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Two founders talk about how to build software businesses that are meant to last. Each episode includes a deep dive into a different topic related to starting, growing, and sustaining a healthy business.
00:03.40
Rick
What's up this week, Tyler?
00:03.63
tylerking
What's up?
00:05.56
Rick
I thought it was, I saw it at two and I thought it was going to go to one and then it went to three and I was like, Oh crap. I was supposed to say something.
00:11.33
tylerking
Hmm. Hmm. The countdown failed us. Uh, yeah. Hey, what's going on?
00:15.88
Rick
Um, uh, not much. What's new in your world?
00:19.33
tylerking
I, uh, can finally say publicly that, uh, Shelley is pregnant. I'm going to be a dad.
00:26.04
Rick
Do you know the gender?
00:27.79
tylerking
Yes. It's going to be a girl girl, dad.
00:29.20
Rick
Whoo hoo. Girl dad.
00:32.14
tylerking
yeah Yeah, I love this. Everyone's like, do you do you know the sex of the baby? And I say girl, and then everyone goes, oh, but if I said boy, they would do the exact same thing. I love a question where the answer has no impact on your reaction to it.
00:46.42
Rick
Oh yeah. And just correct me. I was supposed to say what was due to the sex, not the gender. Correct.
00:51.77
tylerking
Yeah, you're canceled, Rick.
00:52.01
Rick
That's the, yeah. Thank you for reminding me of that. Uh, I admit to say sex.
00:55.88
tylerking
Although, yeah. Although girl would be gender, female would be sex as I understand it. So we're both canceled.
01:02.36
Rick
So you're a female dad.
01:02.49
tylerking
Okay. I'm a female dad.
01:04.72
Rick
All right, cool.
01:06.02
tylerking
Um, yeah, science is amazing.
01:07.61
Rick
How far along?
01:07.99
tylerking
They just do the little blood test out of Shelley's arm and can tell the sex somehow. I don't understand how this works, but it's crazy.
01:14.10
Rick
What?
01:14.58
tylerking
How far along? Yeah. I should know the answer to that. I think 13, she doesn't listen 13 weeks. I don't know.
01:20.07
Rick
Nice.
01:20.38
tylerking
Something like that.
01:21.17
Rick
That's halfway, right?
01:21.78
tylerking
Um,
01:23.90
Rick
A little, a little, a little under halfway.
01:24.04
tylerking
Is it? No. I think it's about to enter the second trimester.
01:27.97
Rick
Okay.
01:28.18
tylerking
I could be, I could be wrong.
01:28.81
Rick
Um, you can tell I I'm really, um, anyway, uh, that's awesome.
01:29.54
tylerking
I'm, I'm going to be an absent father here.
01:35.04
Rick
And, uh, congratulations and welcome to the ride of your life.
01:37.25
tylerking
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Well, you've got, uh, more, so I'm, Shelly's extremely morning sick all the time. So, um, she's, we'll see how she feels later, but she's like one and done. There's no way I'm doing this again. and
01:50.74
Rick
but Oh, that's what they all say.
01:55.13
tylerking
Mm hmm.
01:55.40
Rick
That's what they all say. um Well, ah any any like any life changes so far, or is this just like a kind of like an idea still to you?
01:56.72
tylerking
but
02:05.97
tylerking
Yeah, I'd say mostly an idea in that. um Like I'm this way with a lot of stuff, like if I have a big trip coming up and people are like, oh, next month you're going to Japan, are you excited? I'm like, I'm not going to think about it until right before it happens and I have to pack. ah So, yeah, I'm, you know,
02:23.53
tylerking
Intellectually, I'm like, life is about to change, but emotionally I'm kind of just like, everything's the same as it's always been, if if that makes sense.
02:31.11
Rick
No, it makes no sense.
02:32.74
tylerking
Um, one, one funny side effect of this, you know, we've been doing this house remodel for like, I think we were supposed to be done a year ago. It's it's been like two years since we decided to do it.
02:43.64
tylerking
And at the time we had not decided whether or not we wanted to have kids. So, uh, the original plan was basically to turn our house into a cocktail bar and then like, While the plans were being made, we were like, can you take some of the bar elements out of this and make it more of a kid type of thing?
03:01.54
Rick
Oh, it's funny how like preferences change.
03:05.18
tylerking
Yep.
03:05.85
Rick
ah Well, that's just the beginning.
03:07.95
tylerking
Uh-huh. I know.
03:09.36
Rick
so Soon you're going to have a minivan.
03:11.82
tylerking
I cannot wait. I love minivans. I'm the world's biggest minivan fan.
03:16.33
Rick
You have to check out this minivan that Kia has. It is cool. like It's basically a box, and it's got so much functional space in terms of how the compartments open up.
03:22.10
tylerking
Yeah.
03:28.99
Rick
I forget the model name, but it's totally worth
03:30.17
tylerking
Are you thinking about a minivan?
03:31.80
Rick
Well, it was just one of this, it doesn't have four wheel drive. Uh, so it doesn't, it would not work here. Um, but like I went, when we were, when we were car shopping for a new family car, and we looked at Kia's and that car was like, if that had four wheel drive, I would have been pushing for that just for like, just pure functionality.
03:48.66
tylerking
Yeah, minivans are the most functional. There are so many cup holders, so many screens everywhere. You can control the air conditioning in like 15 different places. Love a minivan.
03:56.79
Rick
Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
04:00.63
tylerking
So yeah, I've got that you know starting to think through parental leave and stuff like that. um
04:06.56
Rick
Will you take an extended leave? like what How will you think about that?
04:09.67
tylerking
Yeah, I think so. So our you know you know it's very important to me that I follow all the same rules as everyone else. And that A means I don't take more parental leave than other people. But also, I think it would be a good look for me to take the full amount. So i selfishly, I want to. But also, um i don't think I don't want to set the standard of like,
04:29.86
tylerking
don't take parental leave. um so Our normal policy is you get 12 weeks paid and you can extend it with up to 12 weeks unpaid. I'm planning on taking the 12 weeks paid, but not all at once.
04:40.70
tylerking
I'm probably going to like take a few weeks and then drip it off the rest of the year.
04:44.11
Rick
I think that's the way to do it. Uh, I think like the there's the first two or three weeks is like pretty precious. Um, and then it's like, I would have, I would have, I would love to just like work less, but work cause the work is nice.
04:56.82
tylerking
honey
04:57.28
Rick
Like you get kind of in the getting back in a routine is, is good. Um, after, for, after a few weeks, in my opinion.
05:05.15
tylerking
Yeah. Well, and a constraint I have, so Shelley's got very, cause she teaches at WashU. So she's got the summer off the due dates, April, she gets like medical leave through between the baby being born through summer, then gets summer off and then gets parental leave that fall. But then she wants to, so she could have a lot of time off. She wants to teach one class that fall just to like not go crazy. Um,
05:31.80
tylerking
So i'm I'm going to take two days off a week during the fall semester so that all I'll be the primary parent for those two days and she'll cover three, but that eats up a pretty decent chunk of it.
05:42.47
tylerking
So it'll kind of be three weeks off, three, four weeks off. Then I think one day off a week for the whole summer and then two days off for the fall. And that gets us through the end of 2025.
05:52.23
Rick
That's great. Yeah, that's great.
05:54.70
tylerking
Yeah. And also I acknowledge the classic quotes.
05:54.93
Rick
Love it.
05:58.30
tylerking
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. So we'll see how this all goes.
06:00.61
Rick
Yeah. Well, I just hope, hope everything goes, um, in a healthy way. That's all you can ask for.
