Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Amy Hoy is known for her unfiltered, straight-shooting opinions on building product businesses. Her and her husband Thomas Fuchs have built Freckle, an awesome time-tracking web app - and have become well known in the bootstrapping, design, and Ruby on Rails communities. Amy is also a passionate teacher: her and Alex Hillman run the excellent 30x500 bootcamp whose students include the likes of Brennan Dunn, Chris Hartjes, and Jaana Kulmala. Our topic was: finding an audience, discovering needs, and building products people want. Notable quotes "The core problem with so many businesses is that they’re based on what the business owner wants." "They’re fantasizing about being the hero: “I’m going to ride in on my white ‘software’ horse, and save these poor people." "As much as you can, you want to sell to people who will use your product. People who buy your product and don’t use it will never buy from you again." "Target people already in motion." "Selling to wannabes has the least amount of upside; people who already have a business are more likely to spend money.” "I would rather have no money, than know that the vast majority of people that gave me the money aren't achieving what they wanted to. If that's true, I don't want to be in that business." "Being in business forces you to become a better human being." Show notes Freckle Time Tracking 30x500 Amy's blog post on why Freckle became successful The legend of 30x500A note from Justin: A big thanks to Amy Hoy for being Amy: no bullshit, nothing held back. Just real, hard advice for product people. Cheers, Justin Jackson @mijustinPS: I'm writing a new book right now called Marketing for Developers. Click here to sign-up for updates (and get a sample PDF).
Show Notes
Amy Hoy is known for her unfiltered, straight-shooting opinions on building product businesses. Her and her husband Thomas Fuchs have built Freckle, an awesome time-tracking web app – and have become well known in the bootstrapping, design, and Ruby on Rails communities. Amy is also a passionate teacher: her and Alex Hillman run the excellent 30×500 bootcamp whose students include the likes of Brennan Dunn, Chris Hartjes, and Jaana Kulmala.
Our topic was: finding an audience, discovering needs, and building products people want.
Notable quotes
“The core problem with so many businesses is that they’re based on what the business owner wants.”
“They’re fantasizing about being the hero: “I’m going to ride in on my white ‘software’ horse, and save these poor people.”
“As much as you can, you want to sell to people who will use your product. People who buy your product and don’t use it will never buy from you again.”
“Target people already in motion.”
“Selling to wannabes has the least amount of upside; people who already have a business are more likely to spend money.”
“I would rather have no money, than know that the vast majority of people that gave me the money aren’t achieving what they wanted to. If that’s true, I don’t want to be in that business.”
“Being in business forces you to become a better human being.”
Show notes
Amy’s blog post on why Freckle became successful
A note from Justin:
A big thanks to Amy Hoy for being Amy: no bullshit, nothing held back. Just real, hard advice for product people.
Cheers,
Justin Jackson
@mijustin
PS: I’m writing a new book right now called Marketing for Developers. Click here to sign-up for updates (and get a sample PDF).
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Here we go.
Speaker 2:It's product people. Justin Jackson here. Welcome to a brand new episode, first episode of 2,014. This is the show that exposes you to the scrappy underworld of people creating their own products. No bullshit.
Speaker 2:No pretending. What does it really take to build and launch your own thing? My guest this week, Amy Hoy. Talk about no bullshit. Amy Hoy is known for her unfiltered straight shooting opinions on building product businesses.
Speaker 2:Her and her husband, Thomas Fuchs, built Freckle, an awesome time tracking web app. And they're also well known in the bootstrapping design and Ruby on Rails communities. But Amy is also a passionate teacher. Her and Alex Hillman run the excellent thirty by five hundred boot camp. That's 30x500.com.
Speaker 2:And this interview is a little bit longer, but it gets really good near the end there. Second half, the whole thing is good, but the second half, things really heat up. So stay tuned through the whole thing. Let's get to Amy Hoy now.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I'm with Amy, and we're going to talk about kind of going back to some things we talked about on product people. Things that are you know Amy talks about all the time but there are still things that people are interested in finding an audience, discovering needs and building products that people want. Right. And we were actually just talking about this before, Amy, this idea of how some people think that building software is the hard part. Why is building software not the hard part?
Speaker 3:The people who use your product don't actually care if your code is awesome. They only care if it works and does what they need. The human element is a million times harder. The business element is a million times harder. It doesn't have to be, but people make it that way.
Speaker 3:I think everybody in every field thinks that they're the ones who are critical to the success of the product. I've been professionally a designer, a writer, marketing type stuff. Every single audience I've been in has said, oh, well, we're the ones who are so important.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Especially developers, especially management, especially marketing. Every single area thinks that they're the ones who are really important, and the fact is that it's not true.
Speaker 1:So if building software is not the hard part, what's the first thing people should be thinking about when they're thinking, okay, I want to build a product. What's the first thing they should think about?
Speaker 3:Well, it comes down to one of two options. Most people don't have the perseverance and grit to do it. So if they don't, none of the other stuff matters. Because it takes a long time to build a business and it takes a lot of emotional effort to keep doing the same things over and over. It's not really super exciting and that's you can do all the business stuff right, but if you don't keep showing up every day and doing the stuff you have to do, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3:Like you can get the right customers, you can serve a real need, you can kill a real pain, you can have great software, but if you fuck off for three or four months or longer and just don't keep doing what you need to be doing, if you instead sit down and redesign your product, you're going to fail.
Speaker 1:And when you say show up every day, what are you doing when you're showing up every day? What is it about that that helps you be successful?
