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This is part 2 of our interview with Noel Tock. He built a SaaS app on top of WordPress. In part 1 we talked about the thinking behind that, in part 2 we talk about the lessons he’s learned along the way.
Show Notes
This is part 2 of our interview with Noel Tock. He built a SaaS app on top of WordPress. In part 1 we talked about the thinking behind that, in part 2 we talk about the lessons he’s learned along the way.
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Notable quotes
Classic product myth: “Build and they will come. Just because you have a great product, doesn’t mean people will come.”
“Our best source for traffic is www.better-restaurant-websites.com”
“The people that come through footer links on our clients’ websites convert the best.”
“Don’t use Bootstrap for your app’s design.”
Show notes
www.better-restaurant-websites.com
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Hey. Welcome to Product People. Thanks for listening. We're going into part two of our interview with Noel Tock. He built a SaaS app on top of WordPress.
Speaker 1:And in part one, we talked about what was behind that. And in part two, we talked about how that actually worked out, how the app's doing, what challenges he had along the way, what advice he would give to someone trying to build their own SaaS app. He also has an interesting perspective on consulting and building an app at the same time. So keep listening. This show would not be possible without some really generous sponsors.
Speaker 1:Every time you visit a sponsor or thank them on Twitter, you really help the show out. So if you've got some time, go and check out these guys on the web, sign up for an account, and give them some thanks on Twitter. The hardest part about online advertising is figuring out what works. No ads reveals your competitors campaigns showing you exactly what's working for them. You get to see their successful ad copy and ad placements, keywords and more.
Speaker 1:Go to productpeople.tvads and sign up for a no ads account. If you're trying to set up an online store, you need to use Shopify. I've tried setting up dozens of online stores for clients, and there's always so many headaches. Payment gateways, multiple currencies, taxes, shipping rates, it's just a mess. Shopify solves all these problems for you.
Speaker 1:It's well worth it to sign up for an account. Go to productpeople.tv/shopifysh0pify, and get a fourteen day free trial. And Sprinly has been there from the beginning. Perfect for teams of three or more people. Sprinly is the easiest way for managers and developers to track the software development process.
Speaker 1:You and your team can try sprint.ly for free by going to www.sprint.ly. When you're ready to sign up for an account, I'll get you 10% off. Just use the code product people TV 02/2013. Okay. And and how big is the team right now?
Speaker 2:Well, the the thing is that Happy Tables is a product that's part of the human made company. So it's basically, we're a team of eight or so. Whenever And we have some downtime, we work on products. Okay. I happen to always be on the product side.
Speaker 2:So I'm not only working on Happy Tables, but I'm also working on WP Remote and Backup WordPress, which are two other products that we have. So, basically, we just rotate through developers when they have downtime, when they're interested on working on something. It's all quite flexible, so I guess it's a pretty fun work environment for anybody that's on the team. Just because there's so much diversity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so there's a lot of people that are in that place. They're doing consulting, especially maybe WordPress consulting. It's all WordPress consulting, yeah. And so what can people expect?
Speaker 1:Like in terms of income, does products provide half your income? Is it
Speaker 2:Oh, no. No, no. It's certainly less because we have such a good consulting business. The thing is consulting is a good gig. If you're someone that already has the energy and the passion to create a product and to ship it and to see it through, chances are you're probably hard working, you're, I'd like to say reliable, you'd probably make for a good consultant.
Speaker 2:And at that rate, you'd probably be making a decent daily figure. Especially if you throw in some personal branding and take care of your activities and you make sure you increase your rates. There's definitely a safe play to be had there whereby you will be financially successful for a long time to come. The product stuff is always a gamble regardless. The first product you'll release will probably be not what you expect financially but it's pushing you and it's challenging you in terms of how you think and what you the original preconceptions you had about creating a product are all torn down and you build new ones just for them to be torn down again.
Speaker 2:It's a great learning process as opposed to maybe consulting where you really need to consistently get better and better clients or larger clients with more demands to sort of meet that challenge.
Speaker 1:And so you like this mix because some people say you've got to go all in on products, but it seems like you like doing both.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm all in on the product side of the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I mean, yeah, the partnership is working well, though. But having a company where there's consulting revenue coming in and there's product income coming in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we're having a
Speaker 2:lot of trouble with That's that's the thing, you know, ultimately, you know, you have to figure out what your goals are in terms of where do you want to be in ten years, twenty years, whatever. Do you want to be fighting between the difference between $100,000,000 and $101,000,000 in terms of salary or do you still want to be creating cool shit on a daily basis working with a great team? Not everything has to be front page tech crunch material.