06:06.21
tylerking
Yeah. Well, thank you.
06:07.88
Rick
Yeah.
06:08.55
tylerking
Um, what's going on with you?
06:10.42
Rick
Um, well, I'll just, uh, I'll wrap up the personal sort of health updates with, uh, I don't know if I mentioned, I mean, one of my big goals this week, this year is to get back into like but daily. You know, fitness health routine, one of the big blockers for me since Oliver was born has been my ankle, which I so like really like messed up like four weeks after he was born playing pickup basketball when I was like sleep deprived, which is stupid.
06:33.93
tylerking
Yeah.
06:35.99
Rick
Um, anyway, I've started PT. I've gone to see an orthopedic surgeon. I'm going to go see a podiatrist. It's looking likely that I'm gonna have to get surgery. Um,
06:45.07
tylerking
That's what you want though, right?
06:46.89
Rick
I want this to be, uh, I want to get my like workout routines back. And if I, if, if I could do that without surgical intervention and just maybe risk some, you know, recurrent and or recurring injury and then get surgery later, like I would do that.
07:01.24
tylerking
Hmm.
07:02.21
Rick
Um, if it, but, but if it starts becoming this like thing, I'm just gonna have to live with, I would, I will go for surgery because I would but rather have a chance at getting back to what I was. Um, or at least like just being able to do physical activity.
07:15.98
Rick
Like skiing hurts, man.
07:16.32
tylerking
Yeah.
07:17.02
Rick
like going ah Like I can ski, but like it hurts. ah So um yeah, so i' I want it to be fixed. ah PT is not doing much so far, except just like them going, man, your ankle's really jacked up.
07:33.78
Rick
ah can I refer you to ah an ankle specialist? Which is, the it's funny, the orthopedic surgeon sent me the PT and the PT is like, why aren't you, why are you here? Like go back to the surgeon. So um but anyway, i'm I'm making progress. It feels good to make progress, but it's also like,
07:50.05
Rick
One of those things where it's like, I have no light at the end of the tunnel. And um then there's a timing element. Like do I want to, i but I bought an icon pass this year.
07:55.21
tylerking
Yeah.
07:57.08
Rick
I was planning on skiing more this, this winter, even if it's painful, like do I, do I delay this until after ski season? There's all sorts of things that I'm trying to think through.
08:05.41
tylerking
Yeah. Yeah. The timing is tough. Do you, do you have a sense of like what the recovery window would be or anything like that?
08:11.00
Rick
It's four weeks, uh, like off no, no weight bearing minimum.
08:15.47
tylerking
And then, and then probably some kind of PT ramp up from there.
08:15.48
Rick
And then, and and then. Yeah, five months to like probably like physical, like what I would do, what I'm doing today.
08:24.70
tylerking
Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, that's tough. I say you live in Utah.
08:29.00
Rick
So yeah.
08:30.01
tylerking
I gotta go scan.
08:31.54
Rick
Yeah. So anyway, it's one of those things where I'm, I'm, I'm doing what I need to do. Um, but I can't make it go faster than I'm making it go right now.
08:38.88
tylerking
Yeah. Yeah. That's shame.
08:40.73
Rick
Um, work on the work front. Uh, I have a big announcement, uh, for a CRM, uh, uh, entrepreneur.
08:48.03
tylerking
Mm-hmm.
08:49.03
Rick
JD, our partner at leg up health has been using a spreadsheet to track his prospecting activities for the past two and a half years. He has now converted that spreadsheet to a CRM workflow.
09:00.77
Rick
This is a big moment.
09:01.58
tylerking
Very nice.
09:02.59
Rick
Yes. So.
09:03.28
tylerking
It would be especially nice if you'd chosen the right CRM, but that's OK. That's OK.
09:07.58
Rick
Yeah. Not only do we not use listening serum, we use two CRMs, none of which are listening. serum So anyway, he's using pipe drive for his workflows. We've connected it to hub spot. So that's a bi-directional sync between pipe drive and hub spot, which will enable, uh, uh, basically us to send marketing, uh, uh, communications to the, the prospecting list he's been building over the last couple of years ahead of open enrollment.
09:31.91
Rick
So.
09:31.98
tylerking
What's the reason to not just have everything in HubSpot? Is it just because you don't want to have the switching costs right now?
09:37.83
Rick
Yeah. Switching costs for JD. He has a lot of workflows built. Um, I think long-term probably moving to HubSpot makes sense. Um, I don't see what pipe drive can do the HubSpot doesn't. Um, but yeah, switching costs.
09:49.16
tylerking
Yeah. Okay. Cool. This is such a, uh, a real thing, but so discouraging for me in like a magic, like one of the big challenges of selling CRM is just getting someone to use it is so hard, even if they've evaluated them all and they've picked us.
09:51.39
Rick
yep
10:05.86
tylerking
They're like, you know, you get off the call at the end of the call. They're like, Oh, I love you guys. I'm going to go with you. They put down their credit card. They start paying. And then six months later, they haven't even started using it. And if someone as sophisticated as JD took two and a half years to actually start using the CRM that you'd been paying for and had data in for so long, it's just so hard to sell this product.
10:27.50
Rick
Yep.
10:29.06
tylerking
Okay.
10:29.08
Rick
Yep.
10:29.87
tylerking
That's all.
10:31.51
Rick
Yep. Um, do you want to, do you want to talk about that?
10:33.46
tylerking
I've got more on that for later today, but we can. we Well, uh, if that doesn't set, you don't have any like natural segues there.
10:42.18
Rick
and No, I was, I mean, I was just like, but I just realized like I buried the lead for this episode. Uh, I mean, baby, your baby's probably even more important than this, but, um, uh, like I've had a record month last month.
10:50.31
tylerking
man Oh, wow.
10:54.85
Rick
Like we had like 13, uh, almost 13 and a half thousand in monthly recurring revenue, which is like, like our, like rec, like up 30%.
11:02.84
tylerking
Wow.
11:06.77
Rick
It's almost, it's double what we had in January this year, almost triple. Um, and it's up 30% month over month.
11:10.53
tylerking
That's crazy
11:12.52
Rick
And we had $5,000 in profit, most of which will be paid out to JD and like a profit distribution, but like it's a, I mean, we're growing.
11:20.39
tylerking
so I know you, you said um MRR, most of it is recurring, but I know it's also this weird, like with with health insurance for people who don't know, like the, the insurance companies, as I understand it, have all these weird, like you hit a threshold and get a bonus.
11:34.18
tylerking
And there's like, it's not actually, so its it's most of it's consistent month to month, but not all of it is. Do you have a sense of like what the baseline kind of um MRR would be?
11:42.81
Rick
It is that like it, there's very little, it, it ever, it washes out because, um, it's all kind of like timing based and there's no, there were very few, but there were no bonuses paid.
11:43.74
tylerking
Okay.
11:51.59
Rick
So, um, it's, it's pretty much that, uh, at least.
11:52.30
tylerking
Okay. So 13 K per month going forward.
11:56.92
Rick
Yeah.
11:57.58
tylerking
Yeah. Awesome.
11:59.17
Rick
Pretty cool.
11:59.47
tylerking
You said that's double from the beginning of the year.
12:01.52
Rick
Yeah. We made $5,800 in January. Good revenue.
12:06.24
tylerking
That's wild. Cause I feel like in all of our monthly partner meetings. There's, I mean, it, you know, we're, we're all constructive people, but I feel like the general tone is like, man, why, like it's so hard to grow during the off season.