Speaker 3:You have to do what needs to be done. I don't mean every day. Metaphorically every day. I don't work every day. But you can't decide that you're going to develop like crazy because you feel inspired for two weeks and then, you know, you'll maybe you have a product launch and then you get distracted and don't do anything with your product for a month or two or three.
Speaker 3:You don't do marketing, if you don't do support, if you don't do the boring stuff, then you're never going to get anywhere. All you are is a toolmaker and nobody wants your tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And we were just talking about how you've just celebrated the fifth anniversary of Freckle. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:That is really awesome. Think for, and you wrote about it in a great blog post that kind of echoes what you just said. Yes. Like when people ask you, How did Freckle get so successful? Your answer is hard work, right?
Speaker 1:Showing up every day.
Speaker 3:No, not hard work. God, no. I need to channel Dale Carnegie for a moment.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So if you read How to Win Friends and Influence People, which everyone says they've done, and as far as I can tell, no one actually did read it, He interviews, he tells a story where he interviews this incredible like political consultant who helps the president get elected. And Dale asks this guy, what is the secret to your success? And the guy says, hard work as every douchebag says. And Dale says, don't be funny. I hear that you can call 10,000 men by their first names.
Speaker 3:And he said, and the other guy applies, no, it's 50,000. And Dale Carnegie is basically, I'm paraphrasing because it's the 1920s.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Are you really fucking telling me it's hard work and not the fact that you know 50,000 fucking people by their first names? Could that have something to do with your political success? I don't know, maybe.
Speaker 1:But isn't it hard work that gets you those 50,000 names?
Speaker 3:Nope. Nope. The right work.
Speaker 1:The right work.
Speaker 3:And I don't say work smartly or whatever, but let's face it, the people who work the hardest in this world are usually the poorest. Like any one of us work harder than a coal miner or someone who sews clothing for a living. Let's be honest, we're panty wastes by comparison.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. That is a good point. The distinction, I guess, is that you can be working really hard but not really getting anywhere.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely. Hard work is something that people like us, we fetishize it and people like to say hard work is the secret to their success because it makes them look so Puritan and diligent and worthy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So do you think you did? What was the right work with Freckle? Maybe even start from the beginning. Like, what did you guys do from the beginning that helped make Freckle what it is today?
Speaker 3:So the very first thing we did, and in this point it was me because no one else was convinced that we were going to do this, this was very early on, is to kill a pain that people already have, people like us. So time tracking was a constant struggle for us. Mean, software was all awful. And so we didn't use the software and then we knew we were losing money. Now I say we, but the fact is that we, in this sense, includes all of the other consultants and freelancers I knew It's and read a constant struggle, it was a constant struggle for everybody.
Speaker 3:And I knew this because I was constantly talking to other people just like me, and people who are not just like me, but similar enough.
Speaker 1:And what kinds of things were they saying? Because obviously you recognize the pain, but what was actually coming out of their mouth that That's let you
Speaker 3:a great question. So a lot of discussion about estimating and how estimating isn't worth, you you don't know how are you good at it, if you're good at it. If you're losing money, you don't know. Like, how can you not know if your estimates are wrong? And the answer is, of course, they're not tracking.
Speaker 3:They didn't say that. Or constantly struggling to fit more client work in, which says to me that they aren't keeping tabs on their time. People talking about writing their estimates, basically estimating how much time they spent whenever they invoice the client as opposed to actually tracking it. People choosing project rates because they don't have to track their time then, which is like saying, I'll give you all my money because it's too hard to manage for me. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you you not being a money manager, you being like somebody on the corner.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they they weren't they weren't coming out to you at a cocktail party and saying, Amy, I I could really use a better time tracker. They weren't saying those things.
Speaker 3:No. When anyone says anything like that, they're usually lying.
Speaker 1:Because people don't generally think in those terms.
Speaker 3:Correct. Those people who do come up and say, I really want software for this, unless you know for a fact that they have a real history of saying things like that and then seeking it out and then making things and then solving that problem for themselves. Unless they say that, they're like the people who think that if they buy an electrical machine and running shoes, they will suddenly be skinny. Yeah, exactly. And we all know what happens to those people because we are those people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But most people don't, you're right, like most people, they would be saying like, Oh, I've got I've heard freelancers say that. Biggest thing I hear with freelancers say is that they're busy. Like, Oh, I'm busy, busy, busy. I've got too many projects to manage.
Speaker 1:I'm working overtime. And those are all things that you decided to to kind of tackle with software.
Speaker 3:That's part of it. Yeah. One tiny aspect of it.
Speaker 1:And so how did you know, as you were talking to these folks, sorry, listening to these folks, how did you know that freckle would be the answer? Like, what's the jump from receiving that kind of information and then jumping to the tool that solves the problem.
Speaker 3:I didn't jump from we're busy to they need time tracking tools. It was all the different things I said, which was quite a variety. Yeah. And there is no such thing as the answer. There is no the answer to anything, ever.
Speaker 3:Not even smallpox has a the answer because it still exists even though we have quote unquote the answer. An answer. But it's not even an answer. You're like, oh, I had this problem, time tracking, great, what the fuck does that information do? It's two words.
Speaker 3:It's actually about action and behavior and if anyone works with other people, they know that people can know information till the cows come home, they can have all the tools they could possibly need and they'll still make stupid mistakes even though they have the information that says otherwise right on them. It's a fool's errand to ever think that you're going to quote unquote solve anything.
Speaker 1:So take me through that process then, like as you're hearing this stuff and what was your next step? Like after you've received all that information, what did you do next?