Speaker 1:You talked a little bit about some of your preconceptions that got torn down after you launched the product. Can you share some of those? What were some Build
Speaker 2:and they will come. It's a classic hole that everybody just falls into. You got the great idea and you executed it well, or you think you have at least, and you just think that, Oh, okay, we've got this great product, let's put it out there, people will come. And to be fair, we haven't done that much more marketing at all for Happy Tables, we've just gone about it in a smarter way, which has helped bring in a consistent amount of traffic on a daily basis without having to pollute the web with more advertising or try to send cold tweets or whatever you want to call them. Basically just adding noise on top of noise.
Speaker 2:I think we've had a quite good organic response to the activities we've built around Happy Tables.
Speaker 1:And what are those? Like how are you bringing in more traffic?
Speaker 2:So one of the things we did early on was build betterrestaurantwebsites.com. It's a pretty tacky domain name. But if you think about it, Happy Tables itself doesn't have the word restaurant or websites in it. So that was something where like, the beginning, we're on page four or five for results like restaurant websites. But then when we created betterrestaurantwebsites.com, which is basically a collection of posts on how to create a better restaurant website, and it's all free and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:It just has a note there that we've built it, we've built that page. We just get a lot of referral traffic from that, for one. That's been really fun. When we launched that, it got retweeted around quite a lot, which was great. Feedback was really positive there.
Speaker 1:That
Speaker 2:adds a lot to your long lasting brand if you want. Shows that there's more to your business than just trying to pump out code and try to sell it as quickly as possible. So that was one thing that was really well received. And I think it still ranks like number three or four now for just restaurant websites as a keyword.
Speaker 1:And what percentage of your organic traffic would come from something like that?
Speaker 2:Probably like fifteen 20 Okay. Yeah, yeah. And then we'll get another 20% from links at the bottom of free websites that we have. Some users will be on our free plan because we have a free plan. Believe in helping out restaurants at the very beginning when they literally have no cash or restaurants in third world countries that may not need to use all the features that we have.
Speaker 2:They can go ahead and just use Happy Tables for free. When I say free, I mean free. You can connect your domain to it if you have one so that it doesn't come at an extra cost. At the bottom of all those pages is a powered by Happy Tables sign And that really helped us out a lot. I think the case study from that came or the inspiration for that came from Carbon Made.
Speaker 2:Do you remember that site?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So that's something that they did and that worked out really well for them. They pretty much just took that over one to one back then. That's just been a great source of traffic because that's just the one channel that just has the highest click through rate from landing page to signing up for just an account.
Speaker 1:And so you said 15% comes from betterrestaurants.com, 20% comes from that footer link. And where's the rest of that traffic coming from?
Speaker 2:It's just a mix of referrals from websites we're just mentioned on, direct traffic or just organic traffic. We still rank really well for WordPress related keywords which is a bit awkward since we don't have WordPress copy at all on our website. It's all gone. It's quite interesting that we still come up for WordPress restaurant theme and stuff like that. Harder Yeah.
Speaker 2:Segment to sell to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And do you have a sense of what kind of channel converts the best?
Speaker 2:Yes. The people that come in through the link, the Powered Buy
Speaker 1:link. Because
Speaker 2:they've seen the product at that point. They see what it is. They're like, Okay, this is this. Maybe they're on a mobile device, maybe they're on a tablet. They'll see that it's responsive, that it all works.
Speaker 2:So that partial win is already there so they can just click on that link and just sign up and give it a play around themselves. Yeah. So they already have that sort of buy in if you want. I mean, the click through rate on that link itself is ridiculously low simply because most people that visit a restaurant website are interested in its food and not the way it's built.
Speaker 1:That's right. And what's a good conversion rate for people that do click?
Speaker 2:As to from
Speaker 1:anyone that clicks on that who clicks on that footer link and actually signs up? Do have a sense of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the ones that click on a footer link and then just sign up for a site. So we're not even talking like paid or not paid because we haven't even bothered tracking that yet. The last time I checked it was 37%.
Speaker 1:Okay, wow. So quite high.
