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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
Don't fall behind. Subscribe. Like. Drop a comment. Or not. The ball is in your court.
Nick Loudon (00:00)
You guys ready for the good stuff? Are you ready for it to just be so good?
Zach Stevens (00:01)
Yep.
Nick Loudon (00:06)
Yeah. Okay, sweet. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the factory floor. We are continuing our discussion on some of the most important things that we have discovered working in SaaS product marketing. And we're going to be talking a little bit about our three phase process of how we approach marketing. And we already covered phase one. So if you haven't listened to the first episode just before this, I would listen to that one.
Zach Stevens (00:08)
Yeah, definitely.
Nick Loudon (00:37)
Or if not, we'll just give you a quick recap of phase one and we're going to be talking about phase two today. So let's talk a little bit about phase one. Do either of you want to give me, wait, I should probably do this first. Corey's here, he's our marketer. is here, here's our designer and I am here. I'm the web developer. Great. Done. Check. Check that off the list. Zach, would you be down to give us like a quick rapid fire?
of the phase one that we talked about last week or last episode.
Zach Stevens (01:09)
Sure. So
the reason that we've broken these up into phases is because we believe like it's essentially like building a house, your marketing engine. And we've labeled them aptly so. Phase one is the foundation. So it's laying all of the core elements of building that strong marketing engine. The key things within that are your positioning, your brand identity.
doing customer research, getting a landing page. I believe there's some others in there that I'm missing. An audit, yeah, and an audit to make sure, and see where you're at. So, cause you don't know where you want to go, or you might know where you wanna go, but you have no idea how to get there unless you can pinpoint where you're at.
Corey Haines (01:40)
audit.
Nick Loudon (01:42)
the audit at the start.
Zach Stevens (01:54)
currently. And then finally, a homepage, which is the final manifestation of all those elements actually being put together in something that is a marketing asset and the most crucial marketing asset from the onset, something you could use to capture leads, to potentially get sales, and to explain who you do, kind of your storefront in the digital landscape that we work within.
And then now we're on phase two, is the base. So expanding upon that foundation and building the core assets of your marketing engine.
Nick Loudon (02:28)
Yeah, we it's kind of funny because we started the last episode thinking like, we can like, let's talk about all these. But while we're doing it, we're like, there's so much meat and potatoes, even in like each individual phase and specifically in the first one, given it's like the foundation and super important. And we talked at length about how almost any business should jump in if they're going to be working through a roadmap like this and start at the beginning.
Corey Haines (02:35)
you
Nick Loudon (02:56)
because something like an audit is so valuable and looking at customer research, like you just can't do enough of, and like you can always relook at your positioning and make sure your brand aligned to do all these different things. So we kind of got like almost stuck on that stuff is so important. Let's just keep going. So now we're going to hit phase two. And so we'll go through phase two and we'll just kind of start at the top with like, what's the first thing we do after we hit all those phase one things, you know, we did our little homepage revamp, like we're ready to like really, we dipped our toes in everything's ready to get.
we're ready to dive in essentially. The first thing on the list is sales pages. There's a bunch of other pages on here, competitor comparison pages, conversion pages, we call them, emailing, onboarding, all that stuff. Why do we start with sales pages, which is like feature pages, industry pages, solution pages first?
Corey Haines (03:48)
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I don't think that a lot of people, even a lot of marketers know the answer to that question. It's like, well, we should build those because everybody else has them. think, you know, like I think we need feature pages. I think we need industry pages. I think we need solutions pages. And so you just kind of like build these out because it seems like that's the right thing to do. But really there's no strategy behind it. there, to me there's two different purposes to them and
you need at least one of them in order to justify building them. Ideally you would have both. The first purpose is for SEO. So you're targeting keywords that are very bottom of funnel, sort of like product or feature descriptions, or you're targeting keywords like this type of software for this type of persona or this type of use case. And you want to build pages to essentially target those keywords, right? And get that
traffic from organic searches. The second purpose is as sales material and sales collateral, where they're essentially like these personalized versions of the homepage that either go in more detail and or are tailored specifically too. hey, let me tell you all about how these features apply to these industries, these solutions.
these use cases, these personas, or let me just go more in depth on the features or any one of the features to give you a more kind of thorough explanation of them. Ideally, you want your sales pages to have both of those purposes solved where they can rank for keywords that get you organic search traffic and their sales pages. And what I mean by sales pages is like people are exploring the website and they're trying to figure out this is a tool for them and they see, here's
a page all about how this applies to marketers like me, or here's a page that applies all about this specific use case that I'm looking into. And there's the whole reason why I came to this tool in the first place. And now it's confirms what I wanted to know. And so now I feel comfortable signing up, right? but ideally you want to have both of those.
Nick Loudon (06:05)
Yeah, you said something at the beginning that I thought was interesting, which is like other people have feature pages, so we should probably have feature pages. And that being like a very common, like you kind of see the same framework on a lot of different people's sites. How can you like distinguish like, you are someone or your product actually probably doesn't need these feature pages. Like your...
your product is like very streamlined or it's very like straightforward and like we really don't need to add all these extra pages. We need to just like double down on use cases or case studies or we need to double down on you know your competitor pages or something like that and kind of funnel the traffic towards those because those are going to have more like bang for your buck or something like that. Is there a way to like delineate when to have these types of sales pages and when not to?
Corey Haines (07:01)
Yeah, I think that just the more mature you become as a business, usually the more necessary these types of pages come because in the very early days, you can just get away with having a single page website and just a homepage. All you need is a homepage and a pricing page and a signup page and you're good to go, right? But then as you find product market fit, as you scale a little bit, as you try to widen your funnel, then you end up needing more of these types of pages.
that serve these different purposes of ranking for keywords, for being sales collateral for people who are kind of just browsing around and window shopping. Even just as your product expands and it becomes a more comprehensive platform, so to speak, where there's multiple different features and you're not a one trick pony anymore. And especially if you're expanding horizontally and you're appealing now to multiple personas instead of just applying, you know,
instead of just being specifically for copywriters, maybe now you have a use case for copywriting, for SEO, for content marketers, for demand generation, so on and so forth, and maybe all those different use cases are a little bit different, then yeah, you're want a page that speaks specifically to those. But yeah, it's mainly just a function of time, I feel like, as your product becomes...
Zach Stevens (08:05)
A yeah, like a single segment.
Corey Haines (08:29)
a mature business, then you need pages like this. Otherwise, people are going to be asking these questions in their head and trying to figure it out for themselves.
Nick Loudon (08:38)
Yeah, that makes sense. What were you gonna say, Zach?
Zach Stevens (08:40)
Yeah,
I was going to say I think that from a...
I think you just from a purely logistical standpoint, you end up wanting to talk about these things a lot more and you just don't have the space to do it or it totally breaks the flow of the user. You can get away with it for a little bit. Like Corey said, when you're initially launching, because you don't have to describe as much detail, like who this feature is for. You just run out of real estate really. So you need to expand into other areas and communicate that you have these tools that people need in order to make a buying decision.