Speaker 3:I looked at how bad the software was that existed. So specifically, several apps that were popular or are still popular, I checked them out and every time, I did a sort of a competitive analysis and just saw how terrible the software was, like really terrible. Like this is something that I'm an expert at. And they were really bad. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I looked at all the reasons that people would not track their time thus leading to the problems that I heard about and tried to take each one of those and obliterate it.
Speaker 1:So you wrote down a list of, you know, why what was out there already was not solving needs these people had. Right.
Speaker 3:And I saw that these people were constantly trying to switch software because they thought the different software would solve their personal issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And what like, there's an interesting balance there, right? Because you just mentioned personal issues, like, and you also mentioned that you can't solve everything. So how did you decide, like, what was a good thing to try, like a good need to try to solve or help people with, and maybe stuff that was best, like, best not to touch?
Speaker 3:Well, we don't try to convince people to track their time if they're not tracking their time. We just convince people who do track their time, at least theoretically, but don't like the tools, they don't use it as often as they ought to because the tools are terrible, which they are. So we always look at people who have good habits because if you try to persuade someone who doesn't track their time to track their time, chances are you're just going to get someone who's going to sign up for a trial and go, Fuck this, I'm not going track my time, and then quit.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. We definitely need to talk about this because this is something I see all the time, is folks trying to change people's behavior
Speaker 3:Good luck with that!
Speaker 1:One of my favorite things you told me, it was on another chat, was you said, You can't help people, you can only help people that help themselves. Is that right?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. It's like that joke about God and the lottery ticket.
Speaker 1:Tell it to me. I don't know that joke.
Speaker 3:Okay, so this person of who knows what religious denomination, I've heard it various ways, prays to God every night, please God, please God, let me win the lottery. And he prays this way every night for a year, and God is finally he does answer this man's prayers, and God says, look, I'll help you, but you've got to buy a chicken.
Speaker 1:That illustrates it perfectly, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. The
Speaker 1:story I always tell from my past on this is I started a retail shop, and the problem I was trying to solve was I wanted people to shop locally. So I lived in this little town, and so I thought, you know, what people really need to do is shop locally. And the truth is people did not want that. Like, there was so much behavior that I would have had to change to make that successful. And obviously it didn't work.
Speaker 1:Like it crashed and burned because people didn't want to shop locally. They wanted to go to the big city that was thirty minutes away and shop there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what you said was I wanted people to shop locally. Yeah. The core problem of so many businesses is that they are all based on what the person doing it wants. Which Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is, by the way, why I say everybody says they've read How to Win Friends and Influence People and none of them actually have.
Speaker 1:That's the book recommendation for today.
Speaker 3:For life, yes.
Speaker 1:For life. Yeah, I think that is a really important point. And so obviously with Freckle, that was something you guys focused on right away, is we're not going to go after people not tracking their time. We're going to go after people tracking their time.
Speaker 3:At this point, it was me. I don't usually take extra credit for freckle, but at the early stages, every step of this was me because I had to convince my husband and our business partners, more on that later, And to do I was thinking about to keep focused on these people constantly and to keep focused on the tasks that they needed to complete constantly and to not add extra stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, because it is easy to fall into that trap. I think especially, you know, technical people that like solving problems, like, you know, sometimes you'll just notice that there's a problem or an opportunity and you'll say, Man, like, you know, people aren't tracking their time. They should really be tracking their time. We've got to help these people track their time. But they don't realize that the solution is not technical.
Speaker 1:It's not just, you know, building something technical that's going to solve that problem. The problem is with people.
Speaker 3:So my favorite examples that I hear constantly are, I'm going to create a marketplace that connects x and y. For example, I have heard no less than five times completely different people saying that they're going to make some piece of software that connects music venues and artists as if music venues and artists aren't already connected in the most like incestuous and annoying ways possible. If you're a music venue, you don't think that you have people who are bad musicians calling you all the time. You need to connect it to more. Please.
Speaker 3:Or they add a third thing like connect them with fans. It's like, I'm sorry, Ticketmaster. Yeah. I've heard at least three or four different people tell me that they're going to, that they notice that their local bar, restaurant, hair salon, whatever, has scheduling issues. They keep their schedule on like a marked up piece of paper hanging on a door.
Speaker 3:Why don't they make software for that? And then they can see who doesn't have schedule blah blah blah. The fact is, you aren't gonna be able to sell software to those people because it exists. If they wanted software, they'd be using software. They don't want software because if you run a hair salon, you're probably not all that great at business.
Speaker 3:To say anything wrong with hair salons, some people can make them work really well, but that's an area where people who are actually bad at business and just wanna be artists are often drawn to. Same thing with bars and restaurants. The reason they fail so much is because people who start them are usually bad at business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. There's a, I think it's a Ramit Sethi quote where he says something to the effect of you can't swim upstream. So if people are already flowing in a certain direction, for you to start swimming upstream and say, you know, to a restaurant manager, you know, you're already doing it this way, but I'm gonna show you there's a better way. And you're like swimming upstream. That is so hard.
Speaker 1:People don't realize how much energy that takes to do that. And it really is actually sad because it's so easy to fall into those businesses, and they are just a lot of frustration.
Speaker 3:So I disagree with you on several points, one of which people don't fall into this business. They choose it deliberately. Yeah. They don't choose it knowing, God, I'm definitely going to fail, usually. But it says they're choosing based on their own self involvement, which I'm not saying is a terrible thing because everyone's self involved.
