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The State of Independent SaaS Survey results point to a correlation between more co-founders + faster growth. https://microconfonair.com Shar Darafsheh is one of the 5 co-founders of Servicebot.io, a fast growing UI toolkit built on top of Stripe Billing. In this episode, we're going to explore the validity of the first State of Independent Report (stateofindependentsaas.com) that points to a direct connection between the number of co-founders working on your SaaS and the rate of growth you're able to achieve. We also explore the platform risks that are associated with building a business around the infrastructure of another product - what considerations you need to make when deciding to create a business in that structure, and what assumptions you need to make about platform risk in order to overcome those hurdles. The first ever SaaS Podcast Awards are now accepting nominations. Head over to saaspodcastawards.com and let us know your favorite shows, episodes, host(s) and stories SaaS Focused podcast. We'll aggregate the top 5 nominees in each category and head to a vote in early December. MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Hey https://hey.com Twitter ➡️ @heyhey

Knowing of which metrics to track, and which to ignore, is an essential part of growing your SaaS business. The ability to filter out good, actionable, data from the ever-present noise that just distracts you is what separates many successful businesses from the ones that never get off the ground. By creating a system of how you can collect, review, and take action on the data in your business you'll be able to take action with confidence that your business is going in the right direction. https://microconf.com #microconf #microconfeurope2019 MicroConf Europe 2019 Castos: Podcast hosting and analytics tool. https://castos.com Join the conversation → http://microconfconnect.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail → support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners ► Stripe Twitter → https://twitter.com/Stripe https://stripe.com ► Basecamp Twitter → https://twitter.com/Basecamp https://basecamp.com Transcript: Rob Walling: Thanks for joining me on this week's MicroConf refresh episode of the MicroConf podcast. We are continuing our journey through the building, your first SaaS ultimate crash course, playlist. That playlist has received rave reviews on Twitter and from folks contacting us. So if you haven't watched the talks, you can always head over to youtube.com/MicroConf to see the visuals today's talk is from Craig Hewitt.It was given in 2019 at MicroConf Europe. It's called "Staying on Top of Your SaaS Metrics". Know what to measure, to maintain sustainable growth. It's an exceptional talk. And here's how Craig describes it, knowing which metrics to track and which to ignore as an essential part of growing your SaaS business, the ability to filter out good, actionable data from the ever-present noise that just distracts you is what separates many successful businesses from the ones that never get off the ground by creating a system of how you can collect review and take action on the data in your business.You'll be able to take action with confidence that your business is going in the right direction. And this is one of 10 talks in the playlist that covered things ranging from finding an idea to launch and early growth to outbound sales, to customer support, onboarding, and playing the long game, staying sane while you're starting up.Hope you enjoy it. Craig Hewitt: Hello everyone. I think I've met many of you, and a lot of familiar faces, so it's good to be here. it's an unenviable position to be right after lunch. On the second day, people are. Tired or hungover. we're gonna have a lot of, interaction here. if you have questions, you can stop me. We don't have to have questions at the end.but what are we talking about today is SaaS analytics, and SaaS metrics that you need to watch and those that you don't, cause I think running a SaaS business, which I guess show of hands who runs a SaaS or subscription and business. Awesome. Good for you. and who attracts their metrics like every day, every week, every month, Cool.Okay. We're going to talk about all this. so that's cool. SaaS metrics are fun. there we go. But it's the second day right after lunch. And so what's really cool is how we can grow our companies faster by paying attention to our metrics because metrics by themselves aren't really that important. so who, again, show of hands. Who's happy with their current growth rate, who has a positive growth rate, I guess we'll start with that.Yep. And who's happy with it. Right on. Cool. That's not unexpected. Okay. after your talk right there. Cool. so I think what we're going to say here is instead of just this nebulous to grow and I want to grow my business, let's put some values around that. So metrics and narrowed down this whole huge field of like marketing and sustainability to something that's a little more, tangible and that we can affect better.one son just started judo. He's seven and it's not my son, but, I think, this, this Bruce Lee quote is really cool because it dispels like the arrival fallacy, right? The rival fallacy is that when I get to 10 K and I quit my day job that I'm there. Or when I have a team of 10 people and I don't have to be working in the business every day, I can work on the business that everything will be sunshine and rainbows uniforms.and it's not true, right? Because you're never there. We're all at this conference because we want more out of our businesses and this fulfillment that it gives us personally. and I think talking about metrics, it's the same thing. We are never going to be there. We're never going to be happy.And so you just have to get cool and comfortable with being unhappy and run your business this way. So who has seen something like this and all the marketing world? Yep. Cool. top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, the idea is just get a bunch of people aware of your brand and your content, and then you work them through this funnel by educating them about the problem that your product solves.and then hopefully. Oh, is this not working? Okay.everybody hear me. Okay, cool. I'm like double fist in here. And then convert them at the bottom of the funnel. And so this works really well. This is pretty traditional. I think some people are starting to dispel this a little bit with instead of funnels, they're using loops and cycles.but the idea is really that you start at the top with something like awareness and then increase, awareness of a problem. And then the solution that your problem, your product presents and more information about your product itself and how it's different from others. And then hopefully convert these visitors or trial users into paying customers at the end.We're going to touch on this down here a lot more later, but this is, something that's really popular in the marketing world these days about the five stages of a customer journey. So I think that this model is Shortsighted right. As business owners, if you're a marketer, then this is cool.Cause this is all you care about. But as a business owner, this tells like from a metrics perspective, maybe half of the story and what I really like to break it down to is acquisition and retention. because they're the two parts of the business. One is getting people into your world and into your funnel and then converting them.And then you got to keep them around, Because. There's a very pop I'm part of the tiny seed cohort of a very famous saying now from one of the tiny seed folks, INR that he says, I hate your churn. and because churn will absolutely wreck your business. And so INR hates everyone's churn, even if it's really low, like we're fortunate to have a cast dose.you have to pay attention to both sides of the point, right? You have to pay attention to awareness and acquisition and trials and all this good stuff, but you also pay attention to things like lifetime value. And turn, we'll talk about both sides of this because they're really important. so from an acquisition metrics perspective, this is like the world, right?And this is like all we really care about, seeing things like from the very top of the funnel number of people come to your website. and the way we like to think about this as we'll talk about, how we evaluate our metrics and how we can change them in the future. but just the very beginning is like how many people are coming to your website?From there, it goes down the funnel to say like, how many trials do you have started? That's cool. And then once that ratio, so what is the trial to visitor ratio in your business or for your funnel? And then from there you say, how many new paying customers do I have every month or whatever. and we talked about that in terms of MRR usually.and then what's that trial to paid conversion ratio important. and then something else that we think about is like, how much does that cost, How much can we spend on AdWords or Facebook gods or a marketing person or content writers all super important because you can't be paying more to acquire customers than they're worth, in the long run.And then the last one, which is super hard, but, if you can figure it out is channel attribution. So where are you getting people from? And then how much does that cost, from each channel? On the re on the retention side of things, that's like after someone becomes a paying customer, how long did they stay around?So we talked about revenue churn. We talk about customer lifetime value, and average revenue per user. So on a monthly basis, how much does the average person you and then the big one is cash in the bank? because all, I think the day that's all of it, All distances really about is like, how profitable is your business?How sustainable is it? So we don't want to happen as this. And that's why I like to think about acquisition and retention, because you don't want to put a bunch of resources and time and money and stuff, and the top of the funnel or in the top of the bucket, just for it to leak out the bottom. And so we're going to run through a couple of examples and I'll ask your opinion on Hey, look, let's look at this business.Is this good? Or is this bad? but the way that we kind of solidify, this is with a scorecard. and this is not my unique idea. This is from a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. Who's read Traction. So there's two tracks and books. Rob talked about one yesterday. It's not the marketing book. It's the how to run a business book.Yup. Everyone else should read it like this week. it's the book on how to run a business, from a really macro it's if you read the E-Myth it's E-Myth. They already got the unit 2.0, it's the EMAC 3.0, it's like for grownups, how we should run our business. So he has this idea of a scorecard.Everything that really matters in your business is too much for all of us think about. So you solidify it down and concentrate it into one piece of paper and it's your scorecard. So it's all of these SaaS metrics. And then for the business, whole it's things like cash in the bank and receivables and all this kind of stuff, depending on your business, you're a scorecard will change, but you have to have.A place to look at this on a regular basis, that's easily accessible and you can track over time. So how and where do we track our metrics? a lot of subscription folks here will use something like ProfitWell or biometrics. That's cool. That's a piece of it. Something like Google analytics also super-important amazingly free.and then a product usage tool like amplitude and mixed panel. There's a handful of others out there. Heap. and then we got to put all this information somewhere. So we put it in things like notion, which is what we use for like our communication tool, or in base camp or in Google. She threw a little drive.So how often to track your metrics? There are definitely people who look at ProfitWell every day. I am Craig. I look at profit. every day I obsess about it. and that's cool. you should look at some things every day. You should look at some things every week and you should look at some things every month.and so we'll talk about what we do, and you can take this for what it's worth. so on a monthly basis, we write a, and we did this before we joined tiny seed. We write a kind of narrative, a letter to our friends and advisors and people that I know and respect in the space. And now we write it to Robin INR and the folks at tiny seed to say, Hey, this is how we're doing.and we include all of this stuff in that letter. and say, here's our MRR, here's our churn. Here's our booth. Here's our open meeting. Here's our CAC. Here's the number of new trials that we'd started, on a monthly basis because these are lagging indicators, right? You're not going to go do something.I guess, James, talk dispel this a little bit. You're not going to go do something that affects churn on like a weekly basis, right? This is a longer term thing to affect these numbers. So that's why I only report these once a month, because if you look at churn, Or ARPU on a weekly basis, you'd be like, yep.The same as it was last week, if your business anything like mine on a weekly basis, we look at a lot of the marketing and acquisition type things. So we look at website visitors, new trials, what that ratio is trial to paid conversion ratio. and we try to look at channel attribution because these are things that are really fluid and dynamic and are changing hopefully all the time.If you're having an active marketing group, all of this stuff should be changing all the time. So we track this. I'll show you how in a Google sheet. And we look at it all the time, and hopefully these numbers are changing on a weekly basis and that tells us that something is happening and hopefully that's good.and then on a daily basis, we look at basically ProfitWell, and look at