I do wonder if I Wonder if the there probably could be some overlap between which one you pick first as far as conversion pages and sales pages Maybe Corey depending on like just how in-depth you need to go with your features and solutions
Corey Haines (09:34)
Yeah, I mean, the conversion pages, which are your pricing page, sign up page, demo page, anything that's like, hey, fill out this form in order to get started or like, here's the logistics of what you need in order to start paying us. Those are definitely going to be important. The likelihood that you already have something up and or that you have a sign up page that kind of does the trick already is pretty high.
And so yeah, it's a toss up between which one you start with. One more note on the sales pages, I'll just say really quick is that,
and now just lost it. I was like, wait, I need to say this before I forget. I remembered. Okay. Before I forget again, one of the other things I think is great about the sales pages is that a lot of people, when there's product starts to expand and as their use cases expand as well and the personas they appeal to expand, then they end up diluting their homepage more and more and more. They sort of become this like,
Zach Stevens (10:15)
Yeah
We can come back to it. Oh, go ahead.
Nick Loudon (10:22)
He
got it, he's good.
Corey Haines (10:42)
well, we can do anything for anyone, anytime, anyhow, any which way that you want. And now you sound like everybody else. Because you think that
Nick Loudon (10:47)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (10:50)
or an AI company.
Nick Loudon (10:52)
Yeah, or AI company.
Corey Haines (10:55)
Yeah,
exactly. Sorry, it's a little buggy for me. Because you think that as those things expand, then you need to keep updating the homepage. But actually you want to think about your homepage more as like a storefront and an entry point. And like the first thing that you show someone in order to hook them in and get them interested. It can be your main use case, or it can be talk about your most differentiated features, or it can talk about the
the main persona that you appeal to. But then the real use case of these sales pages is then you have dedicated places to talk about how your product applies specifically for X, Y, and Z, all those different features, industry solutions, use cases, so on and so forth. But you can keep your homepage still pretty tight and pretty tailored.
Nick Loudon (11:46)
I was going to ask because the the sales pages versus the conversion pages. When I look at like what we consider like sales pages, feature, feature pages, industry pages, solutions pages, those seem like they are much more. They could be a lot more content dense than any of the conversion pages, like a pricing page or sign up page or a demo page where you could.
Zach Stevens (11:47)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (12:16)
hypothetically turn these conversion pages into sections on a bunch of other pages to suffice for the time. Like, hey, I don't have a dedicated pricing page, but I have a dedicated pricing section and it goes on all the pages or it goes on this page and this page and this page. Whereas you can't really do that with like all your features necessarily, or all your industries. I mean, you could make something, but it's not going to have the content that you need for it to be effective.
Corey Haines (12:26)
Hmm. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (12:45)
And the same goes with like sign up, like you could just have a form or a demo page. You could have like an interactive thing that goes through like an arcade where those conversion pages could start out as sections and then be converted into like, here's a full scale version of this as a page. Is that maybe another reason why it would come after those sales pages?
Corey Haines (13:00)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, definitely could. And he brought up a really good point, which I'm glad you reminded me of too, which is that there's an opportunity to also further tailor and personalize your pricing, your sign-up call to action, your demo, whatever it is, the call to action for those specific features, industry solutions, use cases, personas on each one of those pages. For example, one of our clients, audience tap, they, we made them a specific, solutions page for coffee roasters.
And this worked out really, really well because they also had a specific offer for coffee roasters. And so the perfect place to put that offer of their special pricing and onboarding and migration and setup is going to be on that page. So now it doesn't just feel like another reskinned page where, a couple of words are changed here and there. Like there's actually a really, really tailored offer just for that persona.
And now the whole page feels like a very cohesive website in and of itself, if you think of it that way. And now when you're running ads to it, as it's ranking in Google, like those people are being served in a personalized way.
Zach Stevens (14:18)
As sales pages almost become individual landing pages in and of themselves, right? Like, and that's like, they have that kind of flexibility, whereas on the pricing page, you're not going to add that much detail. Like you're not doing any kind of problem, problem labeling or in the fact you're just giving somebody a place to pick a plan and buy it. That makes sense. That was a good.
Nick Loudon (14:38)
Yeah, maybe you're fleshing out the details
of the plan and that's about it. Yeah. I was going to ask about like demo type pages because we've, I mean, we've built a bunch of different types of these pages. Some are like, you know, it says like demo page and it's like, Hey, you know, fill out this form and then we'll like schedule a call with you to give you a demo. So it's like maybe square one or something. And then square two might be like the demo page has like a booking link.
Corey Haines (14:43)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (14:43)
Definitely.
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (15:08)
and you, or a direct link on like a Calendly or Savvy Calendly you book directly, or it's like an actual demo where you, or an arcade where you kind of click through and it's like a simplified demo, or there's like another demo where you click a link and you like get into the product in a demo version and like go through it. Obviously all these products, like everybody's product's a little bit different. So not, it's not like a one size fits all solution.
When we look at making a demo page, do you have a minimum like, hey, it would be best if we have something like this as the demo and not just like a fill out your email and we'll reach out to you or something like that in terms of actually the thing that they click to start this process, this sales process.
Corey Haines (15:58)
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, for a lot of these conversion pages, they all kind of fall to the same types of mistakes that people make, which is they're sort of just checking some boxes and they think that they should have this page because, it's necessary. Right. And so on the pricing page, it's just sort of like, here's plan a plan B and plan C and then there's nothing else. And then maybe on a signup page, it's just like, okay, what's your name and email and terms of conditions sign up or in a demo page. It's just like,
A contact form right as I contact us and we'll get back to you and those are very those are a lot of like missed opportunities right particularly on the demo page as you asked about that. The like ideal flow is really you have a headline that like reinforces the main outcome people are looking for. You have a little subheader that elaborates on that. You have some objection busters. You have a couple of bullet points about what's going to be covered in the call or the demo.
essentially just like what to expect. And then we have a form that is progressive. And so it's not just like one big laundry list of fields, but it might be broken up into one or two or three different steps. And there's even a bunch of fields in there that are either being filled in the background and then made invisible, or they're being skipped altogether because they're not relevant. And then based on the field submissions,
then you can route people to a self-serve demo, to a savvy calendar, Calendly booking link, or basically telling them like, hey, we don't think it's a good fit and or you should just sign up for one of our self-serve plans instead, possibly, right? But you get the idea that there's a couple of different routes that people can go from there with the addition of having a ton of social proof, maybe having some additional things about the way that it works or features, you know, further down the page.
Nick Loudon (17:45)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (17:55)
But you can imagine how you can, you could take like a really bare bones version of the pricing page, signup page, or demo page and be like, that works. Or you could make it optimize for conversions. And then there's actually like a lot to do. And I think that's another thing that clients don't expect always. They're like, Hey, you can make us a pricing page. And we're like, cool. We come back with like, you know, 800 words of copy and like all of these dynamic sections. And they're like, wow, I didn't expect that we could do that much here, but
Zach Stevens (18:21)
you
Corey Haines (18:25)
But there is.
Nick Loudon (18:28)
Yeah, I was going to say I'm like, I'm always a little shocked at like some pages that I visit that are like pricing pages where I'm like, a lot of times if I like go to a new, I see a new business or something, I'm clicking through their website. One of the first pages I'm going to click is their pricing page. I just want to see what it looks like and see what the pricing is. Like people like numbers, people like money. They want to know what's up. And I'm always just like, this is sometimes it's like just not...