Speaker 3:They're in the fantasy land, they're like, what do I want to do? Oh, I want to solve this problem, I want to be the hero. They're picking it specifically so they can play the hero, I think. Yeah. Because I think I'm going to ride on my white software horse and I'm going to rescue these poor hair artists the piece of marked up paper with all the different color marker stuff on it and it's taped to the wall and oh my God, they're going to be so grateful.
Speaker 3:So I think people are deliberately picking that because of their fantasies of being a savior, which doesn't make it sad, it means that they learn a valuable lesson, one hopes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, you're right, you're right. You don't fall into something like that. Definitely That part choose
Speaker 3:of the opposite.
Speaker 1:Yep. So so continuing on. So with so with Freckle, you're you've you've noticed these things. You're focused on you've decided to focus on people that are already time tracking. What was your next step?
Speaker 1:What what did you do next? So
Speaker 3:I convinced two of our friends who we had worked with as consultants before to be partners with us to build it. Okay. Oh, I mean, I wireframed it based on the, like, pains and issues I found.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then I used that to sell my friends on being partners.
Speaker 1:And why did you do that? Why did you feel like you I needed
Speaker 3:believed all the bullshit that everyone writes about having the right team. And it's bullshit because every single person I've ever partnered with has let me down. Every single one. And it's not because I'm some awful, horrible person to work with. I promise.
Speaker 3:I know it sounds like it is.
Speaker 1:So what so what I'm
Speaker 3:still married.
Speaker 1:You're still so obviously, that partnership's working.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Really. So here's what I've discovered. And if I look the further back I look, the more I realize this is just pretty much universal. When I had this big book contract with O'Reilly, which you've never seen, because every single person I brought in to write just a single chapter with my help flaked out.
Speaker 3:I had three different co authors in a row flake out. I had these freckle partners flake out. Later on, we tried to form a partnership with people we'd already been paying to consult for us, for charm. They flaked out as soon as the partnership was essentially created. And initially when I worked with my friend Alex Hellman on the first version of 3x500 called Your Hustle, he flaked out midway through.
Speaker 3:Now we've He's the only one who's ever come back. And now we have a great partnership. Really great.
Speaker 1:So what That's an interesting one, Alex specifically, because a lot of people know that you've partnered with him on a lot of stuff. Yes. Why did he flake out initially?
Speaker 3:Because he overcommitted himself and he wasn't as committed to it as I was. That's the thing. Partners flake out. And if they don't flake out, someone is gonna contribute more than the other person leading to bad feelings and then it's gonna collapse. Now, when we had to essentially break up with our freckle partners, now, I had learned enough and I was cynical enough that I didn't give them ownership of the company at all, I gave them profit sharing.
Speaker 3:And so because it took a while for there to be any profits, they decided that they were just going to sort of disappear slowly and take on other work instead. Meanwhile, we were consulting on the side and we were writing books, we were still working on Freckle because we believed in it. And more importantly, we knew that there was a space for it in the market. We knew that people needed it. We knew we were solving our own problem.
Speaker 3:We had customers, they were happy. It just was going to take more work and takes time to grow. It made $27,000 the first year. This year, twelve month run rate from now, going be $450,000 It would be more if we were more dedicated. So that money is all ours because they flaked out, because they didn't have the investment mindset.
Speaker 3:Now, this something I've seen over and over and over again. People say they want X, they talk a good game, and then they lose interest. They don't have the perseverance to keep working on it because it doesn't pay off immediately. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a question from someone who's listening, Chuck. He says, When you created your partnerships, did you legally create the partnerships or is it just a verbal partnership?
Speaker 3:So for the first one, freckle, it was just verbal, but we dissolved it verbally as well. The one for charm, we were in the process of getting all the paperwork done. It's a lot of work. The contract doesn't actually make people behave any better. I can guarantee it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so do you think, like, was the main issue that the other people were just not as committed to it because it was really something that you understood?
Speaker 3:I don't think it was because they weren't committed to freckle. I think it was they weren't committed to changing their lives by building a business, period. I don't think that the quote unquote idea or even product mattered that much. They did not have the maturity or the big enough desire or the habits to keep working on something that wasn't paying off right away.
Speaker 1:So you're just talking about the grind, like it was just, was it the grind that kind of made them flake out?
Speaker 3:I think so. I think it was not even the grind so much as just the need for consistent effort. Not grind isn't like stuff they don't want to do, but just that it keeps going on. If it doesn't make money right away, people are so spoiled they think that they should finish a product and then they should get paid. That's not the way that it works for software.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And how long did it take? Well, actually, let's just keep going. So you started this thing.
Speaker 1:You got some partners. It didn't really work out. What did you start do like, were you did you were you still, like, engaging with this group of people, like your audience? Were you were you did you have a mailing list at this point? What were you doing on that front?
Speaker 1:Or were you already building software? Were you doing both at the same time?
Speaker 3:You mean before we built Freckle?
Speaker 1:Yeah, like right at
Speaker 3:the beginning. No, didn't do a mailing list or anything like that early on. A few weeks before we launched, we put up a teaser page and Thomas and I both blogged about something specific to Freckle that was like for our audience like design or business or whatever. He wrote about code stuff. I wrote about design stuff on my blog, my old blog.
Speaker 3:And we encourage people to sign up to hear about when it launched and we had a teaser page that talked about the pains that they had with software. Now, did not have very consistent marketing for the first year and a half, at which point if I showed you a graph, you would see the huge uptick And that was because I started to market consistently. There were times where we flaked out for a month or two ourselves, but we came back to it and other partners didn't.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. Gotcha. And so for someone who's just starting out, you think that's a good approach? Like, should they so what what would for someone who's just starting out
Speaker 3:Blog.