how many new trials we had started yet. Yesterday. We look at what our MRR is today, and we look at the number of new paying customers we acquired since the last time we looked at yesterday. And so you might be saying, Craig sounds like a pain, right?but it doesn't have to be right. So we, we automate a lot of this tools. ProfitWell automatically do a lot of this for you. Thank you, Patrick. but for the really marketing kind of metrics, there's not a tool other than Google analytics that does this in a really cool way. like data studio from Google, I think makes us in a really nice format.but we do is we automate the collection of all this into a rule sheet with a free ad on Google sheets. Everyone should be taking a picture of this. That's amazing. so you install this ad on for Google sheets that pulls automatically select Google analytics reports into a Google sheet for you. So you don't have to go into Google analytics all the time to look at your stuff.And so this is a screenshot of what this looks like. we have a couple of things here, like users. This is unique website visitors. Then we have two goals in our business. One is, when somebody starts a new trial. And then when they become a paying customer and these are custom goals and Google analytics that we've set up.And so it pulls this into a spreadsheet that I gave the first version of this to Denise on our team. And it was horrible and she made it very pretty like this. And this is, these are our metrics from the last month or so. And I don't have to do anything. I just have this Google sheet book marketing, and I go look at it once a week, right before her and I have a one-on-one call.So I look at this and I say, Great. This is working. This isn't working. This is where we should focus our efforts. This thing we just started is awesome. Let's do more of it. and so we started doing this who knows this folks from the U S maybe know this, I don't know if this exists in Europe. Yep. What's the name in this game?Yes, we play scorecard whack-a-mole so the idea here is you look at your scorecard, at least from our perspective from a marketing. lens. We look at this and we say, this number is great. This number is great. It's number sucks. Let's go get this number, And you work on this number until it doesn't suck anymore.And so we play whack-a-mole, I, this is not my kid. I wish that would be great if this is my kid, but this is not. But, yeah. And so this is like a simple way to look at the whole of your marketing world and just say, let's do. The one thing, that's the worst right now. And we'll talk about leverage in a minute because that's really what this is.It's what's the absolute worst thing that we can affect that will make a big difference in our business. So what, So yeah, that sounds great. And so the, so what is that your metrics should be, should guide your growth strategy. And so I think this slide sounds like really obvious, but I hope we can shed some more light on what this looks like from a practical perspective in a minute.Let's be Lumberg right. And talk about some TPS reports. And so this is where the audience participation comes in. so we're a SaaS business doing 10,000 a month and we have an average revenue per user, 50 bucks. I'm very jealous of. and so let's consider a couple of scenarios. so this is the first scenario.I'll give everyone a minute to digest this, the CC at sign up. So they're requiring credit card signup. Withdrawn talked about yesterday. The vast minority, so looking at this, I think this is a pretty typical, like early stage SaaS application. What is the mold that we all want to whack?Yep. So the number here that we like to look for is like 2% awesome. 1% is, okay, this is not good. So you're doing a fair amount of work maybe to get 2,500 visitors a month almost nobody's turning into a trial. Trial customer or trial Byler. and then the rest of it is I think pretty good.The one that's really sweet here is LTV of almost a thousand bucks. That's awesome. so let's look at scenario two, also with credit card, sign up. What's the most that we want to whack here? Yep. 10% churn. We replace all of your customers every 10 months. Yeah. Give me anxiety just thinking about it, What's that fresh energy, right? It's after lunch on the first day. On the second day. Yeah, we've got some energy. And so it leads us to like our rule of thumb, right? Rules of thumbs are very, flexible things, but this is like my rule of thumb. And I will see if anybody agrees with it. If you're trying to bake conversion ratio is greater than 35% with credit card up front or without credit card was greater than 15%.And your revenue turn is less than 6%. Then you have just a top of funnel. You need more people on your website. If it's worse than that, you need to focus on retention and you probably don't have product market fit. Everybody cool with us like failing. This is, yes, this is no. Okay. I, this is what we go by.and we are solidly in the category up here right now. We need just more people in our world. So that's a pretty cool place to be. You're a developer. Your product is awesome. Your messaging on site aligns with that. And the people that are signing up are expecting to get the value they get. So moving on to no credit card signup, which is where we are cast us now, we don't have a hundred thousand website visitors a month or 10,000.That would be, Oh no, we do it. We don't have a hundred thousand. so where's the kind of ugly mole here that we need to whack.Yep. 6%. this is rough, right? You're getting a whole bunch of people onto your site. They're starting a trial and they're saying your thing's horrible. I've never going to pay you money. There's also like Rob talked about yesterday, the onus is on you and you don't have credit card up front to prove the value of your product to those trialers.and this is something we're getting used to. It cost us right now. We required a credit card up front for the first two and a half years. So a lot of the onus is on in marketing to say, Hey, our thing is so full, right? And they put the credit card in and they just convert after two weeks. Now, the onus is on us to convert those people, during the trial period.How about the last scenario here? Also? No credit card upfront.So the rest of this is great, right? Visitor to trial to pay churn. I hate your turn, right? 6%. Okay. It depends. But I think 6% is okay. And at this point, this is rule of thumb number two, and all the developers in the room, which is like almost, everybody's going to hate the rest of the talk now, because, if you have less than 30,000, it's an ambiguous number.but if you don't have a ton of traffic to your site and the rest of your business is pretty good. Then you just need more traffic. and this is, this is a really tough thing for all of us to really grow and accept because it's an emotional thing to sell or embrace the marketing of your business.What we're talking about is leverage right? Our communities lever. This is, we want to look for the single thing. We can turn this lever, this, and it moves a huge amount of business for us in the end. It's not. going back a couple slides. It's not getting our visitor to trial ratio, the 1.7, 5%, That's going to be a couple hundred bucks a month, but what if you tripled your website, traffic, that's some cheddar, right? And so that's what we're going to talk about for the rest of this. And this is like a tough thing. And even for me, I'm not a developer, I'm a marketer. Shouldn't be, cause I'm not a developer.I have to be a sales and marketing guy, but we're all scared to do marketing and to really. Dive in and embrace the fact that we need to sell our stuff, within the tiny seed cohort. I think it's okay to talk about this guys. it is absolutely the one thing that everybody struggled with, right?10 companies of successful multi-time founders. All of us every week are talking about how we can get more customers. very few of us are talking about. How can we build a thing it's more cool and maybe a little bit of design or something like that, but it all, a lot of that stuff ultimately goes to, how can I do better at sales and marketing?Because we're all scared of it. this is it right? because the fear is I can go build a thing. All of you guys can go build a thing. That's really great. But there's a decent chance that all of us could, or many of us could dedicate ourselves to marketing and it failed. And then you've said, hi, I went all in on this thing and I couldn't pull it off.And that's rough. Like emotionally, that's really rough. and so this is like rule of thumb number zero, right? Is that all the developers in here and even me, I'm not a developer, but I find myself falling into this trap a lot. Is that I lean on our development team, Instead of me going out and doing more marketing and figuring that part of the business, I say, and if we had this thing, we'd be set guys, when can we release this feature?When, how about this integration? And that is not the problem, right? The problem, like if the rest of our SaaS metrics is good and that's what this assumes. If the rest of our SaaS metrics are good, Then we just need more customers. And the product will not solve that. There, I think are exceptions where like the product sells itself and all that.And those people are not at this conference right there on those boats out there. but for the majority of us, we have to figure out how to sell our products easier and better. And that's, we'll talk about for the rest of our time. and so going back to like acquisition metrics, so really top of funnel, if you will stuff.your acquisition metrics and where that kind of ugly mole is, should dictate how, when and where you talk to your customer. so who has heard of Eugene Schwartz? wait, cool. Couple. Yeah. So Eugene Schwartz, I think of him as he is the big guy from Madmen, right? Like he's an old school direct response marketer or an advertiser.and so Eugene Schwartz wrote this book. That's now out of print than like to get it. It's 600 bucks on Amazon or something. And he talks about the five stages of a customer journey. We'll talk about the customer journey and how we all look can and do apply it to acquiring more customers and doing so in a really, appropriate way for those customers.And so things that make a lot of sense for them. and so I have to give credit where credit is due. This concept was introduced to me by one of the tiny seed mentors, Taylor Hendrickson. so I love the Taylor's avatar photo is of him holding the beer. Cool. Taylor lives in hood river, Oregon, where they have fantastic beer.and Taylor runs a marketing agency that helps staff businesses and e-commerce stores with exactly this thing. So it was like the perfect person to talk about it. Maybe he should be here talking instead of me, but. And so here's the gist of the show, great with the white font, the five phases of a customer journey, and it starts from the bottom and goes up, and the bottom is a place you don't want to be, right?the bottom is a place where you're creating the market or you're creating the product in this market. And people are completely unaware that they have a problem or that there's a solution to it. Or there's a product that solves, the, that need that they have. and if you find yourself down here, you have a long time, the road ahead of you.You have a product, a problem of educating the market on the problem, and that there's a solution. And that there's a product that builds what that solution needs to be, and that your product is the best one. And then they have to buy it. You have to go all the way up here. Some folks are problem aware and we'll talk, we'll give a couple examples that we'll just like specifically where some people are and how they attack this.some people are problem aware and so they're like, I need a podcast hosting platform. Cool. Because I need to host my file somewhere. That's fair. So then you have to walk these folks from there is a problem. So there's a solution to your solution. Your product is the best one for them. And then from there and there.So there's some people that say I need. A CRM to make my sales team more effective. Cool. it was about IO. It was.com. and then product there is I'm going to choose mixed bag channel or amplitude, and then that gets stuff. And so the, I think that the idea with some of this is that the higher up you get in this, the more difficult a lot of the marketing is because you are focused on smaller things.So it might features this and that, rebates and discount codes and things like that. as you get up higher into this, and we'll talk a little bit more about some strategy around how you might think about entering this spectrum because people exist all along the spectrum and where you choose to enter and talk to your customers in the spectrum, talks about how, what kind of marketing you do and how long you might expect that some of this marketing takes.So a few examples. So we're a podcast hosting platform. We have a couple of different customer personas. Some of them are existing gastros like myself, that might move from another tool like SoundCloud onto to Hostos that's one type of customer persona. We would talk to them in a different way than we would talk to new podcasts.You probably pastors come in and laugh because it's an unenviable position for podcasting is really popular, but complex. It's not Oh, you spent a WordPress and you do a blog post. And it goes into the world. there's a lot to podcasting. A lot of people come in and say, I have no effing idea how to do any of this.We have a lot of people that come into that. And that's cool because we can add a lot of them value by providing a ton of content around this. And that's what we do. And so here's a sample of like maybe what a funnel or a customer journey would look like is we have this huge how to start a podcast blog post.and so a lot of people come to it organically. Some people come to it from ads that we run and they