I'm like, this is the place they go to see if they're going to pay for your service. This needs to be pristine. Okay, it's just as it needs to be to get them, if they're the right person, to click the button right here, this big glowing, beautiful button that gets the job done. I'm always surprised to see how little time and energy is put in.
Zach Stevens (19:14)
Mm-hmm.
I think particularly with pricing, the thing that I'm always baffled by is how difficult people make it to compare plans, which is something that think we have a really good process for, specifically from a visual standpoint, where one that gets me every time is I'll see things like a transaction fee added as a feature. And it follows the checklist. like, why?
Corey Haines (19:40)
Mmm.
Zach Stevens (19:44)
This this isn't a feature. This is just an additional piece of information like the descending transaction fee going from like 3 % to 2 and a half percent to 1 % based on whatever tier you pick and So often I'll see that there's a check mark in front of it and it annoys the bejesus out of me Because yeah, because it I think that it makes it difficult and it detracts because it's about the proximity of grouping
Corey Haines (20:05)
Yeah, that's very true.
Zach Stevens (20:13)
and information, which is like, isn't a feature, it's supplemental information to help you make a purchase decision and it should be treated as such. Also, one thing that I've been a big fan of that Corey introduced me to, which is every single one of the like, compounding features that are added on top of it, you you always have like your, your light basic, then like enterprise.
Nick Loudon (20:36)
business plan or whatever,
Zach Stevens (20:37)
Yeah, business
Nick Loudon (20:38)
yeah.
Zach Stevens (20:38)
plan or pro plan. We'll call it the pro plan to make things easy. And you'll do like everything in the basic plan or everything in the light plan. And then like they're all bolded the same way. like, but you're not doing a good job of highlighting the differences between these. So making it very difficult to compare is I think one of the.
The challenges that I see people face with the pricing pages, particularly in the way that they arrange information and not giving the, those visual cues to show this. These are the differences you need to pay attention to. Even doing things like subtle, even things like highlights too, you know, like when we were working on the, the pricing page for dabble, you know, they have a lifetime.
Corey Haines (21:08)
Yeah, yeah.
Zach Stevens (21:17)
access one that we had to include on the page, but it couldn't be treated the same way as their other tiers because it's not the same. You know, that doesn't have the same kind of comparison attributes that we want to include within it. And then you can also use those visual cues to guide people to which one you think they're most likely going to pick. Like your most popular offer is probably going to have some kind of standout visual element to cue them and say, this is most likely for you based on this.
Nick Loudon (21:46)
Make it
pop, it beautiful. Yeah, the designer language. Can you just make this like pop? You would love that.
Zach Stevens (21:47)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (21:48)
Yeah.
You
Easy peasy.
we, we talked about Peep Laja and winter maybe a couple of weeks ago, but, there's a report I remember that he did on, because, know, that the whole winter platform is all about essentially taking user testing, but then taking it to marketing pages and sales pages and all these, everything else that, you know, someone would encounter in a marketing, marketing touch point, if you will, to use some more jargon. and I remember he did a report where people talked about how
pricing page was far and away the most difficult to understand for everyone who went to a website and was trying to like figure out. And when they were rating like the spectrum of like easy to understand, hard to understand all the different pages, pricing was particularly the one that was the most difficult to understand consistently for those same reasons where people are like, to me it's such a difficult balance. And what I see is people either make it way too simplistic
and like the H1 on the page is pricing, and then you have like your tiers, eight, one, two, and three, and then you just have like an FAQ section and the footer. Or it's like this huge mess of, you know, you have a calculator integrated into five different tiers, and the transaction percentage is one of the features, and they're all duplicating across, so you can't tell which one is different across each one of the tiers, and it's just a mess, and it's just a disaster.
Zach Stevens (23:11)
Hmm.
Corey Haines (23:23)
which can actually also negatively affect things. Like it would be better to be overly simplistic than to be difficult to understand.
Nick Loudon (23:33)
You see those ones that are like, there's three plans for individuals, three plans for businesses, three plans for enterprise. It's like, dude, this is like really complicated, which is all about, you know, that's actually like pricing, not just like the pricing page, but yeah, the overcomplication, the calculators, the slider, that kind of stuff, always, they're fun to play with, you know what I mean? But it never really like matches in my brain. Like it's necessarily a great converter.
Corey Haines (23:51)
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other thing about it too, that people don't understand is that the pricing page doesn't need to be comprehensive. And they're like, what, what do you mean? Like, isn't that misleading our customers? No, you should have a pricing or like a billing section within your app. And that is a very functionally designed section where people choose exactly the right plan for what they need. Your pricing page. The goal is to one, help people understand
the big picture of how your pricing works, but then two, to pick a plan that's the best fit for them or the lowest, the least risky option for them. And then to just get them in the product and using it, just get them started. And we've done this a few times with clients where they were under emphasizing the fact that they had a freemium plan.
Nick Loudon (24:49)
Right.
Zach Stevens (24:50)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (24:58)
And that most people start on a free plan. And then once they get to use the product and they start to mess around with it and they get a better understanding of what it's capable of, then they have a better understanding of what they need and which plan would be best for them. But then they're presented with this big wall of information where it's like tiers one through 27, which one is the best for you? And you have to siphon through so much information when in fact you should just have a big section at the top that says,
get started for free, $0 per month, know, easy peasy bullet points, one, two, three, you have most of the things that you need. Just click this big button. Um, and, and that actually is the most like functionally well-designed pricing page for them.
Zach Stevens (25:40)
Hmm.
Nick Loudon (25:40)
Yeah.
Let the user figure out how much they actually need because they know what they need. just know which plans have what things and offerings. We're getting really in the weeds with pricing pages. Sorry, what are you going to say, Zach? Take us further in the weeds.
Zach Stevens (26:00)
Deadly.
I'll just, I was just gonna say,
I had an experience with this this week. I was trying out a project management tool called Motion, not Notion, Motion with an M. You've probably seen a couple YouTube ads for it. Maybe. Yeah. And I was just curious. Like, you know, I wanted to see what is inside the product, what is it like? And it was super easy for me to make a decision to get in and just try it because...
their pricing was very indicative of a risk free trial, like sign up right now. And all their CTAs were geared toward that. was consistent through every page. And it didn't matter that I had to like sign up for it. It was a no brainer because all I wanted to do was try. And they made it very clear that it's okay to try. And all you have to do is, at least if you're somebody who thinks through this the way that I did,
which is I can sign up, I will immediately cancel the plan that I am eventually going to be charged for, and then I can write out the seven day free trial and see if I like it or not. And if I do like it, then I'll just re-up and I'm sure they're gonna send me a discount anyway to try and get me to stick around. Yeah, exactly.
Nick Loudon (27:14)
Perfect. Yeah.
Totally. Okay, well, let's move through to the next section of pages, which we do. Go ahead.
Corey Haines (27:21)
Yeah.
Wait, wait, what? Yeah, one more thing.