12:21.54
tylerking
I'd say doubling is suggests easy growth. Like where's the disconnect here?
12:26.83
Rick
No, no. Okay. The disconnect is January does not include a lot of the sales that were made in, um, this in the last open enrollment.
12:34.01
tylerking
Oh, in last year's open enrollment.
12:35.55
Rick
And so like the real comparison is probably March, um, which, which jumped up to like, let me, I haven't actually looked that up right now. I think it was like more like AK. Um, so it's, it does.
12:44.21
tylerking
Still that's like huge growth for to to not even have like the the main part of the year.
12:46.26
Rick
Yeah.
12:48.63
Rick
the The number, the run rate that we're like kind of building upon is like, we're, we're saying we were at 10 K we're trying to get, well yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's not true. We're trying to get to like 16 K because we want to get to 200 K ARR.
13:00.14
tylerking
Yeah. But I mean, adding 3k during open enrollment this year, I don't want to like counter chickens before their hatch, but.
13:04.75
Rick
Yeah. Yeah. So we've, we basically just need to add three more K in order to get to our goal for the year.
13:10.25
tylerking
Wow. That's awesome. Now I, and that's ah my memory is it's like 200,000 ARR is the kind of base goal. And then the stretch goal was what twice that getting 400.
13:21.76
Rick
Uh, yeah, getting to 400.
13:23.92
tylerking
So not, not that, I mean, hitting, hitting the base goal is obviously a huge accomplishment. I'm not trying to diminish that, but so like, it'll be somewhere between those two, right?
13:30.01
Rick
Yeah, you are.
13:33.29
Rick
Yeah. So March was 9,000 in revenue, uh, which is, which is more representative of the run rate. Um, and, uh, you know, we're at 13 three now and what, you know, if we could get to 20 K by, you know, kind of February at March of next year, that would be really, really great.
13:44.68
tylerking
So like a, yeah, cool. Love it. I still don't know that I have an answer to the question of why it feels like it's so painful. And then when you zoom out and look at it, it looks like things are going great, but I guess it's just like emotions are, uh, hard to control.
14:08.90
Rick
Well, I do think that the there was stagnation there for a few months, um, you know, between March and let's just say like July and August.
14:19.69
Rick
And then we started to hit, get some wins. Um, and those wins now are starting to hit.
14:22.86
tylerking
Yeah, but my memory of of how you've described it is that the, the winds from like July, you actually can trace back to the work that was being done in March and April. So like it felt like there is stagnation, but actually everything was going according to plan. It sounds like.
14:39.06
Rick
That's fair. Yeah, that actually is really, really fair. I have no, no, no good explanation for that.
14:46.04
tylerking
Well, I'm mostly saying this out loud as, so, Hey, I think this is a thing a lot of entrepreneurs go through where like emotions do not always reflect reality. And, um, maybe the same thing happens next year where in April, it kind of feels like, man, okay, we had this, we had a great 2024.
15:03.95
tylerking
did well in open enrollment and then things just completely plateaued. And if that happens, we need to remind ourselves, well, people just aren't buying a lot of health insurance in April. Let's keep putting the work in and probably in July, August, September, we'll start to see returns.
15:16.55
Rick
I think that's true. The only, the only caveat that I think was unique this year that is like, I think you're right about next year. What was unique about this year is this was the first year we really entered the group health insurance space and started targeting business owners.
15:27.25
tylerking
Hmm.
15:29.83
Rick
And we really didn't know what to expect. And like JD's gone through, I mean, ah shout out to JD, like he's gone. One of the hardest things about being an entrepreneur. in my opinion, is building the the train tracks as you're going.
15:42.25
Rick
like but what the new what the hire When the entrepreneur makes the hire to do a role that the entrepreneur's paid the way for, like there's there's like a playbook. right and it's like i'm goingnna teach like It's going to be okay.
15:50.73
tylerking
Mhmm.
15:53.80
Rick
I know how to answer all the questions. You don't know how to answer all the questions, but when you can't answer them, just come to me and I'll ahll help you.
15:56.02
tylerking
Mhmm.
15:59.97
Rick
There's no playbook for an entrepreneur who's like building that, unless they have a really good mentor, like which is rare, because then you're competing with your mentor, like what's happening? So he's building the playbook as he goes, and he's gone through so many learnings related to like and like payroll systems.
16:15.17
Rick
and Uniqueness with insurance companies uniqueness with group health insurance the buying cycle ah how to earn trust ah how to how to lose trust. um i'll you know you know Managing a b2b buyer versus a consumer buyer like there's all sorts of things that he's had to go through and i think there's been a lot of anxiety associate there's learnings that.
16:34.65
Rick
Um, he's felt, I've felt, um, we're kind of over coming those, um, to a degree. Now we're going through renewals for the first time. Um, which is a new thing, like group health insurance renewals, but like next year we should, I don't think next year we're going to be in this situation where we're going like, let's try something new.
16:44.69
tylerking
Yeah.
16:50.99
Rick
I think it's going to be, okay. Let's, we've got the basis built. We've got the base built. Let's just build the base.
16:58.22
tylerking
Yeah, well, that's awesome.
17:00.63
Rick
Yeah. I'm excited.
17:03.16
tylerking
Yeah, that's cool. um Yeah, so we just ah made a new hire.
17:04.59
Rick
Um, tell tell me what's going on in your work world.
17:10.38
tylerking
We hired a CRM coach after a pretty grueling interview process. um
17:17.11
Rick
what where's what's What's the background?
17:17.53
tylerking
i'm
17:20.23
tylerking
ah What's the person's background?
17:22.68
Rick
Yeah. Like what's what's the profile?
17:24.93
tylerking
Yeah, so we. Uh, well, let me back up and say the whole interviewing process and then we'll get to who we ended up hiring.
17:31.45
Rick
Hmm.
17:32.58
tylerking
But, um, we kind of had two main channels this time. One was referrals and one was doing outreach to people on LinkedIn. Um, just like if you pay for recruit or light or whatever it's called on LinkedIn, you can go.
17:46.69
tylerking
message a bunch of people. We got a good number of applicants, because you know it's one position, pretty targeted. if If you put a job listing on like ZipRecruiter, you get 100 crappy applications for every one good one. But if you called outreach to people you found on LinkedIn, um it's a much higher quality. So we we got, like I think, 25 applications, and then we cut it. We were like, OK, that's good. That's that's enough. andd say I'd say half were referrals from employees. Half were these LinkedIn outreach people.
18:16.13
tylerking
Lots of different backgrounds and stuff, but you know mostly we look for ah people. I'd say the um the most promising type of person is someone with like a career a prior career in a service adjacent industry, like not not customer service necessarily, although it could be that, but like where it's not a career. So like a barista, a school teacher. like A teacher could be a career, but they burn out so often. ah you know Something like that.
18:45.17
tylerking
um Anyway, whittled it down to six people for the final ah round of the interview to like bring them in person and do a real interview with them. And then ultimately landed on one whose background is kind of in education administration.
18:58.13
tylerking
So again, one of those, you know, kind of adjacent to, it's not customer service, but like there's a lot of helping people and problem solving and stuff.
19:08.44
tylerking
And then um teaching.
19:08.89
Rick
Teaching.
19:10.11
tylerking
Yeah, but yeah, she's not a teacher herself, but um Yes. In that environment. And then the, I'm really excited about this. out You know, every time CRM coaches get 20% time. So one day a week they can work on something else at the company. And I like, there's a thing that I've been wanting for a while that we'll see where where it goes, but she's at least expressed interest in it, which is.