Speaker 1:Blog.
Speaker 3:Okay. Blog specifically about the same pains that you see that your audience has and help them right away. And then they'll trust you when it comes time to selling them something.
Speaker 1:And and would you be building a mailing list
Speaker 3:while you're blogging? Definitely. So
Speaker 1:have a blog post, have a place to sign up for an email list. And what what how how do you distinguish between everyone has their own system for this, between what you would blog about and what you would send to your email list?
Speaker 3:I don't have a system for that. I'm just still kind of winging it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you might send something just to your list, you might blog about something and then send that to your list?
Speaker 3:Yeah. To me, there are things that matter a lot, and the things that matter a lot I work on. The things that don't seem to matter a lot, I kinda just put off. I don't Something else I see with people who fail a lot is they treat every decision as if it's of equal weight. Now, could I make more money if I got this totally, totally figured out?
Speaker 3:Possibly. Now, could I make more money if I rewrap my sales page to be more effective? Definitely. Yeah. So I focus on, because we're still a tiny team, so we have two employees.
Speaker 3:It's me and Thomas and two employees. We still have to really prioritize, and so I prioritize.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Now when I have a launch sequence, I very specifically plan that out and I do that to my mailing list, combined with blog posts to get people on the mailing list. But that's for it's like for 30 by 500 and conferences and stuff. It's not the same for Freckle because Freckle is launched.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you still you've talked about this concept of e bombs. Maybe can you can you describe what an eBalm is? Sure. Is that a technique you use with Freckle?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So an eBalm is my work for educational action oriented content marketing because that's just a mouthful. So it's not content marketing because content marketing can be like pictures of puppies or memes or like some stupid infographic that's covered in numbers because that's the way you convey information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Or like questions like, what do you think about x? I hate when people do that. Like, I think y, what do you think about x? I'm like, could you phrase that in a way that isn't clear that you're trying to manipulate us? So specifically, an e bomb is something that takes a problem or pain or fear or whatever, all those things are pains, that your audience has and shows them a small thing that they can do right away to start fixing that issue.
Speaker 3:So it specifically gives them a win. Otherwise, it's not an e bomb, it's just content, whatever. And we absolutely do that with
Speaker 1:What's an example of something you've done with Freckle?
Speaker 3:Last December, we did this thing called Freelancember, we did it the year before as well. It's thirty days of like tips and worksheets for freelancers. So like one would be how to fire a client or how to ask your client for how to tell your client they're raising your rates. We had like templates they could use and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So something specific that you can send them, it's not a huge thing, but it's like a small like you said, a small win they can feel like they've accomplished something.
Speaker 3:Yep. In fact, they don't just feel like they accomplished something. That's the problem with badges. You want them to actually accomplish something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like there's actually a tangible result. Correct. Does that work in terms of why does that work in terms of, you know, people signing up for Freckle? Why do e bombs send sign ups to Freckle?
Speaker 3:Because it, one, they get shared because they're inherently useful. Two, it shows that we're thinking about their problems all the time. Three, if you can teach something to somebody, they're much more likely to give you money because you've proven that you're an expert. But the expertise is kind of a white whale, it's kind of a, no, wrong thing. Red herring.
Speaker 3:Wrong fish metaphor. Kind of red herring.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:People don't care if you're an expert. They only care if you can help them. And expert is like a poor, proxy for whether you can help them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So if you show that you can help them, you build trust. And also you help them, which by the way is a good thing for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I think anyone listening to this can start to see a trend here, and again, it's something you talk about all the time, but I think, you know, one thing that I'm always kind of noticing is how inherently selfish I am, and like how I'm often just thinking about myself. So even I might be like trying to produce something, and it should be focused completely on the other folks and what they actually need and how I can actually help them. But sometimes it just seems to slant my way, and I'll end up doing something that doesn't actually help people. It's just maybe just setting myself up to be an expert without actually helping the people in the audience, right?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So I've been reading various opinion pieces and research and whatnot that seems to indicate that American society is ever more narcissistic with each passing year. And so I don't want to say that it's natural, but it's definitely the environment that we're in.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 3:it poisons everything, big and small.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Now and this every we chat, we always get into this. And I think it's good, because I think it is important for people to recognize that whatever the cause is, whether if it's society or what have you, that we often act that way.
Speaker 1:And if you can't get over that and actually focus on people and what they actually need And there's so many ways to pervert that, isn't there? Like to pervert that idea of I'm really, like thinking that you're helping someone, but you're not really?
Speaker 3:It's Tolstoyan or Tolstoyesque or whatever, that you know, all happy families, non narcissistic, other orange people are all alike, and then unhappy families are each unhappy or narcissistic in their own way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, it's really interesting once you start looking at the media and the way people talk about things, like just around you as well, how identity focused everything is. Pretty much all of the quote unquote startup media, you have to see like, who are they casting as a hero? Or even an anti hero in every single thing. It's almost never about the users or the customers. They are almost never mentioned in any coverage of anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Not landing pages, not, you know, puff pieces, not stories of this is why we shut down. It's like never ever about the customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's kind of disgusting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Yeah, yeah. And you did a great talk about how that's also reflected in marketing pages too, how that kind of self focus, instead of talking about the customer and how you're helping them, we end up just talking about ourselves and
Speaker 3:yeah. But the thing is, it starts at a lower level than that. The product starts that way. Ego driven development. Yeah.