One more thing on pricing is just if you've ever, because a lot of people do, and if you've ever tried to sign up or like figure out the pricing for HubSpot or Salesforce or another like big CRM, just go to their pricing page. And a lot of people do because they're really popular products. And that's why so many people end up just booking a demo to talk to sales anyways.
because they don't understand the pricing page because it's literally impossible to understand. Do you have to be like given a custom quote and then like talked through it for half an hour? there's sort of the exception to the role. but again, it's like, well, don't copy that though, because just because HubSpot or Salesforce can get away with that doesn't mean that that's the best practice. You can't.
Nick Loudon (28:04)
Interesting. Yeah.
You can. Yeah, you can't. Probably.
Zach Stevens (28:16)
Yeah, it doesn't,
yeah, I was gonna say, especially, it's not like the only way that makes sense is if you're charging tens of thousands of dollars and you're gonna pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for an enterprise contract and it's gonna be typically set up for you and most softwares are not like that.
Corey Haines (28:33)
A decent amount are, but yeah, most software is moving away from that. Despite that though, I think it's still good to have like transparent pricing and things like pricing calculators can make this a lot easier. And I'm a huge fan of having those on the pages. But yeah, that's also because HubSpot and Salesforce have these giant multi-product, multi-tool. There's add-ons everywhere. There's services, there's packages, there's this and that and the other.
It's just don't make it complicated.
Nick Loudon (29:06)
I want to move to competitor comparison pages because we do a fair amount of these. And my experience as the web developer and not the marketing brain is like these are likely a really good SEO, SEO driven pages where people are looking for so and so product alternatives or so and so product versus so and so product, because it's trying to, you know, we're trying to basically
capture any traffic that might be comparing our product to another product and make sure that they are seeing the information that we want them to see, which is the benefits of using ours. These to me feel a lot more SEO driven than the conversion pages and even the sales pages, the feature and industry maybe. Could you touch on that? Are these purely an SEO type thing? Is there a lot of...
traffic like internal like from your current site to that page or is it more for search engines?
Corey Haines (30:13)
Yeah, I think they function exactly the same as sales pages actually and that they they have that dual purpose that are pretty equal It's gonna depend just on the industry and how prominent your competitors are for the search traffic, right? And and it matters for you as well because if no one is searching for you or for you versus a competitor Then it doesn't make a ton of sense To capitalize on that part of it, but it can still serve the purpose of being a sales
collateral sales material for people who navigate to it from the site once they're already there. But you can also make pages on competitor versus competitor, even versus another competitor, and you can make pages just capturing competitor alternatives as well. But yeah, mean, there's definitely a huge SEO value. And I don't know if people actually still feel this way, but for years and years and years,
Um, it felt like everyone was very averse to them because they were like, ah, I don't want to stir the pot. I don't want to like pick a fight with my competitors. Um, I don't want to say anything that's going to give me a legal trouble, so on and so forth. I don't really know if that sentiment has changed. I've been a huge fan of them since like the very beginning, basically, because again, these are, this is like the thought process of your customers. They're going to be doing these mental comparisons.
They're going to be doing these comparisons mentally in their head anyways. You might as well kind of spell it out even more clearly than they could because you know your product better than anybody else. And you don't even have to talk about your competitors super directly. You definitely don't want to disparage them. You definitely don't want to mislead people. And I think people see through the checklists that are like, you know, you have all the green checks and they have all the red X's and in a way that's like,
very biased, right? Like people don't really respect that anyways. But if you just say, hey, we have this feature, our competitor has this feature, we do it this way, they do it that way. People are like, that's great. That answered my question. That's all I wanted to know, right? You don't even have to like paint it in a light of we're better and they're worse. You just have to make a comparison. And they're so valuable.
Zach Stevens (32:10)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (32:36)
And nobody really prioritizes these, but honestly, these are one of the first things that I recommend people do. In fact, I did this challenge like four years ago for the swipe files community. And I called it the $500 MRR challenge. And based off of one half an hour call, we would talk with our marketing strategy and where their product was. And I would give them advice just from that 30 minute call. And within six months, if they couldn't add
just $500 in MRR to their product from that conversation, then I would give them the money back. And I think I charged them $500 too. So was like a 500 for 500. This ends up being like way profitable for you. And competitor comparison pages were like the consistent across all of the prescriptions that I gave people. I always recommended a comparison, comparison pages to them. And every single one of them always hit their goal. And normally,
the biggest like driver of those signups and that new MRR were these alternative pages.
Zach Stevens (33:42)
That is super crazy. Why? We need to that statistic a lot more often. That's fantastic. I have, there's one thing that I would want to add to this. This is actually, I think one of the few times where the designer is actually the more sneaky person as far as trying to paint the picture in favor of the brand that we are.
Nick Loudon (33:43)
It's crazy.
Corey Haines (33:49)
Hahaha
Zach Stevens (34:05)
developing a competitor comparison page for, because I've done this with, like with Dabble, I remember. It was something as simple as like changing the color of the checkboxes under Dabble's column to be a highlighted color, but then still giving checkboxes to the competitors where it was due, or just like something that indicated yes, but maybe yes in a different way. Like instead of,
like making sure that the, your product is still highlighted. And you can do that in other ways too, especially if you are having those head-to-head comparisons of like this form builder does this thing and we do it too. And you both have a check, but maybe your check is branded and it's in a color. So you're still paying homage and giving the devil is due. I think that you're subtly cueing people though, by means of visuals to respect your product.
more and see it as the solution. curious, what do you think about that tactic, Corey?
Corey Haines (35:09)
I love it. I'm all about it. I still think that there's great ways to like, you definitely want to shine your product in a positive light and you want to, you want to make it look obviously like people should choose you because otherwise if you don't think that then like, why do you exist? Right? You should have a story to tell. And so you can emphasize that story using tactics like what you just mentioned.
Nick Loudon (35:28)
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (35:29)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, subtle sneaky ways. If you need to design Snake, come see Conversion Factory.
Corey Haines (35:37)
Yeah. No, that was actually a really good stuff.
Nick Loudon (35:41)
I-
Corey Haines (35:41)
Like I know that like e-commerce stores, especially AB test, the stuff like crazy. And it's a lot of those little subtle things that actually do make a big difference.
Nick Loudon (35:53)
I personally love building competitor comparison pages. I know it sounds a little strange, but they're just always like, okay, I'm to build all this CMS out and make these pages like kind of systematized. And then I get to just make so many so fast and it feels great. Let's keep going because we are where it's it's all happening. It's happening again. So after the pages. OK, so quick recap, we have home page revamp.
Corey Haines (36:13)
Mm-hmm.
See you.
Nick Loudon (36:23)
We feature pages, industry pages maybe, solutions pages, pricing, sign up demo, competitor comparisons. Maybe there's an about page. There's a lot of pages here now. Like this is a full-fledged website. This is not just a landing page or a super homepage. This is like, okay, we got a whole ecosystem here. Next is sales collateral. So it's saying, okay, to me, the non-marketer, I'm thinking, okay, we have all these like asset, this big asset now that is our website, that's hopefully doing its job.