Speaker 2:Much higher than any other sort of figure we have from anything else. I Something like Google or whatever, like pure organic traffic depending on the country will range anywhere from like, I'd say eight to 15% maybe a Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, want to ask you a couple more questions. First, I want to talk to you about doing business in Europe. And then I think we'll leave the audience with some of your best tips for people that want to build their own products.
Speaker 2:Yes,
Speaker 1:that's So let's talk about you're running a business in Switzerland. The rest of your team is in The UK. Are most of your customers in Europe?
Speaker 2:No, the majority of customers are in English speaking countries. Basically, have a number in The US and then a smaller component in The UK and then an even smaller component in Australia. Yeah. That's about it right there. And then there's just like the spread sort of mix around the rest of the world.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we get little pockets like in Brazil or Germany, which is cool too, but really like an English speaking thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Has that been challenging to run the business from Switzerland?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's just pros and cons.
Speaker 1:Should I move to Zurich and start my next product there?
Speaker 2:No, none of you know. The thing is the whole company and everything, even Happy Tables is incorporated in The UK simply because it's just that much cheaper to do. We also just had better access to services. One of my reasons for doing it in The UK to begin with was I knew that it would be easier down the line to also just tap into third party services that we may want to use. Case in point, we now use Stripe, No one else in Europe can use at this point because it's only in The UK.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:that's good. But on the other side, you are quite restricted from the whole sort of US market and the biz dev that goes on there. Let's say if you're living in San Fran or you're living in New York or whatever, you'll probably just have many more opportunities to come in contact face to face with people that can provide distribution. Because on our side, we have a white label program. The cool thing about that is that a third party, another company that maybe does reservations or does online ordering can take our product, integrate it into theirs and completely run that as if it was their own.
Speaker 2:Which is cool because you know reservation link and all that kind of stuff is just inside the website from the first minute. But yeah, I mean, on the other side, the pros to being here is obviously that we have a much better chance at trying to go after the long tail that's present in a lot of the smaller countries. Is very broken up into a lot of different areas, different languages, So there is an opportunity there to hone in on those niches and just try to execute them very well in terms of providing the right language sets, maybe providing local integrations for reservations or online ordering. And that's where we have access that maybe a player that's focused much more in The US and is based out of The US would just that would never come into their sphere of influence or their site at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. I went to France probably five years ago, and there was a lot of French restaurant websites that were still on Flash. So there's obviously lots of opportunity.
Speaker 2:It's just everywhere. The whole flash thing is just crazy. People ask for it today. Then they're fine having a separate mobile website. That's probably one of the larger challenges for a company like HappyTables beyond location and this is a sort of yeah, location.
Speaker 2:It's really trying to educate the user as to why they need HappyTables in the first How are you going to start that argument? Or how can you sell the advantages of Happy Tables in one or two sentences? Yeah. It's quite different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Noel, let's leave our listeners with some of your best tips or things that they should consider as they're thinking about launching their own product. What would you say to someone that's just getting started?
Speaker 2:Do not use Twitter Bootstrap.
Speaker 1:Oh really? Why is that?
Speaker 2:I always get criticism for it, too. Like it. I like the concept of it and the theory behind it's great, but I I think in practice, it's it's been used for such, like, early MVPs
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That it's it's almost become, you know, a stamp of the of the quality to expect behind the app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you think
Speaker 1:it's getting it's getting a reputation now as kind of like an early state. Like if you see Bootstrap, it's like an early stage, not quite fully baked application.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, how hard is it to create a front end? You know, if you've already created an entire app, about CSS is very responsive. So all you have to do is add a little bit of styling here and there and come up with something that's more or less straightforward. Think you can have a more compelling design and probably user experience too.
Speaker 2:Just going right into the full load of Twitter Bootstrap.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. That's personal
Speaker 2:opinion though. I know people have all sorts of varying stuff on it. Obviously if your app has a live demo which you can just click on and then you see the entire app and that's mind blowing then great. It doesn't even matter what you use. But if your app is behind two, three registration fields, then maybe you should have your own look and feel to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if that means you have less stuff on your website, which is not a bad thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I like that perspective. Is there anything else? Any other tips that you'd give someone who's just starting out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's I mean, this goes back to what I was talking about before with the whole sort of soft side of the business, where it's easy to create the app, it's easy to bang out the code. That's the experiences that we made anyway. It was like, okay, we're building our first big app and that was really fun, But then you break through that, so it's like the first year you're not really spending time trying to learn how to get users, you're more spending time learning how to build an app. Once you get past that, you really need to be able to move into this area where you're starting to bring up the game of that app so that the user experience is there too. It's almost like saying you go 80 of the way and then it's that last 20% that will take forever if you want to get it done right.