19:32.37
tylerking
I guess for lack of a better term, like operations, but like we don't need a full-time HR person. We don't need a full-time bookkeeper, a full-time accountant or any of that. Even combine those all together, we don't need a full-time person.
19:43.33
tylerking
So it's we've never been able to justify it, but nobody wants to spend their 20% time on that stuff, but maybe she does. So um but I'm pretty excited.
19:50.40
Rick
Yeah. Admin. She's an ad administration keyword.
19:52.46
tylerking
Yep. Yeah, yeah, correct. So, uh, anyway, and it's just always so much fun hiring a new person.
19:57.03
Rick
Sorry.
19:58.94
tylerking
she She hasn't started yet. So we'll, you know, it's just anticipation right now. I know earlier in this, I was like, Oh, I'm not really emotionally excited about having a kid, but I'm excited about hiring a serum coach. What does that say?
20:09.46
Rick
yeah Yeah. Well, ah congratulations.
20:12.89
tylerking
Anyway. Uh, yeah. So thank you. Um, so yeah, that's done. I guess there's not much else to say there, but that's been occupying my mind.
20:22.45
Rick
Have you done hiring for a while or any more hires?
20:26.50
tylerking
Yeah, I think we're probably done unless someone leaves. Um, yeah, hiring is so, we probably don't do it nearly as efficiently as it could be done, but it's so time consuming for us that it's like, uh, yeah, we don't, I don't want to hire anyone else.
20:42.28
tylerking
Well, sorry, I take it back. We need to hire coding fellows for now. They're not hires. They're not technically employees, but like we need to go recruit coding fellows for next summer, but that's kind of a different thing.
20:51.75
Rick
Yeah, that's different.
20:53.07
tylerking
Um, so yeah. The team hopefully will be a little more stable. Like I mentioned, we had three, three people leave. Well, announced that they're leaving. They're all still at the company right now, but they're leaving at some point, uh, this year they let them. So hopefully we've got more stability going forward.
21:10.24
Rick
Nice. um And do you, do you, um, any, any updates on like, uh, marketing and sales?
21:18.35
tylerking
Uh, yeah. So I want to dive into a specific part of our marketing, um, in just a second, but you're probably just describing like growth in general.
21:27.96
Rick
Mm-hmm. Yep.
21:28.80
tylerking
Um, yeah, it's been most, mostly we have plateaued art. So now that everyone's on the same pricing plan, I prefer to look at user growth rather than revenue growth.
21:39.83
tylerking
and they're They're the same thing, right? It's a one-to-one relationship, but, uh, our user growth has been. So when we raised prices on our old users, we expected a decent amount of churn. We lost. I think 300 users over the the couple months after that, it did last longer than I expected. We, we continued, we had a third month of down, um, like, like losing users, not meaningful, but you can think of it as like a little worse than plateaued this month. We're back to growing again, average it all together. My read on it is things are just fine. I don't know.
22:16.04
tylerking
ah We did have a pretty tragic A-B test mishap happen.
22:22.38
Rick
What happened?
22:23.31
tylerking
Well, OK, so it's really hard to run in. When you use something like Webflow, where you don't control the back end, it's really hard to track to do A-B tests well.
22:34.72
tylerking
um There's all these tools, like we use one called Optibase, O-P-T-I base. um that it lets you like change what's on the website and make two different variations just through like a JavaScript snippet. But because they don't have access to our backend, the like conversion event that it tracks is like, did they click on a button basically, right? And clicking on a button, isn't necessarily that useful. Cause like the buying journey is longer than clicking on a button. So for example, we have a live demo, you can go to our homepage, you can click the live demo and get a real Lessening Serum account to play around in without signing up.
23:11.29
tylerking
That decreases the number of free trial signups because if, if you do the demo and it's not a good fit for you, you're not going to sign up for a free trial, but it actually increase it.
23:21.55
tylerking
We were ran this AB b test a long time ago. It increases the number of people who end up paying us because the people who do sign up for the free trial are much more qualified.
23:26.46
Rick
Hmm. Yep.
23:31.36
tylerking
But to to know that, you have to be able to connect which variation they saw on the home page with 30 days later did they actually pay us. um None of these tools, or I shouldn't say none of them, but it's very hard to get these tools to actually track that.
23:46.75
tylerking
have you experience You can relate to the problem I'm describing here.
23:46.82
Rick
Yeah.
23:49.64
Rick
Yeah. And I'm not, I would say like this type of conversion optimization is not something I'm very strong at. Like I, I focus more on the point, like, like, like is the form getting visited by the right people and then is the form being completed by the right people?
24:04.01
Rick
Like, like that's yeah.
24:04.38
tylerking
Yeah. And for a lot of things, that's fine, right? If you're just like which headline gets them to click on the free trial button, that's probably, there's probably not second order effects there, but do you show the live demo or not there?
24:07.57
Rick
yeah
24:15.80
tylerking
There are.
24:16.49
Rick
Yep.
24:17.38
tylerking
and Anyway, as a result of this, we have all these pay. We, most of our traffic is organic. It's just people googling, less knowing serum, I guess word of mouth or whatever, but we have like, you know, 10%, 15% of our signups come in from paid.
24:31.79
tylerking
whether it's like ah Google AdWords or Captera, some kind of paid channel, where we get to direct them to the exact website the the exact yeah URL we want. For weird technical reasons that I won't get into unless you want me to, it is much easier to A-B test those pages than it is our homepage, because we don't want to like fuck up the SEO on our homepage, but we don't mind fucking up the SEO on these pages that
24:52.63
Rick
Mm hmm.
24:53.17
tylerking
no one's actually finding organically. So we ran an A-B test where we changed our our homepage to a a pretty different thing and tested it for these ad clicks. And it did better than our default one. But we don't really have good A-B testing set up on our homepage that can track beyond just that initial click. So we our normal approach is we test it with the PPC. And then if it works, we just put it on our homepage and assume it works there.
25:20.61
tylerking
Because they were the exact same page otherwise.
25:22.48
Rick
That makes sense.
25:22.65
tylerking
There's really no difference.
25:23.67
Rick
Yeah, you make it makes sense.
25:25.40
tylerking
So we did this. And for the first time in years, we had an A B test that actually showed like meaningfully better results. And so we applied it to the homepage and just didn't think about it for a while. And then like three months later, ah Eunice and I were looking at the free trial report we have.
25:38.77
tylerking
And we were like, man, our free trials are like. down like 20% from where they normally are. What's going on? And we tracked it back and it was like the day we made that change to our homepage, the free trial started ticking down. And then we switched it back to the old one and they started immediately ticking back. So i I can't prove that it was this AB test, but ah for like three months or so there are, we were losing a meaningful number of free trial signups because this new homepage was not performing well.
26:08.06
Rick
Oh man, I don't know. Like what is it worth? Like even like, can you just like, the like, what's the upside of experimenting here? Like is it, is it we' even worth spending energy on this or should you and should you focus elsewhere? Like what's your thought on that?
26:23.39
tylerking
My thought is, ah well, it depends on what you mean by focus elsewhere. like What I want is more traffic.
26:29.92
Rick
More traffic.
26:30.89
tylerking
Yes.
26:31.12
Rick
Yeah.
26:32.09
tylerking
ah That's what I want. I have no idea how to do it. I don't know anyone that I trust that I can hire to help with it. ah We've tried a bunch of stuff. it's all It's not that we haven't tried.
26:43.42
tylerking
It's that we've tried and failed. and
26:47.26
tylerking
But we have a pretty good pipeline of people coming in. like This isn't a 0 to 1 problem.