say, wow, this is a really cool, This is a really cool blog post, is probably those guys know what they're talking about. they may, they sign up for an email. First. We have a, 20 day how to start a podcast email course.That's cool. And by the end of it, we pitched this thing called office hours, which is a live webinar. We run every week where we answer questions about podcasts. So all this stuff is the same. It's talking to the same person at the same point in their journey with the same topic, and then trying to answer and solve the same problem.And the offer is, Hey, if you're a part of this email course, here's a coupon code to sign up. So all I did now, your permission to do this. So less accounting is, one of the tiny seed companies. And I know Paul really well. We talk every week. and so Paul is, less accounting is, accounting software for small businesses.And their problem is, and I do my accounting, but it's a pain and I don't want to spend a lot of time on it and I want it to And so a sample kind of a customer journey for less accounting. And for Paul, it could be something like drive traffic to, what there's a two, a case study from one of his existing customers talks about how great Les counting is and how it saves them a ton of time.Every week I was kind of stuff. Maybe then it's Hey, if you want to see more about less counting click here to view this demo, or Paul would go on a call with them and walk them through it. and then maybe we'd have a service about Hey, I'm going to solve this thing for you by making it super easy.I'm just going to get all your books set up on your, on this platform for you or, use automated tools to make the, so we all heard from Steli earlier. Everybody knows what closes close the CRN. Yep. and so I think the customer persona here would be something like sales managers or directors or founders who wants to make their sales teams.More productive, but also for them to have insights into what people are doing. Cause I manage a salesperson now and what the deal flow and the pipeline looks like is a big question I have as a founder. and so this is an interesting one that I think we'll spend some time talking about. Castelli is a really savvy guy.Everybody heard him talk this morning. let's go here. So they write a metric strict ton of content around how to do sales better. And so Steli has dispelled some of this myth because you would consider that a lot of people looking for a CRM, like clothes are product aware, They know they need a tool to make their salespeople sell better.And for the management team to have visibility into this. But I think what Steli has seen is that. That's a crappy place to be. Because then you're competing directly against pipe drive and Salesforce and the 8,000 other people in his space. And nobody wants to do that. Is anybody in a super unexpected, competitive space?Anybody else in a super competitive space? Yeah. Do you try to attract and convert people really far down in the funnel and say, Hey, we have this feature that is better than everyone else. Yeah, you do. Is it going well?Yeah, it sounds like it's going well. That's cool.Yep. Yep. Cool. So that's a really good approach. That's a really good approach. So to go to the whole market, I think would be challenging. And so that's probably why you haven't done it is to say Close and pipe drive and Salesforce and all this, they basically do the same thing. So then coming into folks that are just product aware and trying to sell them on your thing versus everyone else's thing is skating.so I think what Steli has done against he's a really savvy guy is he's gone up the ladder if you will, from here. And this is that I, this is where we'll leave things a little bit is there's not an answer to where you should talk to your customers. You should talk to them all the way through the spectrum.but you should talk to them, the place that's the easiest and best for you. And maybe the place where your metrics tell you that you can provide the most value. And so Steli is down here, right? It sounded like the only way he can provide a moveable incentive for people is to lower his price or something that I know he would never do.And so what he's chosen to do is to be a thought leader in the space. And go all the way up here, or maybe even here I would argue. And so Steli, and a lot of the really best brands we know, play all the way up in the problem, aware or the unaware side of the spectrum, and then follow their customers where customers follow them all the way through until they're ready to buy.And I think this is the classic content marketing inbound approach that we see a lot of folks do. And I bring this up. Not that I think content marketing is the only way to go or the way you should go, because I think there are definitely people that can only focus further down in the customer journey, stage of things and talking about like old email, like you can do cold email and just sell people, like the folks from gathered.And that's cool. And if you can do that, like a lot of us are MBS, right? Because you have a relatively straightforward, not simple, but a relatively straightforward thing to do. Like you have a tool. You can let folks know about it and convert them to the trialing and paying customers, hopefully. But if you think that is too hard to do, or you think you can't do that effectively at scale, then you have to move up the spectrum here to get folks earlier on in their journey.as someone who's evaluating you, you as a solution or your market, and hopefully becoming a customer. Leanna was cool, everybody. Yeah. Right on. Cool. Thank you. And yeah, I think this is a, this is like wrap up and saying we should let our metrics guide where we focus our energy.And then I think for the most folks in this room and myself included, like you built a good product. And so to, as much as you can devote yourself to marketing and understanding this customer journey. And approaching and talking to people at the appropriate point in their, and their journey as a buyer.Hope you enjoyed that. Talk from Craig Hewitt and I'll be back next week with another microphone.

A Solo Rob Adventure!  During this episode, we are answering listener questions live from our MicroConf Connect members.  Rob answers questions about:  - Early Stage Validation- Competitive Markets- Youth Entrepreneurship- Key Insights Around the TinySeed Portfolio - Retirement Planning MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.comTwitter ➡️  https://twitter.com/MicroConfE-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripehttps://stripe.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Heyhttps://hey.com@heyhey   MicroConf On Air Question and Answer Episode Rob Walling: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob walling live streaming direct from my bunker library here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So every Wednesday at 1:00 PM Eastern and producers, Andrew and I stream for 30 minutes and we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom and purpose and allow us to value and maintain healthy relationships. We believe that showing up every day and shipping that next feature, that next piece of marketing copy closing that next sale is the way to build a sustainable company. Thanks so much for, for joining me today. Today is an all ask Rob episode. We're going to be doing a live Q and a, we have some good questions coming in on Twitter and in the MicroConf on air channel in MicroConf connect. If you're not part of MicroConf connect already should into Microsoft connect.com. We have more than I believe it's over 1600. Founders of bootstrappers and mostly bootstrapped founders in there hanging out and having conversations like this every day. And what I love is when I get into connect and there's a solid thread where I see a question and I go to, I know the answer to this, or I have a thought on this and I go in and there's already five amazing answers from other experienced founders who have done. Exactly this and I don't even need to weigh in, because the answers are, are good and they're all, and they're all legit. So I am checking out some questions. So today, yeah, I normally intro my guest here, but you'll know me as the co founder of drip and MicroConf and tiny seed. Startups for the rest of us host and author starts small, stay small. So I'm going to be answering a bunch of questions today. what are the, Oh, what are those books behind me? Yes. So it is definitely, a, a really nice book case here. I'll just show you a poll one book off the shelf, just so you can see. So here we are with the, this tome of no title, that actually, holds some silver age comic books for those who, are in the now missing Spider-Man number two there from 19, 63. I think so. Yes. All questions today can be startup related, silver age comic book collecting related, and of course, Dungeons and dragons related. we really do, in all seriousness have some really good questions coming in and, It's nice that we have a producer, Sandra says so smooth. It's nice that we have such a, it's a really good audience. It's a really great group creators that are here in microcuff connect and participating on Twitter. And just in this MicroConf averse. and I did an interview last week. If you haven't checked this out on indie hackers, Courtland Allen and I had a conversation for, yeah, it was about an hour and 10 minutes, really solid stuff. Good questions from Portland. Good thoughts from him. And I was just weighing, and we were just talking about frameworks and advanced, and opportunities for launching SaaS in October of 2020. It was very specific to now, not five years ago, not 10 years ago. And that's actually spring on a few of the questions that we have today. So I'm going to dive in there, but first I've had a request already for, tell a joke. So in true MicroConf dad joke, A tradition, this Fibonacci, Joe, coming to tell you it's as bad as the last two you've heard combined. So with no laugh track, it just normally, so at MicroConf there's all these groans and that there's groans and laughs and some people, clap, slow clapping, golf clapping me. But without that, it loses a little bit. So my first question today is from no, we're BRAC. Thank you producers. And they're only a little bit. It's about 20 seconds late. So Noah Bragg from MicroConf connect asks. If you were starting a business today, I'm gonna assume it's a SaaS company and you were earlier on in your career. Would you try multiple business ideas at once or go all in on one? This is a good question. So personally I would go all in is a. Is a deceptive phrase because I wouldn't just dive in and say, Oh, I have this idea. Oh, I've done some validation. Now I'm going to spend the next six months going all in on this idea. That's not what I would do, but I would focus on launching and, validating. One idea at a time personally, I have a huge belief in focus, and I'm not saying you can't own multiple products at a time because I was the King of these micro portfolios back in the day where I had 10 different products generating revenue for me, but I didn't launch and grow 10 at once I launched or acquired and grew one at a time. And then I figured out a way to make it sustainable and more, say more autopilot's at a misnomer, but. Mostly on autopilot for now is how I'll phrase it. It's on autopilot for the next three to six months until something happens that I have to circle back. But focusing on one thing, you get into the head space of it, all the information and content that you're consuming, you can adapt or think through how you can apply it to that one thing. And I would be doing a ton of validation at every step. And so when I first come up with an idea, I always think 90%, this thing's going to work. And then with my 24 to 48 hour cooling off period, before I register any domain, which is what I do these days, I wind up falling down to 10 or 20%, certainty that this thing's going to work. Then typically I say, okay, what's my next step to validate, how can I get myself to 25 or 30%? Oftentimes, it's sending a few emails to people. I know it's putting something on Twitter, asking opinions, it's having, face to face or in this case, these days zoom conversations might be putting up a landing page, driving traffic to it, whether it's from my podcast, whether it's from Twitter, whether it's from running cold ads, which I did back in the day when we were validating drip. And I would just try to get that validation one step further, one step further. Now that's if I'm going to build. Maybe a larger, more novel product that doesn't exist in the space today. And I'm trying to validate the idea itself, but what if I know that there's a gap in the WordPress plugin market or that all the plugins that do polls on WordPress is just an example that they aren't very good or that I know that I can rank, it's not that hard to rank high in the WordPress repository is just a little bit of WordPress SEO. The algorithm is not, it's not as complex as Google. It's not actually that smart. So maybe I don't want to validate that everybody needs a Poland plugin. Maybe I want to validate that I can just rank higher. So I get something in there or I email the top 10 poll plugins, especially the ones that haven't had been updated in two or three years. And I say, can I adopt your plug in or can I buy your plugin? So these are ways that I would be going about, you don't always have to build the thing from scratch. but I think the question of multiple or one, which should you focus on, in my opinion, Unless you're stair-stepping. And even with stair-stepping I would focus on that. I was going to do an info product that the bottom end or I would do, or that WordPress plugin or something, as step one. And then I would build on it from there. All right. How do you get your hair looking so good during a pandemic from Pat Foley will. Thank you, sir. I did wear a mask and I get haircuts. That's the honest