It's generating some leads for us. bringing taking the traffic and it's converting the traffic into booked calls or free users or something like that. Now we need some sales collateral to convert those those people that click that button into customers. Is that why this is the next step right here? Why not put this right after like the home page revamp? Is there a reason that it's right here, right after this like big site build out?
Corey Haines (37:22)
I would say it's more just that the, those other core marketing pages serve more functions because they have the SEO value and the sales collateral value, the kind of the dual purpose, whereas sales collateral normally just serves the sales collateral purpose. They're not optimized for, Google searches or, really generate a lot of traffic by themselves. So, and it's also depending on the product, because if it's a completely product led,
company where they have like a freemium and they're just like mass signups and it's maybe a lower on the, on the pricing spectrum, then they're not going to have maybe any or as many needs for sales decks and one pagers and calculators and sales tools and scripts for SDRs. They maybe even just need case studies. Whereas a more sales led company is going to need the sales decks, the one pagers, yada, yada, yada. But those are still
pretty secondary to a lot of these core pages that we were just talking about. Still absolutely necessary, I would say, like you can't get away from it. And that's still a pretty under invested area of marketing for people, but yeah.
Zach Stevens (38:40)
I think just from echo.
an implementation and logistics perspective as well. These sales decks and assets are usually derived from things that you put on your website anyway. So it's just a different form factor in a medium that you're delivering it. So it makes, I mean, there's been a handful of times where it's almost the same material. You just have to rearrange it a different way because you're limited by physical real estate of like a piece of paper or a deck compared to an infinite, the infinite canvas of a webpage. So.
Corey Haines (39:05)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (39:11)
I feel like you end up having a waterfall effect of, if we put it on the website, then we can easily put it into sales collateral later. The only one that is different, and I'm curious, would be like the sales scripts and email templates. Cause those, I mean, I feel like they're derived quite a bit from the website, but not as much.
Or like you said, they're often just not necessary because if you have a product model, it's not going to matter.
Corey Haines (39:42)
Yeah. Yeah. But I do think that you made a good point that a lot of this is a waterfall effect and sales collateral is pretty downstream from a lot of the other work that you've done on explaining, you know, okay, if we're going to take our product and tailor it specifically to this persona, what does that look like? So now when we have a sales project prospect who comes through, we want to give them a one pager. Like we already have, something to go off of like
A lot of the sales collateral is derivative of the marketing pages that you're doing, even down to the sales scripts and email templates, because a lot of sales scripts and templates are how do I take a pitch and really personalize it to someone? And all the sales pages and competitor comparison pages are ways of personalizing that information to that context, right? Um, cause a lot of, especially a lot of sales scripts, um, are
in comparison with competitors, right? It's like people are gonna be asking, hey, are you using Klaviyo? Because we have Sendlane and you should care about Sendlane because of X, Y, and Z. And unless you've already built those competitor comparison pages, you're gonna have to come up with those reasons in the first place. So you might as well just start with doing the competitor comparison page and then write the sales scripts afterwards.
Zach Stevens (40:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean I think there's a there's a financial incentive in there as well because if you can
answer as many questions as possible that an SDR or an account executive would otherwise have to on a demo. If you can do all of that in place of having a demo, then you save that AE more time and they can go prospect instead and try and land those accounts that are a lot bigger and of more value versus it's the people who do customer support. It's like, why can't I just find this information on your website? It's because it doesn't exist, but it should.
Corey Haines (41:39)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. That's a really, really good point. Right. Normally the, the more pages and sales collateral you have on your website, that's, you know, free and publicly available. In other words, it's not gated. The better qualified your leads are going to be who come through the door to talk to your reps because they're self-educating. And that's mainly how people like to buy these days is there, they are
Zach Stevens (41:42)
So here I am taking a call with you instead.
Corey Haines (42:08)
self-directed through the sales process. You're just sort of like looking through the glass window that they can't see through. like you see them, but they don't see you and you're watching them go through all the different pages and learn about you and do all these things. And then you're stepping out and greeting them just as they're ready at the right point, instead of just, you know, holding their hand through the entire process and giving the spiel yourself.
Nick Loudon (42:34)
Yeah, I was gonna say, feel like I'm just looking at what we have to talk about next, which is onboarding. And so I'm just making a hard pivot right now because I was like stuck in my brain thinking about onboarding and how when I see you start working on onboarding, like with a client, I'm just like, this is like customer research level. Like I'm just like, people just probably do like whatever, like they click sign up, like that's what feels good.
So when you're working on onboarding, I'm like, this is like the boring part in my brain of Corey's job, even though it's probably not. And I need you to convince me otherwise. Because like, you know, it's just like you said with customer research, like it's very important, obviously, like you can't really do enough of it, but it's the thing that's like most commonly neglected in that like foundation phase is onboarding the version of that here, where it's like, okay, the fun part is figuring out how to get
the customer to sign up. Like the not so fun part is like, okay, let's like make sure the customer is like fully educated on how to use our product and like gets to the correct screens within the product and like sets up the right things and fills out the right information. Like that feels like the boring customer research of phase two. Am I wrong?
Corey Haines (43:35)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
No, no, not at all. It's definitely not boring. It's pretty intense actually. Like there's a lot of science to it. The reason why it's so important is because there's virtually zero switching costs in software anymore. And so it's not just about who can acquire a customer first or who can educate the customer best, but it's who can get that customer to experience
Zach Stevens (43:55)
Nope.
Corey Haines (44:21)
the value that they need in order to pay for your tool compared to every other tool that they're shopping for and probably also simultaneously signed up for a trial for first. It's a race. It's literally a race. It's like, okay, I'm in market for email marketing software. I'm going to start trials for Mailchimp, Kit, Sendlane, fill in the blank with like a hundred other email marketing tools out there. I'm going to at least create a free account if I can.
I'm going to look at the pricing for all of them or the pricing page, right? I'm going to look at all the different persona pages, all the different feature pages. I'm going to try to whatever, but then it really just comes down to when I'm actually using this product, does this do what I want it to do? And if you have really poor onboarding, people can come in and they're already sold in your product and then they're talking themselves out of it by the time they get in there because they can't figure out how to do what they want to do in order to justify paying you money.
really good onboarding is like, I was on the fence between you and a competitor and I'm still not sure. And in fact, it might be even be leaning towards this competitor. But now that I'm in the product, I'm sold and I'm to stick with you. and so you have to make the sale twice. That's just kind of the reality of SaaS today is like the first sale is I got them in my product or on a demo. And then the second sale is now they're paying me money.
Nick Loudon (45:35)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (45:48)
because you have freemium, have trials, have pilots. It's just so risk free.
Nick Loudon (45:54)
It feels like this is the problem that I have with hobbies. Just stick with me for a second. In order for me to take up a hobby, it has to have a pretty low barrier to entry or a soft learning curve, like pickleball, for example. Pickleball, it's not that hard to pick up and really start to get your feet wet and start enjoying it.
And that is what good onboarding does to a product is like, is, it makes the learning curve to like getting into the product and experiencing the value closer to the customer than it is to like further. And maybe that means that like the product isn't like overcomplicated to the point where it's like, Hey, it's really confusing. But once you really figure it out, it's like this incredible superpower that like does everything for everyone all the time. And it's like, no, no, let's like,
dial it back a little bit and show people how to get real value out of this right away. It's honestly pickleball versus tennis. I can't play tennis because it's so hard to hit the ball over the net and land it on the court. But pickleball, I could do that every time.