Speaker 3:In the specific talk that you're talking about, I talked a lot about how to win friends and influence people, surprise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And the issue is that that involves copywriting, also we looked at a bunch of different project management applications, and I took some of their slogans and stuff out of context and said, can you tell which one is which? And you couldn't because they were all the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's because the products have nothing to distinguish them either. It is literally, I built this, therefore it's different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I guess with Freckle, like, these eBalms that you're sending out, those are all little pieces of stuff you've included in Freckle? Like, those are all benefits they would get if they were using Freckle?
Speaker 3:Sometimes. I mean, think the most effective eBOM is usually something like, you know, you're hemorrhaging money if you're not tracking those little two and three minute interruptions because they will really disrupt your work all day. And I know it's really a hassle to track them but you'll get these following benefits and by the way, Freckle makes it really easy. They can use it without Freckle but it happens to show that this is what we're thinking about all the time. It shows them that we're always thinking about them, their problems, their business, and that we want to help.
Speaker 3:We can help.
Speaker 1:You still track your time?
Speaker 3:Sometimes.
Speaker 1:Now that you're, like, because you're not in that world as much anymore, Do you do you think is it harder to identify with your audience now or is it still
Speaker 3:No. It's audience isn't people who track their time. It's people who are consultants or, you know, consulting teams or who own businesses, of which I'm not a consultant, but I'll never forget what it was like. I was a freelancer consultant for, let's say, eleven years, some odd. I'll So never forget what that was like.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But, when we were talking before you started recording, before we went live. Yeah. People think that my advice is to serve people who are just like them, that's not it. It's to serve an audience that you belong to or have belonged to or that you sell to or people who want to be like you, but always with a business focus. So, I'm going to offend everyone listening again.
Speaker 3:Wannabes have the least upside of any audience unless they are specifically taking steps. Because the pool of people who want to design a product, for example, or who want to have a blog is, you know, factually a million times larger than the people who do already. So that is a tough audience because they don't have a lot of money, they're not seeing an immediate financial upside, they're usually not as rational customers because they can't say, oh well, I am already making X. If I buy this for, you know, dollars 100, it'll return $200 A business, most businesses that are professional are like, Well, yeah, I'll pay $100 for that. Individuals are much more tied up in fears and concerns whether that will make their money, whether they'll look like a sucker if it doesn't work, etcetera.
Speaker 3:So to some degree, marketing or amplifying whatever is universal, but in other ways it's not.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. I think that's a good point. And how would you because you've also advocated building a tiny product first.
Speaker 1:Right. And, you know, like, we could almost look at any info product and say, you know, there's gonna be a big group of people that are buying that any info product, that are going to buy it, and they're fulfilling some sort of emotional need by purchasing it, but they might never actually use it to do what's being described.
Speaker 3:That's a very good point that most people never think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what do you think is do you think it's still, like, in the way you, you know, would build something like that, is there a way to get around that? Or do you should you just focus on people already in businesses and forget, like, just not even pay attention to folks that might not actually do anything with your book?
Speaker 3:So you can't, especially for like a book, you can't control what people buy it. You can't control whether they use it or not. You can only do as much as you can to ensure that people use your product because if they buy it and don't use it, that's not a net win for you. Yes, you have their money, but no, you will never get their money again because you weren't able to help them because they didn't actually use what you made. So it's a virtuous cycle.
Speaker 3:It's in everyone's best interest that you sell the people who will use your product and that you try to help everyone who buys your product to use it. So there's various things you can do. Part of it, can message it, you can aim it, you can study the pain of people who specifically do stuff already, who are already in motion. That's a good sign. Doers are doers, you know.
Speaker 1:Sorry, I'm typing because I'm writing that down. I love that. Target people who are already doing something or already moving.
Speaker 3:Hopefully, your typing won't break us again.
Speaker 1:Before we started, that's why we started a little bit late, everybody. I started typing on my keyboard on my desk, and it was so loud all of sudden.
Speaker 3:I got stuck in a loop. Was like, and it just kept Same audio clip played over and over again. The other thing you can do so for example, 30 by 500, over time has gotten more expensive. We've added the application process and changed a bunch of stuff inside the class itself to promote that the people who do get in will actually use it. So 3,500 is my class.
Speaker 3:I teach people, designers, developers specifically, to make their very first paying products. All the stuff I'm lecturing about today is something that I, it comes out of what I teach. And I've mentored so many people and like the amount of money, some of them I made is quite staggering. Some of them are gonna out earn me, I think.
Speaker 1:Which as
Speaker 3:a teacher is kinda awesome. But, so the first few classes were all email based and I had all these really polished, really good lessons and there was homework and there were workbooks and whatnot and I noticed that people just dropped off and then they dropped off and then more and more just dropped off all the way through. And so, at one point I reversed the order of the lessons and refined them and that actually helped. And then added live chats and that helped. And then added the application process and that helped.
Speaker 3:Each one of these incremental steps and now 35,500 is a two day live boot camp. We had a live boot camp that kicked off the long class and that helped and now we have it is a two day boot camp plus extras. If you want an exercise program, you can pay extra. Doing all these things, breaking the content, breaking the lessons, breaking into tiny actionable steps, making people show up live and pay to show up live
Speaker 1:has
Speaker 3:been a huge help. It's like all these steps because I have no interest in teaching people who are just going to sit there and lurk and not take my lessons because then I don't get to help people and they took the spot from someone who might actually achieve something and all things being equal, I just want people who are going to actually take what I teach them and use it at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is actually a huge thing, especially if any of you get into a SaaS business because one of the most like, the the metrics that a lot of people who run SaaS businesses one of the metrics that gives them anxiety is usage, like who's using your product. Yep. You know, I know a lot of people I've talked to have run that query on their product, and they're like, oh my goodness, like there's this huge percentage of people that are not using it. And this idea of that you're talking about of if you can target and then continue to narrow your focus to people that are actually doing things, that's going to reduce that anxiety for you too.