26:50.30
Rick
Yeah.
26:51.90
tylerking
We have a lot of people coming to our website. A good number of them are converting. It does seem like you know if we could get like literally a 2% improvement, I don't mean 2% as in 2 percentage points.
27:02.94
tylerking
i mean two two like Sorry, the language here is always these very clunky. If our conversion rate is 1% right now, I mean if we can go to 1.02%, not go from 1 to 3, you know what I mean?
27:15.53
Rick
No.
27:16.53
tylerking
ah That would have a big impact.
27:18.82
Rick
Yeah.
27:22.79
Rick
Leverage over optimization.
27:23.13
tylerking
You don't agree.
27:24.24
Rick
Yeah. I mean, I just, I just feel like all this energy going into, I think you, I think you're hitting diminishing returns and potentially negative returns, uh, on this based on this learning. Um, and it's like, maybe you just like, so like leave it and go try to focus on another area, like increasing traffic or.
27:40.64
tylerking
I literally have zero ideas on how to increase traffic though.
27:42.89
Rick
Yeah, that's frustrating.
27:44.75
tylerking
Um, except the thing we're going to talk about later, which is this forms project that I've been talking about.
27:48.58
Rick
Are you writing blog posts every day?
27:51.19
tylerking
Uh, yeah. I mean, not mad. I don't know if it's every day. We're not writing the type of, but we're not writing like tofu. We're not writing how to improve your sales, blah, blah, blah. That shit does not work but for CRM.
28:01.46
Rick
Okay.
28:02.81
tylerking
Sorry.
28:03.18
Rick
Okay.
28:03.25
tylerking
Like we are never going to beat hub spot at content marketing. That's the hard thing about this.
28:08.87
Rick
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Your competition's really hard.
28:12.02
tylerking
Um,
28:12.31
Rick
yeah I mean, we've done this this this a conversation so many times in the podcast.
28:14.36
tylerking
Yeah.
28:17.11
Rick
I would love one day to actually like outside of the podcast, like deep dive, like your website traffic sources and and really start to, I mean, I'm sure you're doing this already, but like, I would love to spend time on that with you.
28:30.65
Rick
um
28:30.72
tylerking
Yeah, i I don't see any universe where this would make sense for you or for both of us like the only person I know who I think could crack this is you and you've got your hands full like what I want is to clone you and like bring you on to you know, but
28:43.33
Rick
Yeah.
28:48.63
tylerking
I'm not saying it's impossible and no one could do it. What I'm saying is I have tried a lot of things personally and failed. Eunice has tried a lot of things and we've hired outside consultants that came highly recommended and no one's really come up with any credible ideas for what might work here.
29:06.79
tylerking
um Yeah. So that's kind of where I'm at in terms of, and and I want to be clear, that doesn't mean we're not doing it. We're still writing content. We're thinking about SEO where, you know, we post YouTube videos.
29:19.70
tylerking
It's not that we're not doing it.
29:20.31
Rick
You're doing the G2 stuff.
29:20.88
tylerking
It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just that that's all kind of like baseline. It's like, I think we talked last episode about what's the point of having a company like leg up health or like lessening serum, having a social media profile. It's not that you post something and it goes viral and you get new customers from it. No one, no health insurance content and no CRM content is ever going viral. um The point is when someone's already looking at you, they check out your social media sites to get a sense of who you are and if you're still around and if you're active.
29:50.96
tylerking
So we're doing a lot of stuff to prove that we're active um in many different realms, but just nothing we do seems to ever impact top of funnel kind of traffic to our website.
30:03.91
Rick
Yep.
30:05.86
tylerking
Actually, I want to pause it. There's one type of thing we've done that worked, but it doesn't the the things that get traffic don't convert.
30:10.75
Rick
Didn't convert.
30:12.15
tylerking
right So the the only thing we've ever done successfully is Eunice had this idea of like let's write pricing pages for all our competitors because they are so shady with pricing. Um, those actually are all pretty highly ranking. I don't know that they get a ton of traffic, but they get some, but there's, it's very, very low conversion rate from someone being like, what is Monday dot.com cost to, okay, I'm going to sign up for less annoying CRM.
30:35.71
Rick
Yeah.
30:35.84
tylerking
And we don't have another idea like that.
30:37.78
Rick
Yeah, exactly. It does make sense that people searching for competitive, uh, buying, uh, terms, um, could be people in the market, uh, that, that could be good fits, uh, for, um, you know, less than one year.
30:53.80
Rick
And it makes sense like that, like kind of that bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel, uh, buying journey.
30:54.91
tylerking
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you mentioned diminishing returns. Like you're probably right that we, yeah, we're not going to double. yeah Okay. Leverage over optimization optimization. You say it all the time. I'm still not sure I fully get it, but I think I, I think I kind of do. We are not trying, we are not a leverage over optimization company. I want 3% extra juice out of this. I don't need to double, you know?
31:18.46
Rick
Yeah.
31:19.64
tylerking
And I think there is, there's no way our our whole funnel is so perfectly optimized that there's no room to get a little more out of it.
31:29.40
Rick
Now you're right. You're right. um And you're, and you're, you're, what you're doing is you're saying, listen, I, I know that there's opportunity here. Let's go. And I know we I have confidence. We can go seize it. Let's go. Let's go juice, like, you know, squeeze the juice. Um, and then, you know, we can worry about, you know, hopefully something else hits on the product side in the meantime.
31:50.72
tylerking
Yeah, yeah, we're hoping, yeah, it's a combination of these small optimizations to the funnel meaningfully catching up the product so that you know A lot of people ah evaluate us and want to use it. We have so many people email and call in and be like, I love you guys. I love everything you're about, but I really do need a mobile app or whatever. um Get enough of those kind of core CRM features that we can just capture some more of those. And then hopefully the the third part of the the triangle here is the form some kind of viral loop thing. I think there's a good chance that doesn't work out, but currently that's that's where we're placing our
32:31.56
tylerking
but putting our chips down.
32:32.90
Rick
Makes sense.
32:33.47
tylerking
um So I have a lot to talk about there.
32:33.42
Rick
Okay, cool. now Yeah.
32:35.23
tylerking
I don't know if you want to go into that or go if you want to take a turn here.
32:38.26
Rick
Well, let me, let me kind of just do a quick, like 10 minutes on, um maybe five minutes on marketing at leg up. Cause it's related to what we just talked about. And then I would love to spend time on the product side at less knowing like what you guys are doing. Um, the, uh, so I just wanted to share some of the marketing. Well.
32:55.16
Rick
Yeah. I want to share some of the marketing learnings today. So this is the time. So context for leg up is this is the, October is the season for us to start marketing. And so, uh, October 1st, I basically turned out a bunch of ads. Um, and I've set up some tooling, uh, to try to help like.
33:10.57
Rick
Uh, generate leads for JD. Um, and I'm, and I, and we're primarily primarily focused on two concepts. One is, uh, retargeting people that we've had that but that we know are in Utah and our small business owners, like because they're in our CRM and we can retarget them through things like, uh, JD's personal outreach.
33:30.11
Rick
um HubSpot email marketing, webinar invites. We could even re retarget them on social media by creating a custom audience, although the audience is a little too small for that. So so we're running into some issues there. um So that's one is just like going remarketing to the existing database.
33:46.40
Rick
ah Database mining is another ah thing people call it. um The other is, okay, getting more people to the site that are like are have a high likelihood of being our ICP, um which is a small business owner in Utah. And so what what I've done is I've set up a lot of display ads um across social media sites. The ones I have running right now are Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn, ah Reddit. ah I didn't set up Quora yet, um but X, and I feel like there's one more, I was gonna set up, not neighbor, ah which's the What's the next story?