answer. So I didn't have, I had pandemic hair for the first four months because everything was shut down here, but we are still in, I don't even know what it's like stage one lockdown where you can go to places. Like I went to the gym the other day and we were a lot of face masks, but, knock on wood. Minneapolis is not in, It's not doing as poorly as many of the States around us. And so I appreciate the joking question, but that is the honest answer. All right. Question number two, also from Noah brag and Microsoft connect, he's following up on the above question. He says, if building your first tiny product, like a WordPress plugin, Hey, that was my example. And I often say info-product to WordPress plugin. There are Shopify ad-ons. There are Photoshop ad-ons. There are Google. App store Google Chrome store things you can build. There are, there's a myriad of them and I they're Magento ad-ons that, we can go on and on. anytime there's an app store, anytime there's an ecosystem that has something that you're not just battling to rank in Google for. These are the types of step, one ideas that come up where, I would encourage people to look at. Okay. So if you're building a first tiny product, like a WordPress plugin, what level of customer research should you do? Is it more, you see a problem in ship something? Or should you take a more cautious approach and try to validate further before shipping? I appreciate someone handing over money is the only real value to validation, but I'm trying to get an idea of how quickly you should move and whether it's a case of trying lots of small bats. Oh, that makes sense. It does make sense. I would tend to act pretty quickly and do. I wouldn't tend to do a bunch of customer validation calls or a bunch of customer development calls. if I was going to do a small step, one thing I would validate almost in the start, small stay small approach. So you gotta to start small.com is my first book and while the exact tools and exact numbers that I use there may not be accurate today because it's 10 years old. The tactic, there was you find a small niche or you find, even, not a small niche, but with an underserved corner that you can somehow measure the interest. And whether that's looking at a WordPress plugin and the repo and saying, Oh, it has this many downloads. So it's must be a popular search term. Or you go to the Google keyword tool or you go to H rafts or SEM rush, or Moz today. And you say, Oh, there are 5,000 searches a month for this thing. And there are a couple of tools, but they're not that great. Or they've been abandoned. Or, there's ways to validate just using free or lightly paid, keyword tools and trying to find, Gaps in these market markets, or even these days, there's fewer gaps, but it's places where people have launched in abandoned, or they're really not doing a good job and you see an angle. And then I would try to write some code quickly and move there. Now having a few customer development conversations or trying to figure out, Hey, where do these people hang out? That would use a plugin like this? Oh, they're in a Facebook. They're in a couple of Facebook groups become a part of those Facebook groups and participating they're in these Slack groups. They're in these forums, these, discourse or discuss groups. There are ways to get this up to, I would say 20, 30, 40% validation, and to be able to write code and ship something in two weeks, three weeks for my bet, for my money, I'm probably going to write a little bit of code, and get it out there. And the learning starts with every bit of validation and frankly, getting something out there quickly in this, if it's a small, small niche is not the right word, but if it is a micro idea, I would lean towards action more than trying to validate for months and months. Next question from Twitter, it's from Rami, he is King rum star on Twitter. What advice would you give to someone entering a somewhat competitive market? Let's say five to 10 direct competitors, which is. Sounds ugly, but it's actually less ugly than CRM. Project management, software ESPs, marketing automation providers, where there are literally hundreds of players. So five to 10 direct competitors while that's a thing, not the end of the world. More specifically, what would you do to out muscle? The competition when the resources are fairly equal, but the company, the competition has social proof and social capital. I would not try to out muscle the competition. If I did not have a lot of money or social capital or social proof that you're not going to muscle them. So it's, there's this move in jujitsu or just the whole premise of jujitsu is you don't. If someone, you have a bigger opponent than you, you don't go head on with them and try to out strength them or out muscle them because they will win. What you do is you try to find that you tried to take their momentum when they punch or when they lunge at you and you actually. Perry and you use their momentum against them to get them on the ground. And then you've grappled. Similarly, I would use my opponent's strengths against them. So an example is you have five to 10 direct competitors. They have social proof and social capital. What are they doing wrong? Are you in their forums? Are there private Facebook groups? What are their customers complaining about? Where are they dropping the ball? Because customers are, or companies that get to. A million dollars in ARR, 10 million in ARR, they tend to be leaving out sections of the market that they just have to ignore. And they may be making people, disappointing a certain subset of their customer base or of their prospect base. It's even better. If you get really big customers, these are the I'm sorry, really big competitors, because these are way easier to compete against companies like QuickBooks and. PayPal, think of Stripe launching as PayPal. I think of zero launching at quince, QuickBooks, think of drip, launching against Marchetto Pardot and infusion soft. They're these big lumbering companies that aren't shipping very often and they aren't, they don't have the amazing UX that you can build from the ground up. And they aren't just doing hand holding with their customers and they aren't building the features that a subset or a vertical, of the customer set might want. So I would start at the grassroots and I would start by trying to find five or 10. Unhappy customers that I could interact with and say, what are you unhappy with? And if you'll get someone on the phone and they'll just complain about everything, Oh, the app's impossible to use and it's too expensive. And no one listens to my phone calls and I sent him 10 meals a week and they don't respond. Okay. That's a toxic customer. They're angry with everything all the time. They're going to be unhappy with you too goodbye. But then you'll get people who are they're pretty reasonable. And they're like, you know what? They have ignored this corner of the market where photographers have special, I'm making this up, but photographers have special bookkeeping needs and their tax is calculated differently. And QuickBooks has just not listened suddenly. It's Oh really? who else could support photographers? tax bookkeeping, accounting needs, who, what other things have you tried to fix this? And it's I've looked and there's not. An app that does this and will then it's okay, can I find 10 more photographers or, salon owners or whoever it may be startup founders. And that's where I would start is how do you find that subset, if you have all this competition that is being left out. The other thing I would think about if you're already in the space and you try to look for the hated competitor and do the become the opposite of them, you, if you can't figure out a unique positioning where it's we are like, QuickBooks, but not, we're the opposite of QuickBooks because we suck last or we like QuickBooks, but we're for this particular vertical. So think of like savvy cow, right? So there's Calendly and there's all these big competitors. But look at what Derek Graham is doing with savvy Cal, you got a savvy, cal.com to check it out. He's basically saying. It's for, busy startup founders and executives who have some pretty specific needs and want to maybe guard maker time and want to eliminate the awkwardness of sending a calendar invite. And he's taken a pretty specific tack there. He's taking a unique position in the space. So that's one way, another way in these competitive spaces is to have a unique traffic channel. So that is you look at that. Yeah. What someone like maybe Ruben Gomez is doing with a doc sketch, which is e-signature doc sketch.com. That's a, it's a terribly crowded space with bill, literally billions and billions of dollars in market cap are in that space. And yet he has figured out a way to do amazing content marketing, amazing SEO, and just channel some of that traffic to where he is being highly successful in a competitive space. If I was going to go in to summarize, if I was going to go into a competitive space like this, I would look for a hated competitor. I would look for areas where that competitor is dropping the ball with either a specific audience or specific for people. I would look to position myself uniquely, or I would look for a unique traffic channel or all of the, if you had all of the above, that's where we actually would. Drip. We had, I think, three of those four. Every one of those you have is better. If you only have one, you can still make it work. It's just more of an uphill battle. So thanks for the question, Rami. I hope that was helpful. All right. I'm checking in on Slack here. All right. Producers. Zander is going to keep, alright, Chris producers and keep popping the questions in here. It looks like there's a lot coming into Slack and I will keep moving. I'm checking my time. Okay. I'm about 15 minutes in. next question is from Garrett Lancaster. From Microsoft connect. He said, if you had a slow growing 12 K MRR, self-funded B2B SaaS. I love the specificity of this. So doing about 150 K a year, self-funded B2B, SaaS. What questions would you be asking yourself? And I think he's implying it's slow growing. So what questions would you be asking yourself to get it growing faster? How much do you think about retention versus conversion in this position? Okay. I would be well. So I would look at if I, if my retention was not high, I have a problem because if I remember tension is not high, then I'm going to use this phrase that is it's product market fit. And I know that's just big muddy amorphous thing, but all it means is are people sticking around? Do people love your product? Do they, do you know, do they stick around? Is your turn below six, 7%, your aggregate churn below that number? It depends on price point. Depends on a bunch of stuff, but yeah. If you're below 5%, then I would not be worrying about retention now. And I would be looking about, at increasing traffic and increasing conversion. The big question to ask is where. Where's the metrics gap. If you're churning out 10, 12, 15% a month, that's the number one problem. That's what you have to fix before you do anything else. That's where I found myself when we were building drip, eh, we were about, I'm trying to think. We were a few months after launch and we had grown to eight, 10 K a month and we just were turning everybody out. So that was a big retention problem. You can watch my Microsoft talk. The inside story of self-funded. SaaS growth. I believe it's called and it's from, whatever 2014, 2015, if your retention is fine and people get on and then turn, goes to, goes really low for people. then of course it's how much traffic, what's your visitor to trial, signup rate or visitor trial should be, I'd like around 1%. If I'm asking for credit card and I'd like about. 15% give or take maybe 20% if I'm not asking for credit card. And if I'm substantially below those, then of course you have a. Trial conversion problem. If I'm asking for credit card upfront trial to paid, I want to be between 40 and 60%. If I'm below 40%, I have a problem. you can look in the state of independent SaaS from 2020 and look at what other people, what other conversion rates are, or you can look at, Craig Hewitt's talk from microcopy Europe in what was just last year in 20, it feels five years ago. It was this last October. And it's something about, viewing your metrics, maybe producers and or composts that in the Microsoft connect Slack. But he basically walked through, walks through rules of thumb rules of, And then says, these are the things to pay attention to. If you're outside, if you're below these rules of thumb, otherwise move on to the next thing. And at a certain point you get towards my whole funnel is actually pretty solid. Now I'm just going to drive more traffic. I need to spend money on ads. I need to spend money on content. I need to do integrations. I need to go on podcasts, whatever it is, then let's just see as you get more traffic, your conversion rates and almost inevitably drop. And then you have to figure out how to then cater to those new folks. Next question is still from Garrett. He says, how would you go about offloading tier one customer support, meaning frontline, let's say it's, Intercom chat or it is, user list, messaging or it's email. How would you go about offloading it when quality support slash training, he's an integral part of your business model. Everyone who has this question says when quality support slash training is it's an integral part of your business model. It's an integral part of every early startups business model. It always feels like the founder much. if I'm a developer, I write the best code in the world. I always feel like I can give the best support. And in many cases that's relatively accurate, but how would you go about it? You find someone who's really fucking good. That's what you do. You don't settle for someone who isn't going to learn your tool and who isn't going to be ravenous