Speaker 3:I think so. Not that I'm saying it's easy. Which is why that, by the way, is a whole lot harder than actually developing the software, like that step alone and to come back to that focus and to constantly be thinking of how to make things better for your customers, how to attract the right customers, tweaking things, changing your message, altering the app itself. This is a lifelong process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And it sounds like with 30x500, that's been the process. You've kept kind of building on top of, you you learned each time and each time you kind of continued to narrow your focus.
Speaker 3:Yeah, changed it a lot. We changed it radically four different times. Like, almost like completely. And that seems like kind of crazy considering how much money it was making, but in the long run, if you're not delivering an effective product in the long run, you think you may make a lot of money off people who don't get a result for a while, but in the long run, that will really hurt you. Oh, I have a question.
Speaker 3:Sean Fiorito, who is actually a three thousand five hundred Boot Camp alumnus asks, But wait, don't you make less money now? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for asking that because I think he knows what I'm going to say. So $35,500 last year brought in gross, by the way, before I gave out my shares to anybody, aka my partner Alex.
Speaker 3:Dollars 400,000.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:Yep. Anyone can do the math. All the information, number of seats and how much they cost and how much they sold out was all out there. This year, we didn't run a 30 by 500 long class at all. We ran two boot camps and I think the gross yeah, two, was it three?
Speaker 3:I can't even remember. I think two boot camps. Was it three? I ought to know this. Anyway, the the gross this year has been more like 80,000.
Speaker 1:So you you lost $320.
Speaker 3:But I didn't. What I did was invest that. So the long class, one, wasn't delivering the results for enough people. So in the long run, someone will be like, you know what? People aren't actually taking this class and then doing stuff with it and then they're gonna stop coming to my class.
Speaker 3:Also, that's from a purely like mercenary standpoint, but the fact is that is not something that makes me happy. I would rather have no money than know that the vast majority of people who give me money are going to just be burning it, basically. I mean, I had the money, yay. Maybe they would have blown it on a flat screen TV. But if they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, if they're not achieving what they want, then I don't really wanna be in that business.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it was an investment in my ethics, but also the really long class was killing me to keep running it. The endurance required for making new content and hassling people on the email list and answering all their questions, most of which were, by the way, the questions at heart were, Gee, I don't really want to do this and I don't want to admit this is the truth, so I'm going ask a long winded question and wait for you to tell me that my situation is special. That is exhausting. Because I don't like to lie. Don't, I don't lie.
Speaker 3:And so I have to very carefully counsel each individual person and say, okay, tough love, you're making stuff up here, you're going to hurt yourself constantly and it's like being a therapist and I couldn't do it. So we're talking five months of class, five months of that, five months of trying to tweak things as going to get more people active and nagging and all that stuff. Not manageable. So it had to stop for us as well as for the results for the students. So this year, we killed all the old content.
Speaker 3:We made, I think it was, this was the third boot camp that we did. All new videos, every single one was really short, action oriented, live workshop, it's two days, Charge less money. It's $1,500 instead of 2,450 for the long class. And then we sold two boot camps and then we started doing an additional like expansion pack that was four weeks of specific guided exercise and we're actually in that right now. And that was an upgrade people could pay for if they wanted more hand holding because that was a lot of, they wanted more practice.
Speaker 3:A lot of people said that they wanted that after the bootcamp. So we're doing that now. We're getting it back up there. So the last boot we sold, I think 12, I think 12 seats to the exercise program on top of 29 seats to the boot camp, so I think our gross receipts were more like 55 this time. So we're getting back up there.
Speaker 3:Revenue wise, but in a much more sustainable way. Much more sustainable. People are taking it and producing, like I think Sean has used some of the things he learned in the boot camp to make more money with his book. And one of our students from the boot camp in June just wrote me an email the other day that he was up to $2,500 a month in recurring revenue with his product that he completely came up with after the bootcamp. That's the fastest results we've seen.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:So more action, even though with less money, in the end that'll work more money and then we're going fill in the funnel with some more info products that are like self guided that people can just up and buy.
Speaker 1:And the difference psychologically for you as a business owner, when people are actually using your product and getting results, even that alone is probably worth it. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's nothing that drags you down more than, like I said, looking at that query, and every SaaS business owner I talk to, they all run that query, and they're just looking at these folks that are like, half my customer base is just paying me every month and not you know, using the product. It's a really hard place to be in.
Speaker 3:That's pretty universal though. I mean, I hang out in like info product circles, I hang out in software circles, books, educators of all kinds, technical, whatever. And that is true of everything. And one, it makes me really super glad I decided not to be a teacher, like a real one. Because of course the same thing is true of kids as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But also, you have two choices when you realize that. You can either become and admit that you're the asshole who takes people's money for nothing.
Speaker 1:That
Speaker 3:fucks you over, like ethically. You become that person, you accept it, and you then you start to act really act like it. You're like, okay, whatever. These people are paying me money, whatever, who cares? Fuck them, they're never gonna use it, can just do whatever I want.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I've seen a lot of people go down that route.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you're listening and you, for example, don't send monthly invoices to your customers who pay you monthly, you're being that asshole. I'm going to say that right now. I've heard that some people who follow my writing have a chat room and they get in there and they talk about how they don't send invoices. Someone reported this to me, you're being a fucker. That is unethical.