Corey Haines (47:08)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (47:08)
This reminds
me of a section in my mentor's book, Brands and Bullshit, where he says that the four P's of marketing have changed. Corey, don't remember all of them off the top of my head, but it's product, positioning, pricing, and think placement might be the fourth one.
Corey Haines (47:26)
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (47:29)
And I forget exactly which one, I think it was, I think it might have been placement, is now replaced with accessibility. know, the accessible, how accessible your product is, is what makes it a differentiator and what makes your brand stand out. And in the case of software,
Corey Haines (47:36)
Hmm.
Zach Stevens (47:44)
It's, is it really difficult for someone to get joy out of your product and a sense of achievement? Because if it is, someone else is going to eat your lunch and if they can provide a better experience, like even with things like, what was the savvy Cal bought out? A bunch of people that had Calendly, right? Like they, they totally.
Corey Haines (48:07)
Yeah, we had a program
where it was essentially like, hey, if you're locked into an annual contract, we'll buy out your contract for the remainder of your time so that you can switch to the SaviCal now.
Zach Stevens (48:18)
Yeah, so that's a little bit different than traditional onboarding, but I would consider it part of the onboarding process nonetheless, because they made the accessibility of that tool like a no brainer. It's like, do you want to keep paying for this tool that you hate or do you want us to pay for the remainder of your subscription and you to use the new tool that we have forever? mean, come on man, the gates wide open, let's go.
Corey Haines (48:23)
Definitely.
Nick Loudon (48:42)
Awesome. Anything else you want to talk about with onboarding before we hit the next one?
Corey Haines (48:42)
Yeah, it's a great offer.
no.
Nick Loudon (48:49)
Let's run it. Email marketing. This is it, bread and butter. This is where it all starts. People love email. Cold email outreach, dude. The amount of ads I get that like, I can book a bazillion demos of you with cold email. I know, I know.
Corey Haines (48:56)
Yeah, well actually I
Well, that's not what we do. We don't do that type of email marketing. Well,
I was going to say actually is this is basically onboarding part two because onboarding within the product is not straightforward. It's, know, you're trying to lead people down this happy path. You have a, essentially like a first run. It's, it's a race. We're trying to get people to experience value out of your product as quickly as possible. Trying to make it easy, enjoyable, fun, intuitive, but
inevitably there's bumps in the road and there's detours that they make and they just do things wrong where they skip steps and they try to accelerate and and figure out their own way. And when that happens, you need to steer them back on track. And the best way to do that is through email marketing, especially for onboarding. So there's sort of like two sides of the same coin onboarding and email marketing. Onboarding is like what they're actually doing.
And then when they don't do that thing, use email marketing to get them to do that thing. And so you need, you need email marketing to educate them and keep reinforcing all the same points that you've been making on your website. need email marketing to nudge them to perform certain actions. You need email marketing to remind them to do things that they need to do in order to get value and, or, can sort of finish their trial or do it before their trial or.
any indicators of what makes for a successful user that they might not have done within the product. There's a of other things in there as well around like retention, billing, re-engagement. You can use it for sales purposes as well. But I really think actually the majority, know, 50 % plus at the value of human marketing is just in accompanying onboarding and reinforcing your onboarding flows.
Zach Stevens (51:03)
digital cattle prodding essentially without but but in a really cool way because I think that what's cool about software products in comparison to other things like you know if someone buys a
Corey Haines (51:05)
Yeah, yes, exactly. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (51:05)
I'm
Zach Stevens (51:19)
pre-attain supplement for you. You don't necessarily know that they opened the container and you know, if they liked it or how many they have, whether they're running low or not, you could guess, but you don't have that information. Whereas with software, you have granular, like to the T detailed information of you are here, I've seen this path before, I know exactly what kind of trajectory you're on. You're about to go over your user limit and maybe I can push you to get an incentive and have you upgrade to
Corey Haines (51:27)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (51:49)
these new features or you keep hitting this wall like I can see that you keep taking this path and you keep hitting like a payment gate maybe I can nudge you to try and upgrade or if you never started you know right away you know exactly what stage of the game your users at so it makes it's not nonsensical to ignore that information to make the experience better and the time to value more likely
Nick Loudon (52:18)
I obviously email super important for both of these things. But I have to I've had an email for 18 years of my life and for 18 years I have been really bad at checking my email. So I personally want to hit the last piece because we're running short on time, which I think will be more fun for me personally, which is talking about pricing. Pricing.
like actual pricing strategy is a little bit is something to me that I think people are a lot more sensitive about than like, hey, let's rewrite and redesign our sales deck. Like, or, you hey, let me let me let's work through our onboarding flow. Like, yeah, we should have two more emails, one here, one here that does this and that, whatever. Pricing is a lot more like, you know, don't don't touch my like don't touch my pricing like that. That's mine. You can't touch that. Is there a reason for that? And
How can we stop that?
Zach Stevens (53:23)
Well, I feel like we I Feel like I feel like we've only ever had one client where we looked at their price and we're not gonna name them because we're not douchebags Where we looked at you guys you guys aren't douchebags Where we looked at their pricing and we were dumbfounded
Corey Haines (53:23)
It's just sensitive. Go ahead.
Nick Loudon (53:35)
sometimes.
Yeah, you are.
Zach Stevens (53:46)
having such a hard, like we couldn't reconcile it, trying to put ourselves in the position of somebody who would potentially buy this product. There were so many different add-ons and switches and sliders and things that were included, but then we thought would be included in the next one, but they weren't. And the language around it was super confusing and weird. And it was to the point where he asked and said,
Have you considered just examining this from a an outsider's perspective because I don't think we're stupid This pricing makes us feel stupid though
Corey Haines (54:22)
Yeah. Yeah. I think actually that was like a recent update to it. It just changed to that super complicated, hard to understand version. Yeah. Which is even worse. That's what I'm saying. It's like, don't shoot yourself in the foot. It's crazy that they thought like we should make some improvements. And then that's what they came up with.
Nick Loudon (54:31)
It was, I remember on the first call. Yeah.
Zach Stevens (54:44)
Yeah, that's it's a pickle syndrome. They they can't read the label on the jar
Nick Loudon (54:46)
It's a bummer. Yeah.