34:17.67
tylerking
Next door.
34:21.23
Rick
What I'm using is I'm using their audience targeting to identify people who are likely to be small business owners that live in Utah that are in our like sort of above twenty the age of 26, below the age of 65, and are affiliated with a small business or you know ah but have the small business owner title or that sort of thing.
34:37.21
Rick
and so I'm driving purely Utah traffic to the site. Um, spending about $10, you know, maxing out at $10 per day across each site. So it's 50 to a hundred dollars a day in advertising. Um, and then once they get to the site, I have a kind of a anonymized website visitor identifier, uh, sending a ah Slack alert to JD of like, Hey, these are possible leads for you.
34:58.88
Rick
And you know, here's the LinkedIn profile, go connect with them, reach out to them. No fruit to bear so far, uh, that we can attribute on this, but that's what I'm trying. Um, yeah.
35:07.16
tylerking
what Sorry. Can I, when you say no fruit, like you're not getting clicks or you're getting clicks, but they don't seem qualified or.
35:13.15
Rick
We're getting clicks. Um, we're getting some leads, but it, most of the things that are, that are most of the people who are triggering the, uh, sort of anonymized, unanonymized, I don't know what to call it, anonymized identification flow are people that are organic searches that are not in Utah.
35:25.64
tylerking
yeah
35:32.29
Rick
They're not the people that are clicking on the ads, um, which, which is kind of weird. Um, I don't really understand. Um, so it makes me think that maybe the people clicking on the ads are just like hitting the site and bouncing really quick.
35:38.28
tylerking
Yeah.
35:42.56
tylerking
You know what our number three organic keyword is? It's how to change the default email client in windows.
35:49.44
Rick
Yeah. Yeah.
35:50.80
tylerking
So yes, I can, I can relate.
35:52.52
Rick
Yeah. So there's lots of people hitting like this, like we have some really good content around how the premium tax credit works. Um, so a lot of people all over the country. are hitting that, and occasionally a Utah person will hit it.
36:03.92
tylerking
Yeah.
36:03.87
Rick
um but So that's been good, but but know no people that are like, I saw your ad, you know, and I'm i'm gonna buy, so I'm gonna let it play.
36:09.16
tylerking
Mhm.
36:11.97
Rick
I'm going to like, so so that's kind of what I'm doing right now. um The immediate next step is getting email marketing going and retargeting set up to people that are hitting the site so that we're following people around versus just ah hitting people that have never necessarily interacted with us.
36:27.85
Rick
I think that will be immediate, I think that the results there will be pretty immediate. Because I'm sure that people who, oh, I know Legopelt, oh yeah, actually, it's time. i we we when we When we last talked, it wasn't right. like If I can get five requested demos out of a thousand you know person list or whatever we have, like I think that would be really cool. um and so And then you know the next after that, I wanna get some more network set up with a five to $10 per day max. And then the the last piece is Google Search.
36:56.69
Rick
I, I, I, I'm, it's so expensive, Tyler, to, to bid on health insurance terms.
37:00.22
tylerking
Yeah.
37:01.91
Rick
But I think that's, I think we have to spend some sort of money on people searching for small business health insurance quote that are in Utah or people searching for ICRA quote, or even like competitors, like people keep.
37:13.73
Rick
And so I, any thoughts there?
37:14.96
tylerking
Yeah. Do you think there's, so I know that Google is mostly killing the concept of the long tail, which is one of the reasons marketing has gotten so much harder, but like, do you think there's in the same way we don't advertise on CRM. We advertise on like at least simple CRM for small businesses and maybe even more niche than that. is Is there a way to be like target keywords for people who know either they've been let down by bad service before, or they know they want something extra or, you know, something along those lines?
37:44.30
Rick
Yeah. How like, what would that look like to you? Like, can you give me some examples on CRM where you're like, I'm not, I'm not going after the the macro term. I'm going after the long tail.
37:54.98
tylerking
Yeah. So one, I mean, one is industry and I'm not sure that really, I'm not sure like someone would be like health insurance for hairdressers in Utah or something. Like that's probably not what they would search for. yeah It probably is true. Most people are just going to search for health insurance. I'm trying to think of like, what have people already experienced?
38:13.99
tylerking
Or maybe they do a search and they don't find what they're looking for and they do a second search to refine it down. Like how have they been let down by their previous experience? I don't have enough ah knowledge about your customer journey to really know that I don't think.
38:25.64
Rick
I mean, the the the experience that if you type in a generic help, so the reason it's so expensive to buy health insurance advertising space on Google is it is being bought by lead aggregators.
38:36.50
Rick
these These people are basically bidding and then reselling that person's information like 15 times and then they're getting robocalled by 15 people.
38:36.80
tylerking
Yeah.
38:44.92
Rick
So the experience is pretty shitty.
38:45.04
tylerking
Mm.
38:46.66
Rick
like They type in, health and like I want a health insurance quote. They go to a site that looks reputable. In the fine print, they're saying, oh, we're going to resell your information to a bunch of slimy health insurance agents. Those slimy health insurance agents are going to call you.
38:57.88
Rick
You're going to hate this. But then they felt put their information in. And it's like you know doing a mortgage quote online. Like, oh crap, what did I just do?
39:03.50
tylerking
Yeah.
39:05.28
Rick
um And then it's like, I don't trust anyone who calls me now. And so we could go buy those leads.
39:08.56
tylerking
Right.
39:10.01
Rick
Like that's one option is go buy the leads. Um, and maybe we should do that and just like try to differentiate ourselves. The other option is to bid on the key on, on like long tails key terms and try to catch them. And, but, but like we're getting lumped in with these people.
39:22.54
Rick
And so I don't, and it's expensive.
39:23.78
tylerking
Right.
39:24.63
Rick
Like it's not cheap.
39:27.14
tylerking
Yeah. I wonder if maybe, so first of all, I think AdWords is just not, it it just doesn't work for most small businesses these days, but I wonder if maybe targeting other keywords for this probably is too indirect, but something like does my, uh, health insurance cover. Something as a search term. And then the ad is what if your health insurance agent could actually answer this question for you or something, but You probably want people with, Oh, you're looking for employer.
39:53.14
Rick
That's more consumer targeted. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I want to get after the and business owner.
39:56.45
tylerking
Okay.
39:56.69
Rick
Yeah. That's a good idea though.
39:58.33
tylerking
So then maybe maybe people are searching for like how to offer health insurance without group or I can't afford health insurance. What do I do? Like it's more of a question about what they can do as opposed to like, I want to buy a group health insurance right now.
40:11.25
Rick
Like health insurance options. Uh, w what are my options?
40:14.47
tylerking
Yeah.
40:15.06
Rick
Uh,
40:15.17
tylerking
Maybe searching for like, am I required to offer health insurance potentially?
40:20.01
Rick
yeah That's good. I'll do more research on this, but that that's the one where, ah so if I'm going in order, like I can get next door and some of these other, like Cora, some of these other sites that have, and the reason I like those is like, if I can target a Utah person who's looking at a health insurance.
40:35.35
Rick
q Q and a on Cora or Reddit.
40:36.83
tylerking
Mm hmm.
40:37.53
Rick
Like that's pretty, that seems like a really good a target.
40:38.84
tylerking
Yeah.
40:40.49
Rick
Um, so I'm going to set those up and then I think the next step is like email marketing. Then the next step after that ah is retargeting audiences and then Google ads.