Speaker 2:It's that final polish. I know people disagree to a certain extent about at what point do you launch an MVP? Or at what point do you say, okay, this can wait for a later date. I guess from my perspective, it's something that the whole onboarding process for new users, the landing page, all these different things that have come to be expected just play such an important role if you want to stand out as an app today. So it's almost like all these things need to be part of your MVP to begin with.
Speaker 2:Even if you don't have the best design, that whole sort of, I mean the microcopy and everything just needs to feel right. And that's something that it almost feels like a lot of the time you'll see an app that tries to solve a particular problem and it probably does that from a technical point of view. But none of the scaffolding or the front end code or the microcopy or anything around it is really compelling enough to want you to say, Okay, yeah, this sounds great.
Speaker 1:So the hard part is convincing people that it matters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of build quality that people have just come to expect, you know, because you look at apps, the fight on the app market today, it's all about user experience. It's crazy to what extent people expect things to just be intuitive, work really well, be transparent, you know, no dark patterns, no weird, no large forms to fill out. Things should just connect automatically, and these things are just expected. You look at a lot of video games today, some of them just have great onboarding processes whereby they really teach and educate the user every step of the way as to what you need to do. How you need to execute it so that you are always feeling comfortable, you are always feeling engaged, motivated to do things as opposed to just being thrown the technology at you and say, Okay, here, go do your thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't what you think. No, I think, I mean, that's an interesting perspective because I mean, think one thing is that if you can flip that and find people first, that might change things. Because if you find people first and they have a particular pain, they might be more forgiving if you're saying like, I'm going to solve this thing and they're saying, yes, please, like solve this thing. And you say, well, I'm only going be able to go 80% of the way there to start.
Speaker 1:They might still be willing to say, Okay, well 80% is better than nothing, for example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I think for early adopters that's certainly a true statement. We've seen it with Happy Tables too whereby we had a lot of users that used WordPress previously and then switched to our system just because they had that early buy in and they were early adopters. But the people that followed after, the people that never heard of the story, just landed on happy tables yesterday or before yesterday or whenever. What's their first impression?
Speaker 2:What are they seeing as the added value? You know, what's the build quality telling them about this product? I think that's a
Speaker 1:good perspective, actually, because there is this high expectation and it will depend on the audience too. Yeah, can see that. Like if someone uses your product for five minutes and it's not compelling enough to keep going, then you've essentially lost that person and they might never try again.
Speaker 2:Right and it's just becoming more and more complicated in terms of the technology that we use to build websites yet people are always expecting them to cost less, apps to cost less, everything to cost less and be easier, whereby we still can't agree on how to deal with adaptive images, for instance, but now we're trying to find all these hacks for it. There's so much stuff that happens on the front end that we're having to do a 100 times over than we used to fifteen, twenty years ago. It's just that much harder. It's a tough position to be in when you're competing against such high quality everywhere around you. It just takes that much more time to build the compelling aspect of your app as opposed to just the technology that solves the problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Noel, I'd love to keep chatting, but we're out of time. Thanks. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Where can people find you on the Internet?
Speaker 2:NoelTalk on Twitter. NoelTalk. Perfect. If anybody has questions, they can just fire them right on Twitter. No problem at all.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Great. Well, thanks again for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Justin. Hope you have a great day.
Speaker 1:My name is Justin Jackson, and I do the show every week, but I don't necessarily know who you are. I want to hear from you. Why you're listening? What you like about the show? What you don't like about the show?
Speaker 1:You can get me on Twitter m I justin or you can email the show at productpeople@bizbox.ca. You can also follow the show on Twitter at product people t v. The best way to join the product people community is to join our email newsletter list. You can get there by going to productpeople.tv/newsletter. Please check out our sponsors.
Speaker 1:No ads. Go to productpeople.tv/ads. Shopify, go to productpeople.tv/shopify. And Sprinly, go to www.sprint.ly. That's it for this week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.