Corey Haines (54:51)
Right, right. So we, I mean, we did our best with the pricing page. but fundamentally you need to have good pricing underneath in order to be able to communicate that on the page. And listen, pricing is really hard to get right. and it's also one those things that as the business goes on, there are going to be like, there's going be more and more complexity. It's going to be more variables, more things you want to account for more experiments where you just trying to
test stuff and see if it works. People are super sensitive about it because they know that their customers are sensitive about it because the last thing that they want is for someone to cancel because they were like, I didn't understand why you had to increase this price or I didn't know I was going to be charged for that. Or I didn't know that this wasn't included or this was included. and it can really make a huge difference in your conversions and your just brand loyalty. And you'd, no one wants to get that kind of backlash that I've seen a few times where if you
poorly handle pricing update, can really put a stain in people's, or bad taste in people's mouth and it can kind of stain your reputation. So that's all the more reason to do it right in the first place, which I think we have a pretty good process for. It's definitely, there's some science to it, but it's not rocket science level. And there is some subjective,
Zach Stevens (56:07)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (56:19)
pieces to it. mean, our process is more like our analysis. We go through a couple of like Van Westendorp surveying and MaxDiff analysis and things like that that are like we're crunching numbers and spreadsheets. It's actually not as crazy as it sounds, just the names are crazy. But then there's also
Zach Stevens (56:39)
Can you give like a,
just like a high level view of what those, Van Westendorf analysis and the other one that you mentioned, just, just for, I know what they are, but you know, I, I, yeah, I'd love it you could just give a high level for the people who don't.
Corey Haines (56:43)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (56:48)
Yeah, me too.
Corey Haines (56:49)
You
Nick Loudon (56:51)
Uhhh...
Corey Haines (56:53)
Sure. So this is the whole thing. And I'm actually, I was just writing about this in the book that I'm working on because you don't need to do these things until you feel like your simple intuitive pricing is breaking for some reason. Ideally, your pricing would be super, super simple and it'd be anchored to a value metric or two so that as the customers get more and more value out of your products,
you get paid more money and it feels like a win-win. And then that portion stays consistent, right? So it never feels like, I was getting a lot of value out of this tool and it seemed like a really great deal, but now I'm getting value, but I'm feel like I'm paying more than I should for that value. So it needs to scale proportionately as well. These tools like Van Wessendorp and MaxDiff analysis are mathematical ways of trying to measure those proportions of the value that they're getting.
and the perceived bargain that people are getting out of, uh, your pricing structures. So a van Westendorp basically asked a couple of questions like, um, what's the most you would consider paying for this? Uh, and it would be expensive, but not too expensive. What's a price you think would be expensive. Um, but you still wouldn't like really think that much about it. What's the price that feels cheap and what's the price that feels so cheap that you would
question the integrity of the product. And that gives you a couple of data points, you know, $5, $15, $20, $50. And then with enough, with a big enough sample size, you can kind of plot them all out and find a nice intersection between them, where it feels like this is a happy medium between we're not charging too much, we're also not charging too little. This gets even more complicated when
you layer on different plans and or different add-ons and it can get like infinitely complex, but it's more just like a, it is really like a sampler. Like this is just to get us directionally correct. And then the max diff analysis is similar in that you're asking like, is this feature worth paying this much for? Is this feature paying that much for what is the order of these features in terms of value?
What is the order of features in terms of perceived costs, things like that, where you're trying to get people to quantify what exactly they do value in your product.
Nick Loudon (59:27)
were you gonna say something Zach?
Zach Stevens (59:31)
No, I did have, the only thought that came to mind was I wonder, because we have competitor pricing analysis on here as well, and it's probably more of an arbitrary thing, but how much does your competitor's price impact what price you are going to charge? Because this is something that I've done as far as like positioning maps and just seeing.
Corey Haines (59:54)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (59:59)
you know, like a specific amount of features, like in the automobile industry, it's always like performance versus, like an, an axis for performance and then one for economics. And you have, you know, the super high end luxury cars like Ferrari or Lamborghini or Porsche. and then you have more things are more affordable, like, know, the Toyota Camry or a Volkswagen Jetta that are in almost opposite corners.
Nick Loudon (1:00:07)
economics.
Zach Stevens (1:00:28)
do you think that there's merit in trying to pick a price that takes it, takes that into account? Like if all of your other competitors are playing the affordability and economic route, is it stupid to just pick the luxury area because it's not, it's not filled by anybody? Assuming it exists and you think a need for it exists.
Corey Haines (1:00:54)
mean, it's all dependent on if you can fulfill on that promise of being the luxury or premium option, right? If there are a bunch of competitors out there, again, this is why everything like this is also philosophical and existential and why people get kind of the heebie-jeebies talking about it because it's just hard questions to answer. But if all of your competitors are kind of cheapy, low cost options and
the things that the people want them to do they can't do in with their competitors, then yeah, there's absolutely an opportunity to charge a premium price and then offer premium functionality. The problem though is that a lot of people think that they're offering premium functionality and maybe that they're filling gaps that customers are wanting, but they're not actually doing that. And so now people are looking at it being like, why would it pay?
double for your tool when I can get everything that I need out of this other tool, because they don't actually feel the need of those gaps that you think maybe you created in your head and vice versa, right? For economics too, if a lot of your competitors are really premium, you wanna offer the economics, it's like, well, but is it too simple? Does it do enough? I don't know.
Zach Stevens (1:02:15)
Hmm, do you think that status purchase comes into play at all? Like, is that something that should be considered within software? Like, it definitely exists within consumer goods, where people will buy things simply as a status symbol, regardless of whether the features that it has are comparable.
Corey Haines (1:02:34)
Yeah, I feel like maybe we've touched on this in the past and it's a really interesting conversation, but I think status plays a much smaller role in software purchases because software inherently is very utilitarian and it's kind of always a, what's it called? A race to the bottom where things get commoditized. so status plays less of a game because people don't really care what software
they use says about them. It doesn't say much about their business. It serves a purpose and people will swap it out. You know, like, is there a status game being played between Grok and, you know, Chachi Buti and Claude and whatever else is out there? I don't know. It's like, whichever is the best model, that's the one I'm going to use. I have zero loyalty towards it. You know what I mean?
Zach Stevens (1:03:27)
That
might actually be like a philosophical battle at this point.
Corey Haines (1:03:29)
Yeah, right. A battle of
Nick Loudon (1:03:30)
emotional
Corey Haines (1:03:33)
intelligence. Yeah. but you know, people aren't going to choose a $50,000 email marketing tool over a $5,000 email marketing tool just because the $50,000 one has a maybe perceived status benefit of a nicer brand or values or aesthetic or, you know, it kind of does come down to like, well, what does it do?
Do I need those things? Is it worth paying for them?
Zach Stevens (1:04:01)
wonder if that will change with the...
prevalence of software, because I'm thinking of a different market, you know, something like shoes, where at the start when shoes first came on the scene, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't common. There was plenty of people barefoot. And now you have just like so many different layers of shoes, things that you would perceive as very utilitarian. And there is a race to the bottom for them. You'd have things like, you know, Payless or Airwalk or, you know, the non-name brands. But then as a pendulum swing to that, you have shoes
that are ridiculously stupid and serve no purpose whatsoever other than the fact that it is a designer, like a status symbol. More of a conjecture at this point, I don't have any hard data on it, but we're entering, it's also kind of a shifting period for SaaS where it's becoming a more mature market and the competitive landscape is getting broader and broader and broader and broader.
Nick Loudon (1:04:41)
designer brand, yeah.
Corey Haines (1:04:45)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Right. Yeah. Maybe one more comment on that is just if we took the adjacent world of physical tools and things like machinery or, you know, household items, things like that, the pretty, pretty functional brand definitely comes into play because you have like the, the DeWalt's versus the help me on here. Milwaukee. Right. Right.