40:51.28
Rick
Um, that seems like the right order of operations to you.
40:55.44
tylerking
Yeah, that feels right.
40:56.46
Rick
Okay.
40:57.29
tylerking
I it sucks. Google google ads is.
40:58.43
Rick
Billboards and radio ads.
41:00.10
tylerking
Yeah, there you go. Maybe I, the thing I find with, with whether it's billboards or radio ads, or you said you were doing display ads, it's so hard to make good.
41:01.70
Rick
I'm serious.
41:07.63
Rick
Yeah.
41:09.27
tylerking
You have to make good media for the ad. The great thing about something like AdWords or some of these other PPC channels is you just write copy, which is so much easier than like, I have a, and I don't even think a still images really work anymore.
41:17.03
Rick
I know,
41:21.53
tylerking
I think like good ads are all video. They're like, like Instagram or something like that. Those ads are all going to be video. It's so hard to make the ad good.
41:30.11
Rick
and know I know.
41:31.60
tylerking
Um, but yeah, it sucks.
41:31.76
Rick
Yeah.
41:35.44
tylerking
Google AdWords is how less annoying serum got its start. Every time people like ask me about it, hoping that I have some wisdom to share, it's like, it just doesn't work anymore for for us, for companies like us.
41:46.90
tylerking
I think for CRM it's even for niched on keywords, it's $20 a click. Probably. I don't know what you're seeing.
41:53.24
Rick
Oh yeah, $20 to click for like el least at least.
41:57.05
tylerking
Yeah. And it's like, just how, how do we possibly make the math work here? You know, if one out of 20 of those clicks sign up for a free trial and then a quarter of those actually pay, it's like, okay, the payback period on this is like 10 years.
42:10.29
tylerking
Like it just can't work.
42:10.25
Rick
yeah Yeah, exactly. um and and i just don't yeah maybe Maybe we need to be a G2 player here. or people i don't know where i just i mean i need you don't need to do is I need to do more research on the buying journey.
42:22.54
Rick
That's probably what what we'll need to do next year is really start digging in on like how are people actually going but our small businesses actually buying health insurance. One thought I had just now while you were talking was,
42:29.80
tylerking
Yeah.
42:32.92
Rick
Um, maybe like what one niche we're finding is people that have payroll with gusto that by health insurance through gusto who don't get served by gusto. So I'm just wondering like gusto, like are people searching for gusto health insurance, you know, or gusto health insurance broker.
42:41.39
tylerking
Hmm.
42:46.49
tylerking
Yeah, yeah, you do want to be careful there because you want to have you don't want gusto to kill your ability to be their like broker partner or whatever, right?
42:47.35
Rick
That could be an interesting one.
42:56.44
Rick
Yeah. Why would they do that?
42:57.66
tylerking
Well, they probably don't want you advertising on gusto branded keywords. They might not notice you're so small, but, um, for example, like most affiliate, like companies like us that have an affiliate program, if you advertise on our branded keywords, we we cut you off of the affiliate program.
43:10.77
Rick
Holy cow. Look at this. I just typed in guest to health insurance broker. Rippling is advertising on this thatch, which is a, uh, an ICRA competitor of ours, a try-net, a PEO. Like this is, this is the right place.
43:21.69
Rick
Like all of these are our competitors bidding on this term.
43:24.39
tylerking
Yeah, but but you get what I'm saying that you're you don't want gusto to hate you Yeah, okay, probably not
43:26.13
Rick
Yeah.
43:28.97
Rick
No, of course not. Um, I don't think they would for this. Um, we're paying, we, I mean, we get, we make them mark when we become the broker, they, they probably, they probably make more money net because we're paying them, they get paid the integration fee. Uh, and they don't have to serve the health insurance anymore.
43:46.00
tylerking
Yeah, I don't think you're, but they would have been getting 30, 40 bucks per person instead of six.
43:50.36
Rick
I think they like the technology revenue better than the, than the, the service revenue.
43:52.69
tylerking
Yeah, that's, that's probably true. That's probably true.
43:55.32
Rick
Um, OK, anyway, um thank you for talking me about that. I've got a plan. I'm executing it. I'm going to try to, just for ah fun, I'll probably set up a billboard and spend like $50 on it ah because there's digital billboards all over Utah.
44:08.56
Rick
um So I'll probably you know just do it for fun so we can say we did it and take a picture.
44:11.53
tylerking
Okay.
44:11.52
Rick
And then um and then I do want to record myself doing a radio ad, you know ah speaking really fast and loud ah and see if that does anything.
44:19.10
tylerking
Mm-hmm. You've got a friend in the diamond business.
44:21.43
Rick
yeah yeah
44:25.44
Rick
Maybe I should have you record it.
44:30.43
tylerking
Um, cool.
44:30.41
Rick
All right. That's my plan. I'm sticking to it.
44:32.87
tylerking
Yeah. Sounds good. I mean, you've got so many ideas to try out and and it's amazing that it's working even without any of that. So.
44:38.47
Rick
Yeah.
44:39.10
tylerking
not Not that you should just throw your hands up and not do any of it, but like the fact that the kind of outbound sales thing is working for you, marketing can just sort of supplement and grease the wheels a little.
44:49.97
tylerking
It's not like you necessarily, you don't necessarily have to get someone from not knowing who you are all the way through being a customer entirely with marketing.
44:57.80
Rick
Correct. Correct.
44:58.58
tylerking
Yeah.
44:58.76
Rick
And like, what I'm thinking is, is if we can, if we can afford to like trickle along on investment here, eventually we're going to learn something that works.
45:09.27
Rick
Like it's kind of like that. Uh, I forget that book that we we were fans of back in the day, but, um, you know, there's, it's like, basically you spin up a bunch of things and once traction traction.
45:17.99
tylerking
The traction. Yeah.
45:18.98
Rick
Yeah. Like it tracks up.
45:19.97
tylerking
Not the, not the EO there's two books called traction. One is about the EOS system and one is about growth channels.
45:26.41
Rick
growth marketing. Yeah.
45:27.32
tylerking
Yeah.
45:27.29
Rick
And yeah, so that this, um, I, I do feel like the business supports experimentation and these like different phases and, um, something's going to work and have traction. We'll double down when we find it.
45:38.17
tylerking
Yeah. Cool.
45:39.30
Rick
All right. Yeah. Tell me about, uh, tell me about products. Sorry for taking so long on that.
45:42.68
tylerking
Yeah, that's good. Um, so while it's, it's, it's marketing more than product, but it's, it's marketing. So the thing I was complaining about with marketing earlier is basically most marketing is a zero sum game. If you want to be on the front page of a Google search, you have to kick someone else off of the front page. You can't like, I know we all like to think about, uh, entrepreneurship is like making the pie bigger and we're creating new value that didn't exist, but marketing doesn't work that way. It's like, there's only 10 links on the front page. If you want to take one, you're kicking someone else off and serum so competitive. we Like that's very, very difficult to do and not just.
46:13.29
tylerking
ah SEO, that's true with PPC. That's true with all this stuff. So we're trying to say, well, what are the marketing channels where we can, we're not competing with our, with, with HubSpot and Salesforce and pipe drive. And that primarily means what kind of marketing can we do to our current customer base?
46:29.49
tylerking
And so I've said this before, but like getting people to use this forms product. So we we have a form builder. It's a, it's got a decent number of beta testers right now. I'm getting good reviews from people. Uh, it's still in beta for reasons I'll say in a second, but I think it's more or less ready for prime time.