about, really wanting to make people happy and learning your tool. And I had a non-technical non-developer support guy that I worked with from, I think it was about 2011, 2012, all the way through when we were acquired, then he worked with drip through 2018, 2019. And he was not a developer, but he figured out how to view source. He would go dig into people's JavaScript and hack around in it. obviously on his client side, he wouldn't hack their website. He learned, I taught him how to use FTP. He learned how to edit HTML. Like he was just teaching him this stuff. In self this stuff. And he would sometimes ask me for a loom, a quick screen cast about stuff, but for the most part, he went out and educated himself. And so was he in the early days? Was he the fastest responder to tickets ever will know cause he was teaching himself stuff. But by the time he was, working on drip for a year or two, he knew the product. He knew how to answer support way better than any of us, way better than me, way better than the developers. And that's the kind of person you're looking for. And how did I find them? I went on Upwork. And I went through two or three support people until I found a guy who was really good. He was working for a bunch of companies at once. He was doing three hours for me and five hours a week, then 10. And eventually I said, I just want to hire you. Full-time I was good to work with. He really, we got along, we never did video chat. We never actually met in person. You lived in Mexico. And that was it. Many of you, if you email drip and you, Andy responded to every support request for the first like three and a half years of drip, I think it was three and a half. Maybe it's two and a half. Every single frontline support was just one guy, Andy. And that's what you do. That's what I would do today. Hire good people. Next question from Pablo and Microsoft connect. How do you feel about entrepreneurship being taught to children? Do you think it should be taught? Have you witnessed good execution of teaching children? Entrepreneurship? I. I feel good about it with a caveat. my son had course in eighth grade, or maybe it was freshmen in high school and it was teaching him stuff about intellectual property. It was trademarks and it was logos and he had to design a logo and, so were they teaching him everything we learned in MicroConf of course not. But did he learn some basics that he didn't know the difference between trademark and copyright and some basic fundamentals? I thought that was good. I do think. Every, I think all of us in high school slash college should learn something about entrepreneurship, something about, how businesses work, something about personal finance, to be honest, that's not, why is that not taught in school? Why do none of us know what, like really how the stock market works? You have to go educate yourself. You have to go seek that out. And that to me, or how to just simply, find a budget and stick to it. That to me, it's a real problem that is not taught to, or whether it's, again, whether it's our children, our probably our high schoolers and we have civics and economics right. Where we learn about the economy and nobody pays attention about the, the three branches of government. I'm only joking. Of course people pay attention, but I think a personal finance and something about entrepreneurship, I think they should be exposed to it. To know, this is what entrepreneurship might look like and are examples of people who are making caramels or cookies in a local kitchen. And you could do a tech startup and raise funding or not, or you could start an online business. I do think just being exposed to that would be super helpful for children. yes, I do think it should be taught. I can't think of an amazing example of anyone who's done it. I will give a spoiler that I don't know, she's announced this, but dr. Sherry walling, my wife is writing a book called. it's like raising entrepreneurial children or something like to that effect. That's the working title. So go to the Zen, founder.com and sign up for her email list. If you wanna hear about it, of course, I'll be talking about in the future. I may even contribute a chapter or two Sherry and I had his in founder episode awhile back that, or is it in front of episode, in the first maybe 30 episodes? That was all about raising entrepreneurial kids. If you want to check that out, next question. What are things you notice about bootstrap that bootstrappers commonly overlook that are preventing them from achieving their goals? I think a lot of bootstrappers overlook the fact that you have to market that it's not about building products. I think bootstrappers, don't pay enough attention to their metrics. We see their analytics or their metrics, and they just want to go through and it's Hey, they don't even know what's working. And you ask someone a question and they say, what's working is. Word of mouth and it's yeah, I know. I th I have slacks coming in. Word of mouth is, usually the wrong answer. So there, I think there's a lot of mistakes that people make. And I think if they pay attention to. a lot to MicroConf talks point this out and a lot of the teachings from, I would say listening to startups for the rest of us, even nugget.one, which is a pretty interesting website, just in a Vincent has a pretty interesting course there. So yeah, I think there's. There are definitely the common mistakes building before finding an audience building before validate not an audience, but a customer based building before Valley. And I think these are a lot of things that right. People do. And I think people give up too easily. I think they build something, it goes to a plateau and they give up instead of actually doing the hard work. I think it's a lot more hard work, than people I realize I'm zipping through these questions. Cause there's three minutes left. Another question. This is from vagi. Go out from Cheflytics. He says, what are some of the biggest takeaways you can see across your portfolio of early stage SaaS companies?  Is it one winner, a one or two winners generating most returns, VC style. Is it steady progress by most? Will the majority be default alive businesses? The answer is yes. The vast majority are already default to live businesses, I think, Oh, I think every one of the 13 companies, a batch two is default alive, pretty sure. And  if I were to put a number in at 70% of batch one  - maybe 80%-  are default alive. All of them are making steady progress. All of them. of 23 companies, there's maybe two or three that are still. not growing two or three, four, it's a small number. So what is that? I don't know. Maybe 10, 10, 15% are still trying to find that repeatable channel is still trying to find that, repeatable customer base. But, it is definitely steady progress. I don't know yet on the winner. I don't think it's going to be one to take all. Einar did analysis of a bunch of SaaS apps. He got a bunch of anonymized data and he looked backwards over the last five years. And it, if you do look at returns that it was not winner take all, but it was definitely a power law and power law just means there are a small amount who get 10 or a hundred times larger than the others. And so in that case, yes, that, in that sense, yes, we may get there. But we are still, we want to, I've been doing for 15 years. There's a reason MicroConf, Startups for the Rest of Us, my books and TinySeed exists and it's not to help the winner-take-all. It's to help everyone. I want to raise the tide. so all the boats go up. And yes, even if the returns are generated in that VC style winner, take all, I will still be around. And still be here to help everyone involved. Question from Patrick Foley, have you ever built a business that got a fairly large portion of its revenue from services instead of products, but not just you consulting? Yes. One. I think one, I can think of it. It's called CMS femur. It was a productized service before that term existed. It was @ cmsthema.com. I don't even know if there's a website there anymore. I ran it for about 18 months, two years. I acquired it from someone who wanted to shut it down. I knew how to rank it in Google. I got it to the top, top page at the top page, the first page of Google for WordPress theming and some other things were present Drupal and Joomla. And then I just had an agency. I believe they were in. India. There was somewhere that source two for cheap. I marked them up a hundred percent. So I would try to $500 for you. Send me a PSD. I would send it to my agency in India. They charged me 250 bucks to turn it into a theme. I would send it back. And make 500 bucks. And so it wasn't a productized subscription service, but it was these one off themes. And then as custom stuff happened, we would increase the price. if you needed a bunch of, if you needed mobile responsive back in 2009, then it was obviously more money. So yes, I have, It was fine. It was quite a bit of hassle, more hassle than I, I had that along with a bunch of software products and e-commerce and stuff. And it was okay. I wound up selling it for CMS Themer, still, not still live, not quite the same as its original iteration producers, Andrew posted that micro co-founder. So it looks like, there's all kinds of funky stuff going on. Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's any takeaways I have from that. I like, okay. Services are a great way to get started quick. These days, especially subscription services, like you look at audience ops from Brian castle, or you look at podcast motor from Craig Hewitt and there's other examples. And they get thinking up to, whatever 20, 30, 40,000 a month in no time. And then yes, you have to have process in place. You have to have people to manage. There. There is, it's not a software product, but you learn a lot. It's probably 70, 80% the same. As building a SaaSs and then Craig Hewitt levered it up, To then acquire a PO was plugged into then build cast dos. And now, everything's combined. Yeah, no one it's like a match made in heaven, but it's like a chef's kiss to the store. Your step approach in a way is building these businesses and building on top of each other. All right. We are two minutes over onto one more question from Christophe Engelhart. How do you prepare financially or otherwise for your retirement? It's a good question. I like personal finance. I'm a bit of a nerd with this stuff. So before I had sold drip, we, I was contributing to retirement for most years, for both sharing. I putting them in the U S their IRAs or 401ks. I did stop. I will admit when at the worst times of drip, when it was growing fast and we had cash crunches, I stopped contributing to retirement. My bet was that drip would make enough money in the end, whether through an acquisition or whether through throwing off cash, that it would make up for that. The bet worked out for me. It's not gonna work out for everyone, but by the time we sold drip, I believe between sharing my retirement accounts, we had about $300,000, which I was late thirties. Is that right? And it might've been early forties. I would prefer to have more by then. But I did, when I looked at compounding and how it was growing, we would have had, I'd say a couple million bucks when we retired, but I also counted on having a lot more earnings and being able to put money in. So for me, it's about saving early. I started contributing right out of college. In fact, if you can do anything for your kids or nephews or whatever, especially, a comment on the U S cause I know the retirement system here, but if there is a retired, attack shielded retirement account, like an individual retirement account called an IRA here, as soon as your kids get any income. Match what they make, give and put the money you can put up to $5,500 as of this taping into a retirement account. If you can put it in when they're 15 or 16 compound interest. Is the eighth wonder of the world. I believe Albert Einstein said that. And so the earlier you get, if you invest at 15 versus 30, you get two more doublings of that. If you invest in the stock market. So put it all in high risk stuff. I would be a hundred percent in stocks and if you're making 8% per year, then it's going to double every nine years. If you make 9% per year, it's gonna double every eight years. So from 15 to 30, you get almost two doubles of that. if you put in five grand, it becomes 10 grand, then 20 grand, by the time they're 30. So if you don't contribute, if they don't contribute till the third, they have to contribute $20,000 to have the same impact that you do. when they're that young earlier you can contribute. that's, I started putting money in when I was 22 and just a little bit, I didn't have much money. I wasn't making much, I make 15, 17 bucks out of college per hour. And that, but I started putting 50 bucks, a hundred bucks a month away as early as it possibly could so that you man, thanks so much joining me today that is going to wrap us up for hanging out with me a little longer. Last joke: Can you imagine if one day Microsoft acquired WeWork and named it Microsoft office. We do have some special podcasting stuff coming up soon. We're going to have some voting and some nominations I'm teasing that. So keep your eye out MicroConf.com and thank you as always to hae and Stripe for supporting microphone, the headlines partners for the year. Love working with them. Thanks for joining me. I'll see you next week.