Zach Stevens (1:05:14)
Hmm.
Nick Loudon (1:05:14)
or tools.
Yeah, aww.
Zach Stevens (1:05:27)
Milwaukee, Milwaukee, come on, give me your man
card, Corey.
Corey Haines (1:05:31)
do that. I don't have it.
Nick Loudon (1:05:32)
I
have a DeWalt. I have a DeWalt drill.
Corey Haines (1:05:33)
It's not here.
Zach Stevens (1:05:34)
It's honestly,
it's just like choosing your house for Hogwarts. You you pick one and you're stuck with it for the rest of your life. But anyway, RYOBI DEWALT. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (1:05:41)
Well, what's crazy is certain
electricians all use Milwaukee. It's so weird. then construction people all use... It's so strange how they do that. Anyway, go ahead.
Corey Haines (1:05:49)
Mm-hmm.
Well, my
point in that is that I think that that's a good case of when all the like raw materials are pretty much the same and the design has been figured out. Like this is the best way you can make a drill. This is the best way you can make a whatever. Right. And now we're really just packing this in different way with a brand or maybe it's, you know, how it interplays or is interconnected with other.
other tools or plays nice with this, yada, yada, yada, has a warranty, so on and so forth. But then, because you think about like, I think about watches, for example, there's like, there's a brand play to it. For sure. People play a lot more for Rolex than they do for a Casio, but there also is a raw material part to it where it's like, yeah, they're using some of the best materials in the world. And it's like handcrafted instead of, you know, made in, in mass.
Zach Stevens (1:06:50)
Mmm.
Corey Haines (1:06:50)
there's a lot
more secret sauce going on behind the scenes. And it's funny you mentioned this because there was this guy on Twitter. I actually think he's the CEO of of Prada time. He's not just like some guy on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. and no shade to him, but like, I don't know, he just, the community hasn't really clung to him that much. And I think it's for reasons like this. And he was like prediction 2026 all our people are not going to want to buy software.
Nick Loudon (1:07:03)
You think?
Corey Haines (1:07:20)
that was made with AI. And I was like, prediction, every software is made with AI and no one cares. Like, that's just not the thing that's going on in people's mind is like, what tech stack is, was this made with, or what were the raw materials of this code or that's not the thing.
Nick Loudon (1:07:28)
You
Zach Stevens (1:07:36)
You know?
I
I would be really curious to see if that is something that pans out. here, listen, hear me out. Listen, hear me out. It's like my in-laws have purposefully omitted any AI companies from like any kind of index fund investing that they partake in. Whether that actually comes to fruition or not, they're missing out. Well, it's a bold move, Cotton. But I do wonder.
Corey Haines (1:07:47)
There's zero chance, telling you right now.
Missing out.
Nick Loudon (1:08:04)
That's a bold move, Cotton.
Corey Haines (1:08:05)
Hahaha
Zach Stevens (1:08:09)
It's kind of like the, I mean, we see this all the time. You know, like as you were talking about tools, I thought of pens. Cause one thing that I've like thought of it's like, okay, a pen is a tool. there are very, very cheap commoditized ones, but then there are other pens that are so overly priced. I'm like a hundred X the cost of what my pilot G2 0.37.
0.38 loser fine pointer bust anyway there are use cases for that that like this is what people do and I wonder if that will ever become a thing where it's like this is hand coded by somebody else like no matter what it is if it if that if that matters because the crazy thing is pricing is one of those
Nick Loudon (1:08:41)
0.07 guy
Okay
Corey Haines (1:08:45)
you
Zach Stevens (1:09:08)
elements that is so ethereal and emotional and We feel like we have a logical grasp on it. But then stuff happens like that where it's like why would somebody pay a Thousand dollars for a pen when they could buy this one that does the same thing and I wonder I wonder if that would Sorry Nick. I wonder if that will Eventually progress like especially as people's knowledge about what goes into software becomes a little bit more
Corey Haines (1:09:23)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (1:09:25)
This is like the... Sorry.
Zach Stevens (1:09:37)
transparent and just more widespread. Like, could that be a thing? Obviously we're going down a huge rabbit hole and maybe we need to open it up to another conversation.
Nick Loudon (1:09:45)
Okay, one more, one more.
Corey Haines (1:09:46)
I have one more
rebuttal. I'll tell you why it won't because of Tesla. Anytime you can make a premium product for a premium cost and, and, uh, transfer those cost savings to the consumer, they will take that deal every single time. And then that will kill all the other competition. So you take a Tesla, right? Basically the whole premise of a Tesla was
What if we took the performance of a sports car and the aesthetic of a sports car and the technology of a sports car? And then we packaged it in something that was family friendly, economic, and at the price point of a Camry or a Corolla or, you know, fill in the blank with whatever your economic car is of choice. That's why Tesla is the most valuable company in the world, or at least was a couple of years ago, but when why tells us are so ubiquitous and
Software has been down this path for a long time. It doesn't cost hardly anything to build software anymore. In fact, the costs are dramatically dropping still.
And people are going to have to transfer those cost savings to the buyers of software because otherwise nobody would use it because somebody else would make another CRM that's going to be just as good, if not even more beautiful and cost less.
Nick Loudon (1:11:16)
Zach, what you were saying reminded me of like the Starbucks problem where it was like in the 80s and the 90s, people just like when they got coffee, they just like drove through McDonald's and they got coffee and that's all they wanted. And then there was like, it's like a coffee shop. Like you go in and it's like you shop for coffee or you like go to the thing and you order it then you like stay and drink coffee. Like coffee is no longer like a to go drink.
Corey Haines (1:11:36)
Hmm.
Zach Stevens (1:11:44)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (1:11:44)
and how that's what the product hunt tweet reminds me of. That like, no, no, people are gonna wanna like slow down and like, you know, they're gonna miss that human connection to their software, which no one felt ever. Maybe, you know, like, I don't know if anyone felt that like, yeah, that's it. Or people who are like obsessed with software, which someone in that position would be, but.
Zach Stevens (1:12:00)
You
Corey Haines (1:12:03)
except the people making it.
Zach Stevens (1:12:12)
I am writing down another card for us to talk more about this because this is fascinating. The psychology of software pricing and what's ahead.
Corey Haines (1:12:18)
It is a fun one.
Nick Loudon (1:12:21)
We
are officially way over time. Any final words on phase two or should they just buckle up for phase three next time?
Corey Haines (1:12:34)
Buckle up, man.
Nick Loudon (1:12:36)
going to be wild. Okay, I have one final question. Where should people go if they really need help with their product marketing? Shameless plug. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Okay.
Zach Stevens (1:12:46)
my gosh. Nick, you can only
Corey Haines (1:12:46)
you tell him.
Zach Stevens (1:12:50)
do that if you're if you're hosting guests on a podcast.
Nick Loudon (1:12:53)
Yeah. Yeah. Like, so where can
we find you online? Yeah, you can find all of us at the same place. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, sweet. Great work, gentlemen. We'll be back for phase three next time. And thanks for listening to the factory floor. See you guys.
Corey Haines (1:12:56)
Yeah, right. The plug.