46:48.66
tylerking
I'm doing all these calls with customers and there's just one problem. And that is like coming into the call. They're super excited. They're like, yeah, I've been wanting something like this. I show them the demo and I have them do it, clicking through using it. And they're like, that was super easy. It worked exactly how I expected. This is great. This is going to help my business. Then we get off the phone and just nothing happens. They just don't, they don't build it into their workflow. Kind of like what I said, what what we were talking about with JD, having a pipe drive account for two years and not using it.
47:17.32
tylerking
So I think go like for the next year and or maybe, well, I don't know how long our main marketing priority, aside from like, we're going to maintain all our normal marketing, but our main priority is how do we get our customers to actually use forms so that they're sending these links out to people so that those people then see lesson on CRM exists.
47:36.40
tylerking
That's kind of what we're trying to do. The context here makes sense. Any questions about any of that?
47:40.64
Rick
Yep, yep, go.
47:43.43
tylerking
Um, so I wrote some notes here like two weeks ago and, uh, don't, I forgot what I was going to say here, but basic basically like the the plan is we were going to launch it the way we launch other things, which is say, okay, it's not in beta anymore. Everyone has it on their account. We're going to send it out to everybody. Like, you know, email blasts, write blog posts about it, you know, maybe do a pop-up in the CRM that type of thing. We've actually changed our mind about that. The plan right now is to keep it in beta for a very long time. Here's my logic.
48:14.52
tylerking
There's probably a power law here where a small percentage of our customers account for the vast majority of form submissions. And we can do a tremendous amount to help those people on board to forms. If we know who they are.
48:30.56
tylerking
So by keeping it in beta right now, we we just set up a new workflow a week or two ago that's like, if you want to use it, where yeah yeah, request access and fill out this form and tell us, for example, do you already have a form?
48:36.54
Rick
Request access.
48:42.01
tylerking
How many submissions do you get per month, et cetera? We give access to everybody. there it's It's not actually gatekeeping, but that way we can decide, are we just going to give you access and let you self serve forms or are we going to reach out and be like, like, I will literally log into your Wix account and embed this form on your website for you if you have enough submissions coming in.
48:58.23
Rick
ah is I love this.
49:01.02
tylerking
Cool. Um, it hasn't really worked yet, but we're, we're going for it.
49:02.68
Rick
i Yeah. Yeah, but you but now you have a ah you have ah trap and you just need to drive people to the trap. And and that's a totally different game. and and And you'll learn so much from fulfilling that service um about like what the tool lacks, what the opportunity is, what you know whether this is a good opportunity long-term.
49:22.99
tylerking
Yeah.
49:23.60
Rick
I love it.
49:25.00
tylerking
Cool, glad to hear that. Yeah, it feels, you know, every every once in a while you realize, I still think of myself as an entrepreneur and like, yeah, we're not a startup because we're 15 years old, but like we we kind of act like a startup in my head. And then you realize, no, we really don't. Like when you're starting a brand new thing and you have zero customers, you will fight for every single new customer in a way that we just don't now. We kind of have like a baby version of the innovators dilemma where it's like,
49:53.89
tylerking
We're not going to do some, we're not going to put a lot of time into something to get one customer. We we get, you know, 600 new customers a month. We're not going to fight that hard for one extra one, but with, yeah, exactly.
50:03.65
Rick
With forums, you better.
50:05.58
tylerking
So Eunice and I are kind of going guerrilla warfare on this, uh, trying to do what we can.
50:08.79
Rick
I love it. Um, is, can you, can you rally the company around this? Like, is this something that, or is this just you and Eunice?
50:15.83
tylerking
i I think we could, but I think that would, my instinct is that a, it's just harder to like. If we're spreading these calls out amongst everybody, like someone's going to be better than than someone else. And like you'd rather have the person who's best at it on it. Um, and be, I think it loses a little of that startup, like grind it out mentality. Like I, I think our company culture, but basically, let me rephrase. I don't think our company culture is that.
50:41.79
tylerking
I think it's we've got a routine, we follow the routine, we go for it. We've got a handful of people at the company that like discomfort, but most of the people don't. And this is a let's embrace the discomfort moment, I think.
50:54.44
Rick
That's cool.
50:55.49
tylerking
um we
50:55.51
Rick
Well, um i'm not you're not gonna get any pushback from me on this.
50:58.91
tylerking
All right, cool. Well, that's good to hear. We are going to turn it on for new users, I think. So what we're going to say, because it it kind of kills me that it's kind of been quasi-ready for a few months now. And all these new users are coming in and not seeing it. And I don't think we're like losing a ton of people from this, but probably for every one person who so asks us about it, there's probably 10 people who don't bother to ask and they just leave. So I think we're going to turn it on for all new users, but do the beta test thing for all existing users.
51:26.84
Rick
Okay. I mean, I could see that.
51:31.38
Rick
I mean, what worth, I wouldn't argue as long as, I don't know. I kind of feel like the the trap should exist for everyone.
51:37.18
tylerking
do it for Do it for everyone.
51:38.05
Rick
Yeah.
51:39.02
tylerking
OK, yeah, let's just talk through that. I know we're almost out of time here. I think what that would look like, though, so it's easier with new users to be like we or for with existing users to like email them gradually in batches and stuff like that.
51:50.25
tylerking
Maybe with new users, what we could do is there's still a page for it that you can go to and land on. And then that page says, hey, do you want to opt into this beta test?
51:59.22
Rick
Yeah, I think, I think if like I would Mark and I would do that for existing customers too. I would make it very available as a feature, but in order to unlock the feature, you've got to you know go through a process of unlocking it.
52:10.11
tylerking
Yeah, the problem with existing customers is there's just too many of them for us to handle that all at once. Um, but I mean, we could, yeah, what we could do is we could set up a feature gate for existing customers, meaning like some, some customers see the feature and some don't.
52:15.51
Rick
Yeah, that makes sense for new customers.
52:27.62
tylerking
We already have that. That's how we enable it for people. We could have a separate feature gate. That's if you don't have it. Do you see the offer or not?
52:34.95
Rick
Yeah.
52:36.11
tylerking
Cause we put like a little ad. So less knowing serum has a sidebar with like a little ad button. So if you want to create a contact and event, a task, you go to add that has this big ad for, if it's turned on for everyone, we don't have a reason for them to fill out this form.
52:44.40
Rick
But why, why, why wouldn't you go ahead and just like turn it on for everyone and then turn it off if it's too much volume?
52:55.01
Rick
I'm sorry. Turn on the ad.
52:55.90
tylerking
Oh, oh yeah, we could. I mean, we're already. taking about as many calls as we can.
53:00.01
Rick
Are you getting your, okay. You are. Okay. All right.
53:02.98
tylerking
That's not true. We could we could take more calls, but we couldn't take 10 times as many calls.
53:05.98
Rick
Okay. Well, then you're doing it right then.
53:06.87
tylerking
um and and i Sorry, i also i think I think you're right. I think we will do that. I want to i want to ramp up to that, I guess, is is I think.
53:17.69
tylerking
Okay, we're out of time, but i'll I'll bring this up again in the future.
53:20.28
Rick
I like this.
53:20.71
tylerking
This is one of my main priorities here.
53:21.40
Rick
I like this topic. Yeah, this is fun. Um, well, uh, uh, thanks for listening.
53:23.70
tylerking
Yeah, cool.
53:25.74
Rick
And if you'd like to view passion notes, uh, and topics, visit startup to last dot.com.
53:30.59
tylerking
All right, see you.