Learn how to offer your customers amazing support over email and Twitter, create a fanatical user base, and how to avoid the quagmire of 1-star reviews. Check out Sarah’s MicroConf speakers page for more talks → https://microconf.com/speakers/sarah-... https://microconf.com MicroConf 2012 #microconf #microconf2012 MicroConf Connect → http://microconfconnect.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail → support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners ► Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Stripe ► Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter →https://twitter.com/Basecamp   Rob Walling: [00:00:00] this week's MicroConf refresh episode where we play the audio of a past. MicroConf talk. Usually one of the top rated talks of all time. I am your host, Rob Walling, and today's talk is from 2012. We are going back in the archives. The talk is from Sarah Hatter of Co-Support. And it's called Cheap and Easy Customer Support. She says, learn how to offer your customers amazing support over email and Twitter, create a fanatical user base and how to avoid the quagmire of a one-star reviews. Sarah Hatter is a multi-time Microcom speaker, and she has forgotten more about customer support than most of us will ever learn. So I hope you enjoy this talk from Sarah Hatter. Sarah Hatter: [00:00:49] yeah. Hi everybody. This is going to be super fun because I'm weaseled my way into getting my Q and a stuff built into my time. So we're going to do three things in my talk. We're gonna talk about who I am, why I'm here. We're going to do some real world examples of how you guys can be doing support faster, better, easier, cheaper, smarter, funnier, all that stuff. And then if you, once I thought that we could also do. Sorta some life lessons about, Ooh, sorry, starting a business because I've only been in this business myself for a year. I've been in the web scene for years and years. And we'll talk about that in a second. do you guys want to hear about that kind of shit or do you not want to hear about that shit? You wanna hear about it? Okay, cool. okay. So let's start real quick with, me who I am, what I am doing here and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I'm super passionate about customer support for apps. I think that we are in a really great place where we're finally at this awesome plateau of. Having customer support, that's awesome and accessible and educational for people is as important as fast code and great slick design and all of you guys in the room know it. And I love that. So many of you guys are doing this yourselves for your own apps and that you're taking that on from the very beginning because it sets a tone for the customer support the rest of it, the app life. I started coach support last year, this year. So we've been in business for, I don't know, Over a year, which I can say. and literally I have been doing customer support for 16 years. My very first job was working at a call center for shit. You buy on TV, like ShamWows and stuff. When I was like 15 and yeah, it was horrible. One of the ones that we sold was, a radio ad for you could call in and get a spiral bound notebook that lists all the brothels in Nevada. And so it was all truckers that would call and I was like 15 years old and sure. Rob Walling: [00:02:41] Where are you going, sir? Sarah Hatter: [00:02:42] So I started doing that and then, I don't have any kids either. I'm not married, but I didn't want to leave out like a kid photo, but I, so I thought, I just show you a picture of me with a mullet in fourth grade. I'm right there in the middle, if you couldn't tell. And the great thing about this photo is because I obviously know what I'm doing, I've been doing it for a long time and yes, you've probably heard of my last job, blah, blah, blah. It was a really great place to work. I learned a lot being there and they're really good, wonderful people. And I like everything about them and they're really wonderful. And you should all like them as friends and be friends with them. so anyway, I don't work there anymore. One of the reasons I don't work there anymore is because I think that since you're really great, smart, wonderful people, they did a lot of really smart things. And so I wanted to talk about some of the smart things that happened when I worked there. One of those being that they launched a product with zero customer support, they didn't think it was important whatsoever. They didn't have a support staff for their product for almost three years until I begged them to let me take over support because I was. Actually embarrassed working there, the products, the customer support for the product was just really bad. And then on top of that, they really never ever thought that customer support was as important as designed. And so it never got the resources of anything else. It was the least, it was most underpaid and the least focused on part of the whole company. So very smart. Really smart stuff again. Good people. and the other thing too, is that support was always an afterthought. They'd build these products, they'd build these products and then they'd bring me in and say, so we built this product and here's what it does. And I'd say, you can't do that. That's going to just cause support. People are just going to have to write support for that. And they'd say, yeah. so anyway, I think that the problem with these smart things that happened at this great company was that. They learn from those mistakes too late. And they ended up building up around this whole philosophy of say no to customers and say no to feature requests and don't listen to them, just build your app and you build it, how you like it, which is great. If you're, you want to do that. But at the end of the day, we're now in a place where we need to build apps based on what people want and what people need and what people are asking for. And so we've all learned. That's the better way to go. So how many of you guys are doing support for your app by yourself? You do it. Yes. I love all you people. How many of you guys are using a help desk? Like a user voice. Who's really super awesome. Or desk or Zendesk or awesome. Awesome. Awesome. you don't need to do that by the way. All of you guys are micro founders. You're micro entrepreneurs. I don't know how many of you guys are profitable, but you shouldn't be spending even $49 a month to do any of that shit. I'm not. And so you make 10,000, $12,000 a month. You should not be paying for a help desk solution right now. So we're going to talk a little bit about what you can do instead. That's literally like super cheap, super easy. We're going to start with emails, forms, and inboxes. I'm rushing through this, but I want, I can see everybody all the way in the back of the room. So if you have questions, please raise your hand and we'll take the question during the talk instead of waiting to the end. so how many of you guys have heard of turbo scan? Do you guys use it? It's an awesome app. It's one of the top paid apps in the iTunes app store. It's an app for your phone. I think for your iPad too, you can take a picture of anything and turn it into a PDF. It's amazing. I use it for contracts all the time and it's crazy, wonderful, and very popular. So what happens if you don't understand how to use this app? This top paid iPad app, that's all over the place that Apple advertises. If you go to turbo scan.com, this is what you get. Please email us. We answered most support emails within a few hours. Thank you. So that's it. This is URL. I think it's turbo scan, app.com. That's it. There's nothing else on the page. And the funny thing about this is besides the fact that it's totally fucked up to do this to your customers. They don't write you back. I've written them 17 times since December, and I've never gotten an email response. So the second thing that's wrong with doing a page like this is you're giving the customer an out number one, because a customer is going to see this and no, thanks. Forget it. I'm not even writing them, but two, you're not gathering any data from them whatsoever. You're not getting a subject. You're not getting any way to triage emails. You're not getting any way to. Run analytics on emails that come through based on time zone or device or any of that stuff. And what ends up happening is you get an inbox that I'm going to show you. This is one of our customers that we just started doing support for you get this name and the URL. This is horrible. This is horrible for any sort of support. And if you did look at this all day long, you wouldn't want to do support either. So instead, the best thing that you could be doing just to start is to build a contact page, a contact form that gathers information and allows the customer to set the tone of the email, set, any tags, gathers information about their device and all that stuff. This is another one of our customers readability. We built this form for them and we give the customer the opportunity to say. I have an issue with this specific thing. I have an issue with the iOS app, the Android app, the mobile website. I have a feature request down at the bottom. I'm even a developer and I want an API key, really specific things. So this does all the work for you, which means when you get to your inbox, the next day, you're seeing everything right there in front of you. It's tagged all this, all these tags are that you can run analytics on the tags. You can scan through this first thing in the morning and pick out every single thing that's I can't log in or I have a problem or this thing sucks. You can leave all the other stuff for later and it gives you a way to control visually how you go into your support. Does anybody do this right now? Yes, you're. You're an Oregon organizational kind of person. Do you have, does this for your clients, or do you have your customers to do it or for your own apps that you're doing that for your own apps? Perfect. I think that everybody should be doing this even for their own personal email. You should have personal email folders that you're putting stuff into reply later. Reply later. I don't want to do this reply now. Another inbox. I wanted to show you too. This is from desk, which is a paid app. Like I said, you don't really need to use pay to apps. I got this great screenshot from Heaton. This is their Gmail inbox actually for Kissmetrics. And once you can see is they have multiple people using one Gmail inbox and multiple email addresses going right into one inbox. And they're able to prioritize using the little superstars function that you can enable under your Gmail settings and all of their emails come in and are tagged with people's names, meaning that person's going to go answer it. Or this is a bug. This is a bug and IE, this is crazy smart stuff. And they're like a billion dollar company, I think. I don't know. I think I've just flattering him at this point, but this is like the super smart thing to do the other really smart thing to do again. You can shift all this stuff out of your inbox. So you're not seeing it. So Cindy can have her own folder and only Cindy goes into their emails that are about IAE, go into one folder. You can send them to a developer to do The other thing that Kissmetrics does, and they're also a code support customers. So maybe that's what I'm talking about them so much is that they offer the selected issue. Tell us about the issue, but way up at the top, we see, how can we help you? The first thing that they say is, have you checked out our support site? Meaning that they've actually are making the self-service for people. You don't have to email me, go find information like right here, and this can link to a help section. It can link to a customer forum. It can link to get satisfaction. It can link to any sort of historical data that you have online that's documentation based. So this is another screenshot of what we did for readability. This is also in desk, but you can see that we have categories about all this stuff and each one of these, how to use it apps for iOS. All of these have multiple articles. And each article is maybe two, three sentences with a screenshot. That's it super easy. It'll take you a Saturday to do it all. You could probably get a hundred of them up. And the great part is right at the top it's searchable. So your customers can just type in anything and search it. Anyone doing this yet for your app? you don't count Philly. If you haven't thought about doing this, think about doing it right now, this would be the very first thing that you do even before you start on support hiring and all that kind of jazz. Get a searchable. Yes. This is desk.com formerly assistly.com. Now Salesforce pretty much any help desk solution will offer this built-in they call it a knowledge base. and it's wonderful. You can also build this yourself in HTML, but it's a little bit easier using a service because it's like. Old timey like tight pad or blogger interface with the select a picture. So if you want to use something like this it'll cost you it's free for two users. So again, a really great free option. If you want to add more users, it's $49 a month. So any questions on that stuff? I know you have him through these, so we can get to question time. I'm really interested in this because it seemed like you were saying that you preferred is he self service. Totally. Oh, you're trying to push me away. I'd like to talk to him. you can do both. It's all about presentation. I think that when you're in a state of developing an app, a customer form is really important because you're getting customers to talk about stuff. You're seeing stuff in public, and it's a historical record of what people are questioning you about asking for information for and how it's also helping. When you have someone post on a forum, this doesn't work. How does it work? I don't like this. They're identifying design plus for you. So that kind of stuff is really great. When you have a searchable index like this, you can track what people are searching for. You can track what the top hits are on your help section. So you get a better sense of what's confusing people. What do they not know? What am I not presenting well enough in the app store? What's not in my description that people are asking me. I think that it's wonderful to be completely transparent and open and let people email you all day long. But I think that most customers just want to get the answer online. So like