where your business would be without you in the business doesn't mean you have to take yourself out of the business but it means you recognize you will at some point and yeah, having an understanding of what it looks like without you. Having those tools I think to to really estimate like what is the percentage, what sort of money we would be making if I wasn't here. I hope that kind of stuff is useful to people.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think that's a good place to leave it Dan. Thanks so much for coming on today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was fun. I'm sorry it was just so hippie like. I'm just going go meditate now.
Speaker 3:No, it's good. It's good. So if you folks want to see more of what Dan is doing we've got wpcurve.com. We've got the blog wpcurve.com/blog and is that the best place to find out about the book?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if you go to wpcurve.com/7daystartup, at the moment it's just a landing page to jump on the email list which is where we'll give the book away. Once it's launched, I'll just put the book up there. It'll just be a free download and all the resources to do with it will be on there as well. But there's a bunch of content on the blog and I like my email list is where I send my best content.
Speaker 2:So I did a post on Medium a week ago that went really well. It's not on the blog but that that all goes out to the email list so you can jump on there and get my emails and reply if you got any questions. I read read and reply to all of them.
Speaker 3:Perfect. So again, that's wpcurve slash the number seven day startup. And you can get on the email list and then follow along on wpcurve.com/blog where Dan is posting a lot of his content. Beauty! Thanks so much Dan.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thanks, Justin. That's cool.