Speaker 3:So you can either have contempt for your customer and then go, whatever, it doesn't matter. Or you can become an ethical person and sit down and do your damnedest to make sure that you deliver value for every customer, if possible. It's not possible, but you can know that you've done your absolute damnedest. And then you can sleep at night. And for me, that involves giving up money.
Speaker 3:I sleep, like, I mean, metaphorically, I sleep like a baby.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's such a good point. I think the idea of some, I think what you're really getting at is when you're a business owner, you have to sometimes make hard decisions.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And people don't realize that. The funny thing is, whenever I've I mean, I've done both. Honestly, sometimes I make bad decisions and sometimes I make good decisions. But when I face the music and make good decisions that are ethical and that have the best, my audience's best interest in mind, man, it's a lot of work and it's hard and all that stuff, but it's really encouraging because then you're hearing from real people that are actually really being impacted, that this actually means something to them in a really tangible way.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, also. That's why I say that being in business or getting better at business is about becoming better as a human being because it's still humanity and it's still human relations and commerce is a human action and if you don't make that effort, you're going to regret it. Yeah. And that's way harder than developing software because you can just sit in your cave and write code and see if your test turned green and all that good stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly. And On ambiguous.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is the thing. This is the thing because it's so easy at the beginning when you're thinking about a project or when you haven't launched it yet or when you're just writing code or whatever, you don't realize, like, the real nitty gritty, like, in the trenches, you're actually running something with people that are paying, like, that is it's hard. Like it's hard doing all that stuff. The technical part can be hard or cannot be hard.
Speaker 1:Like that's a thing unto itself. But like actually having a relationship with people that you're saying you're going to help them and they're paying you money to solve a problem for them, that's hard because there's just all sorts of stuff that can come up in that, right? Have to swallow your own pride every single day. You're gonna get humbled all the time. You know, like that's like, know, like David Hanami or Hansen, you know, when their servers go down, he has to like no matter what kind of rock star people think he is, he's the one that has to write the email to all the customers and say, You know, I'm really sorry.
Speaker 1:Like, there's something very humbling about having to go to people and say, I'm really sorry I let you down. Doesn't matter what people might think of you on the Ruby community or whatever. It's hard work being a business owner.
Speaker 3:It is hard work, and I agree with everything you said, except I wanna point out to you that you used the phrase have to or had to. And the answer is no. You don't have to. No one has to. David Hennemeyer Hansen does not have to write customers.
Speaker 3:He does not have to respond to their tweets on Twitter. Lots of companies don't give a shit. Yeah. He chooses to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is
Speaker 3:infinitely more work than saying I have to do it. Which is why people lie to themselves and say, well, I have to start a business blah blah blah. They're trying to trick themselves into think it's an obligation so that they can avoid the emotional effort of choosing and then following through on that choice. It's not about logic, because emotions are still really important when someone has their emotional centers of their brain destroyed, they can't even decide what shoes to put on in the morning. Like you're screwed.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But the question is what's the evidence? Yes. What is the evidence? So people think, oh, if I do this, like with my job, I'll end up on the street, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, what's the evidence?
Speaker 3:It's like, have you even tried to see how hard it would be to get another job? No, this doesn't apply universally. There are lots of people in The U. S. Who would be absolutely messed up if their business failed.
Speaker 3:But those of us listening, software designers, developers, we are like the most in demand profession right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So if you think these things, if you indulge that fear, kind of ridiculous fear, instead of looking at what it would actually be like if you failed, then that is being self indulgent and not very adult. That's what, you have to look for the evidence for People are like, I hear this all the time, developers don't buy things. I wanted to serve jobs for developers, but developers don't buy things. It's like, are you kidding me? Have you ever heard of GitHub?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Text me.
Speaker 1:One, and only honestly book
Speaker 3:has sold like 200,000 copies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Amy, I really do appreciate, like, I love talking to you and getting just this unfiltered stuff, and
Speaker 3:it's really -Have I ever filtered?
Speaker 1:I don't know. It really is helpful. Thanks for doing this chat and thanks for doing it live. Thanks for everyone that asks questions as well.
Speaker 3:Sean Fiorito asked a question which was really more like showing one of his cheat sheets which is sketchingwithcss.com. Fiorito on Twitter.
Speaker 1:Yes, he just posted that now. That's a good sketchingwithcss.com and then he's got a sample chaptercheatsheet. Html.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:You can can check that out.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Audio is totally a great way to share URL.
Speaker 1:I think I think we got it in though. I think it was good.
Speaker 3:We did. We did.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Thanks so much, Amy.
Speaker 3:Thank you. A
Speaker 2:big thanks to Amy Hoy for being well, being Amy. Nothing held back, just real hard advice for product people. And you can check her out on Twitter at Amy Hoy. You can also take a look at 35hundred. That's 30x500.com.
Speaker 2:Her blog is unicornfree.com and freckle is at let'sfreckle.com. Also, I'm writing a new book right now called marketing for developers. You can sign up on my website to get updates. Justinjackson.ca/marketingfordevelopers. When you do that, you'll get a sample PDF as well, and you can track my progress with the book.
Speaker 2:That's marketing for developers at justinjackson.ca/marketingfor developers. Thanks again. Next episode, we're going to interview Amy's partner, Alex Hillman, who is also one of the founders of Indy Hall, the coworking space in Philadelphia, and just launched his new product, his own product called GroupBuzz io. So stay tuned for that next episode. Probably publish that in a few weeks.
Speaker 2:See you then.