when we see the app for turbo scan, it's just an email address. That's not very educational for me. There's no other option whatsoever. It's you want to find a nice middle ground where people have accessibility to you, but they also have accessibility to education. Anyone else? More questions? Okay. This is a super easy one. Prioritizing, does anybody have a really good trick for prioritizing email so that they get it done quick and they don't kill themselves at the end of the day? Oh, what's this reschedule things later on. That's amazing. So I love that idea. I use folders for it personally in Gmail, I use labels and like I said, move it out of the inbox. And then the great thing about Gmail or folders is that you see an unread count. So you can go to it at your, whenever you want. Yes, Corey. I'll use a followup that CC too. I'll just essentially say set a one day reminder or six hours or tomorrow, like all kinds of stuff, whether we followed up  and I can actually perfect. Yeah. That's stuff is great. All that kind of stuff. Follow up, get to it later. Get to it later is great. What I like to do, especially if I'm the only person there doing support, which many of you are, is to figure out what I'm going to do first? What matters to me now? What matters for later? Which what's the stuff that I can push on for later. So easily. The very first thing is scanning the inbox like we did with the subjects and the tags for anyone saying I can't log in. Something is broken. These are indications that you need to stop what you're doing and look at the email. And you can look at an email for someone saying, can't log in and read it in two seconds and know whether they're just an idiot or something's broken. So that's important. The next thing, obviously, this isn't working, I need help. I need billing issues. The reason that these two are like top of mind priority for support and should always be answered every single day is because they're paying customers. Not only their paying customers, but if they're paying customers and things, they have a login for your whole website, it means that they also have access to rating you online. So what we find with customers, and when we find, when we do brand salvage of companies that have had a really bad support run, and they're trying to figure out what they can do better is that overwhelmingly people that write iTunes reviews or app store reviews are saying no one ever got back to me from support. And we go and check because we can track those people. We can look them up and see, did we reply to them? Usually they posted their review a day after setting their support request. So this kind of stuff is really important. And all of the app stores now require that you have accessible support information in your app store description. If you go through, if you're in the app store, if you're in like even a Chrome app store, you're anywhere you're even on Twitter, like start Googling and searching for what people are saying about your support, your accessibility, and, use that as a way to prioritize what you should be doing. The next thing, the next two things, I think go hand in hand they're sales emails. How does this work? Does it do X, do you have this feature? And then of course, feature requests. We all love feature requests. Is there anybody in the room who does not reply to feature requests? Awesome. Yes, we're all on track already. Everyone should reply to a feature request. I don't care if you do it today or tomorrow or next week, but you need to reply to them. And the other great thing that you should think about using as a tool is text expander is your friend, is anyone used it? Yeah. So write your scripts, write them with little blanks that you fill in. Say, thanks so much for your vote on this. We don't have plans to offer X right now. We love hearing from you. Send us more ideas. That kind of stuff, use tools that help you get through this stuff easier because if you're letting stuff back up or you're putting things in folders where you're going to follow up on it later, it's going to be a slug to get through. Okay. Any questions on that? That stuff's easy. The next thing. I hate Twitter. I hate Twitter so much that I ran a script recently to block people on Twitter because it doesn't work for my username since it's like sh I get anything that anyone ever types into Twitter with at sh anything on it. I get the responses to I'll give anybody in this room a thousand dollars if they can fix it for me. but I want to talk about Twitter because Twitter is a great free, cheap, easy. Useful way to do support and it's index by Google. It is a historical record of conversations that you have with your customer. It's a historical record of like accessibility that you are have as a brand to you tweeting out updates, you tweeting to, favorite users and all that stuff. Can anybody guess what? My very favorite Twitter account for customer support is like the best Twitter account out there. Who's doing great customer support on Twitter. Anyone. Not Zappos. Anyone else? Corey and Eric taco bell at taco bell. Everybody go and look at it right now. It's amazing. Let's read through some of their awesome Twitter's right now. Okay. Check this one out. Is it possible for me to have intercourse with your food? technically, but we prefer you just eat it like a civil human being, That's I have another one. This is great. It only gets better. Check this one out. I love you. That's all best tweet ever. They're so wonderful. The next one, I think the Dorito taco sucks that makes you and nobody else. It's incredible. Yeah. These are just from a couple of days ago. Like I just do this a couple of days. It goes. Cause I wanted them to be new and relevant. The next one. Do you guys sell hot dogs? Let me check. No. Yeah, this is awesome. Shit. This is awesome. Shit. And so one guy it's one guy, he was hot. He was initially hired as a social media intern and now he's taken it over completely. So it's pretty awesome. And this kind of freedom that you have with customers. Is going to elicit raving loyal fans because there's no bullshit here. There's no, I'm sorry. You don't like our Doritos taco Locos. Maybe you'll like our blah, blah, blah, blah. They is that makes you a nobody else. Awesome. And it's taco bell, it works with their brand, do have a voice at a tone that works with your brand. That's fun and engaging. This is another really cool, like a whole conversation that my friends and I were in. About taco bell. And they actually were like pacing yourself as overrated. Overrated. Let's do this because my friends said I'm going to eat Doritos all weekend long. Like people, this is the kind of conversation you want people having about your app and your service and your company having it in a fun way. Last one, Corey who's in the room. Mrs. No tweet leaves, no talk related tweet unturned. I love it. Their responses. Or trying to believe that like they're just into it, this kind of stuff is really inspiring for anybody who wants like a free, easy resource to engaging with your customers. Do you guys think that you should reply to every single person on Twitter? do you think that you should reply to every single person who like mentions you on Twitter? Yeah. Tell me your answer. Why would they use my name? If they want me to know. that's a little bit different. if someone is actually writing to you specifically at D absolutely. You should respond to everybody, you should respond to everybody and just be fun and friendly. Because what we learned from looking at the taco bell is language is important, but so is having fun and not being super buttoned up corporate about your app and your company and being professional. I hate professionalism so much. okay. So that's that? That's the Twitter stuff. Does anyone have any questions about that kind of stuff? Yes. I use my personal account, but people use it as a customer support channel. That happens to me too. personally I myself in this position. So I just have to give up on that. And if you have a personal account, I do need somebody to monitor it. Yeah. I think you should use whichever one has had has a sort of built up audience of fans using it. And if you want to have a private account, create a personal private account without sight, that's never going to happen again. But if you or your brand, or if you were known for your brand, like I'm known for my brand, whatever, and people I think already know that I don't get at replies. So a lot of people will reply to my company account, which we never used because. I'm the brand. So if you want to separate the two, I would certainly suggest now if you guys haven't done this already have a private, personal account, you can still use your face as the brand and still use that other account customers. Anything else about Twitter? Yes. Question as much as you call it. One thing I didn't notice Very cool. So yeah, he said, if you guys didn't hear him, he's seeing that he leaves the messaging on his mobile. is it like your, the mail app or whatever the signature that just says sent from my iPhone or set well mobile. And it's a really great indication to his customers that he's always available and accessible. I think that's great. You shouldn't be doing that during dinner though. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to move into the last little segment about real life customer support stuff. Some of you guys saw me talk about this a few times before this year. language that's used in support that I think a lot of us are guilty of or have been guilty of in the past. So I'm trying to eliminate from the support vernacular, and those are what I call these empty words. So I'm just going to put them up there and we can discuss. Like what they feel like as they come up feedback, hate that word. Worst word ever written ever by anyone content, probably worse inconvenience. I can't even spell this word right. Most times, which means it's evil to me just to even see it is just terrible that isn't this isn't. We don't, we won't, we can't anyone who's familiar with my former career life have probably heard a lot of these words a lot from that great company. Does anyone know? I don't like these words. No. Okay. So good. No, one's heard this talk before. Feedback is the sound that I'm microphone makes one, a good Target's too close to it. You don't want to ever tell your customers thank you for your feedback because that's just completely brushing them off and saying, get out of my face. Content is a way of being very derogatory about somebody's words that they've written to you in earnest. So it's not content, inconvenience. We've all know this whole, like the old adage. If I spill hot coffee, I'm not going to tell you, sorry for the inconvenience. I'm gonna say I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm so sorry. That's the kind of focus that you want to have with your customers so that they know that you really care about what they're saying to you, whether it's in email or in Twitter or wherever. So the opposite of this then would be full words here. Some of my favorite things to say to customers, I encourage you all to give it a try. Thank you. I'm sorry. That's a hard one. This sucks. I know it's frustrating. That's a bug. You're right. Great idea. Thanks for the vote. And the last one, I don't know. I have a lot of customers who have a lot of hard time with this. I know 80 told me that after a year of me training his team, he's still having a hard time not saying, unfortunately, which is another one of the words I hate. It's hard to get out of the habit of saying these words because we're so used to hearing them. So we get really used to saying them. And one of the worst ones is saying, I don't know, and saying, I'm sorry. I've customers who refuse to say, I'm sorry. And I think why not? What's the big deal. What's the big deal. It doesn't matter. You're saying I'm sorry. Doesn't mean you're taking responsibility for anything. It just means that you're really sorry that someone's pissed off at you and you're going to try to do your best to fix it for them. They would disagree with that. No, I don't feel like you guys don't want to say that you disagree, but I would say try to get these into your vernacular. And one really easy way to do that is if you're going to use shortcuts, keyword, shortcuts autocompletes, or something like text expander, start putting these into your scripts and don't take them out. Even if they don't sound like you. Even if they sound uncomfortable, trust me, this is what your customers want to hear. They don't want to hear the professional crappy feedback, content speak. So that's it for that side of things. Are just summary on this support. Isn't as important as code and design, you should invest in it as much as you do anything else and development of your app. And when I say invest, money, time and hiring the right people to do it and not just finding someone to do it because you don't want to do it. And they're not really even qualified to do it. That's not going to help you keep it friendly, keep it fast, educational and fun. Be like taco bell. I can't believe I'm even saying that I don't even eat taco bell. And I think their Twitter is just so incredible and amazing. Secondly go make money. That's what we're all here to do. That's what I've been trying to do this year and it's been working great. And I think that you guys are, if you think about like the customers, the people who are going to actually be handing you money to do these things, you remember that we need to be great and kind and awesome to them as well as educational and offer them accessibility and all that stuff. So that's the end of that part. Any other questions? Yes. Yes. Wait yes. My support team is really friendly and I have to, a lot of times going and tell them to cut it out. You have to fire some customers that just overrun. So maybe you could speak to that for just a moment. So do you, yeah. So his question, you heard his question. Do you have problems with people just asking, taking up too much time of your support people? Yeah. So when I worked for this really great company that I used to work for, and I was the only person doing support, I was answering maybe 200 emails a day on average, and every single day from March of 2009 until probably April of 2010, I got one or two emails from the same guy over and over and over. And it was really weird because every time he wrote me an email, it would be like, please advise, I never, we never talked before. Like we're not friends, come on rich. I know you What I ended up doing was seeing like, what the fuck is this guy? Does he have no, does he do nothing else than write me support emails? And it was account. And I found out that he was paying the most money. He could pay us for four apps every single month. And he'd been doing that consistently for a year. So to answer your question, I ended up comping all of his accounts because I think that's amazing loyalty. And when you look at it that way, it's far less annoying. That's the one thing I would do, but if there's customers are not making you money and they're really just being a time suck, you just need to tell them you're being a time suck and you can do that kindly what I found that you're being a time suck. This is the thing. if you were to educational setting, I'm going to be honest with you and be like, dude, you know what? I got to go. Write me an email with all your questions and I'll answer them when I can. But this one and back and forth and back and forth thing is not working for either of us. So some things that we advise people to do when they have these times, lucky customers is to tell them, save all your questions for one big email and send it to me at the end of the week, that works for a lot of people. They end up getting emails that have 10 or 12 questions in them on a Friday, but it happens saying to the customer, it sounds like you have a lot of questions about this. do you want to have a quick phone call and we can go over some of these things and trust me as much as I hate phone support, a quick phone call with someone alleviates a lot of the stress and anxiety they have about using your app. So when you see people coming back and forth, what does it do this, how does it do this? Does it do this? That's also an anxious person that just needs to be reassured that everything's be cool with you guys. So if none of those things apply, just stop replying to them. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Don't ever do that. Don't ever do that, please. Okay. I get, I comp their account for free for life. No, their whole, all of their accounts, they were paying us. Yeah. So really different from the philosophy of the cool company that I worked for. but I think it was really wonderful for the customer and they ended up just loving it and that's what counts. That's what matters. Yes. So I have a question about outsourcing support, single founder, every hour I spend in the sport is an hour. I'm not working on a bug and it's not fixing Rob Walling: [00:29:00] features Sarah Hatter: [00:29:00] or anything. how, what suggestions do you have on outsourcing support? Good sources, techniques, trip, tips, training. So how do you know about how many support emails you get per day? I try to shove everybody over to my support forum instead. So I've been doing that. if they give me an email, I'm like, Hey, I'm a single guy here. I go to the support forum there's stuff over there to, cause most of the questions probably vastly. Majority of the 90% or more are all questions that are either answered in my FAQ or are there things that they can search on in the Rob Walling: [00:29:29] forum? Sarah Hatter: [00:29:30] So I tell them that generally, and they can't find that. So we need to get a little bit better about being service clearly. okay. So let's say you get less than 25 emails a day on support. It's that's an opportune time for you to raise up a great support person who can be with you for a number of years. But who's starting out in this support role with you at the beginning of things, we do outsource support, very minimally. We like to do it for people that have one to two people on their teams. So it's mostly people like this in the room. and there are people like you who just, they need to spend time on dev. They can't be doing support for them. So there's resources out there. One of the other really great resources out there that I hesitate to tell you guys, because it'll put me out of business is find really loyal customers that like you and that are really excited about you and give them superstar status in your forums to answer your customer questions on your behalf. It works, especially on stuff like on guest satisfaction. You can take someone who comments on a lot of stuff or who points people to there's an answer over here. You can actually make them a representative of your company. On a forum like that. And if you really trust him, pay him, 15 bucks an hour to answer the 25 emails in two hours or something like that. yeah. Okay. Other questions, we're going to move into the lightning round real quick here. Do you have a lot of the last question? Okay. so the product that I sell is very technical and very complex, very kind of computer science-y like, good point. Yeah. Everyone is reinventing the Guggenheim machine or whatever it's called the Google machine. So the problem, my question is, and it's pretty good and it works pretty well most of the time, but when I do get, get bug reports, they're really deep and really hard. And it's yeah, I can. I can look at this and it's going to take me like the next six months to solve this problem. what's the best way. Or would you speak to, basically saying you're right? You have a point, you found a bug. I'm sorry. I'm not going to get it fixed tomorrow or maybe Rob Walling: [00:31:27] ever Sarah Hatter: [00:31:28] that's it. That's it. You did it. Yeah. So great. I'm out of a job. Thanks a lot. So I do that with people all the time. And especially when you know, a, this is a deep seated bug. That is where we're putting a lot of resources and figuring out how to fix it. And it's not a tomorrow fix or when it's a feature request that we know is not coming for years and years be honest because the problem is, if you tell a person anything else he's going to write you in a week, did you get that bug fixed is an update coming and you don't ever want to string people along again. Honesty, as Jason said, endears people to you. They want to be loyal to people who are honest to them. Yeah, be honest. And if it's something that a lot of people are reporting, you need to put it in a public place, like on a forum or in your Twitter or whatever we know about this bug known issue. We're working on it, hard heart issue. That's it. Okay. We're gonna do that. Quick lightning round of my business advice. Can you hold it? And just to the end, anyone else has got their hand up. I do want to hear your questions, but I want to run through these slides really quick. so I started this business a year ago and I was at a very lucky place because I had amazing advisors. My last, my former boss, I had knew a lot of people in the industry and I got really great advice from them and it wouldn't do me any good to not share it with you. Some of the stuff is my own and some of it is not, and I'm not giving attribution to anyone. So you can give me credit for all the really good stuff. so this is the first thing never, ever lean deep into business advice given to you by someone who doesn't have a fulfilling and healthy, personal life. I know we joke about the kid pictures, but the kid pictures are important because it shows that these people up here have lives outside of coding all day long. It shows that they have families to invest in and hobbies and other things that they're doing besides just sitting in their cave until three in the morning. if I'm ever going to ask someone advice about anything, I want to know that they have great relationships. They have hobbies, they're doing stuff outside of coding. On top of that, you want to surround yourself with people who don't give a shit about what you're building, but love who you are and not the opposite. We love conferences like this because it gives us a sense of camaraderie with everyone. But these are not the people that we need to surround ourselves with. These are not the people that we need to be talking with or texting with all day long. We need to find people who give our egos a little bit of a slam because it helps us remember there's humility in what I do. I'm not this great God building the next, whatever I called it. Guggenheim machine. So anyway, the next one is really important. I will take credit for this. It's okay to give away your ideas. you shouldn't keep your ideas. You should just talk about your ideas because we don't live in an age anymore where people are here to steal your ideas. you're going to make money by executing the most elegant and harmless and interesting version of any idea, not by being the only person to try it. So it doesn't matter if there's competitors. It doesn't matter if there's other people in the app store doing the same thing. It matters whether you're doing it better and you're doing it more efficiently. And you're a little bit kinder about it. The next one version of that I heard that's really good is, people can steal your idea, but they can steal your backup. Absolutely same sentiment. Absolutely. the next one go to therapy. If you need to tell them, you start your company, they'll know what to do next. Trust me. Therapists are really great at this kind of stuff, because there gets you to talk about stuff you never get to talk about, but always think about you're paying the money so they can't walk away from you. And they have experienced in people transitioning from careers to career, especially people who are over 30. That's one of the, one of the biggest reasons that people go to therapy is because they're transitioning from career to career. So they're trained in how to do this stuff. They're training how you walk you through it. It's very important. next thing don't be a Dick. Swagger is not something you need to be successful whatsoever. In fact, it will repel people from you and you want to be bringing people towards you and bringing people in to help you more and to be around you and to like you. the next thing, this is a piece of advice I got from a friend of mine. Gary Vaynerchuk, totally name dropped right there. If you want a mentor, find someone who's amazing and asked to buy them dinner and take them out and do this until they offer to do the same for you. When they start offering next time, it shows that there is engaged in your development as you are engaged in learning from them. And that's a solid relationship that you can have with someone. I know that there's a lot of controversy about the whole like sending entrepreneurs and famous people emails. And let me buy you drinks. Let me buy you dinner. Trust me. it's worth putting yourself out there cause someone's gonna bite on it. the next thing remember that unkind people are maniacally unkind to themselves first and foremost. This includes your competitors who are going to be saying crappy things about you. This includes bad app store reviews. Just includes customers who are mean, this includes anybody. Who's going to tear you down on tech crunch or hacker news or whatever. Remember that they're there. It makes their unkindness towards others, more sad than annoying. I keep that in perspective and also keep it perspective that you don't ever want to react in kind to anyone who's saying negative or poorly worded things to you. next thing asks for advice from everyone, including your customers, ask for like people to write you feature requests. If you know that there's stuff that you want to add to your app, ask people what they think about it. Ask for advice from every single person that you meet, because you're going to get a lot of it. And that's going to be how you grow as a business leader, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO or whatever on top of that, find a spiritual center that's bigger than you and spend time thinking about it. And I don't mean religion at all. I don't mean yeah, I don't mean a religion, anything that's bigger than you that you can dwell on and spend time thinking about and know that there's something that grounds you out there. And again, this gets back to having a healthy, personal life and a healthy life outside of your work. Next one. I'm totally calling out Dan on this because he talks about it yesterday and I think he was wrong. Be good to your body, donate your desk, get enough sleep. We are so grow party about powering through these work times. we brag about not eating and not getting sleep. And I think that's a detriment to your mind. I think it's a detriment to the work that you do. I think when you're well rested, you make better decisions. And when you eat, your brain is fueled and those things should never be compromised just because you have the will to win. You can have both at the same time. Okay. So that's it. That's my advice. That's all I have at taco bell. Don't forget that. and there was a couple other questions you guys want to ask them real quick. think about that. When you say Rob Walling: [00:37:42] surround yourself with people, do you mean at home or work or both? Sarah Hatter: [00:37:47] both, whatever works for you, whatever you think is most productive for you. Mostly for me, it's at home. Like none of my friends have any idea what I do all day long. I have tried to explain it to him and they don't get it. I think most of them think I'm unemployed. I think I know my ups guy thinks I'm unemployed because I see him more than pretty much anyone else. But I think I don't know what they think I do when I'm gone all the time. Maybe I'm just on vacations three days a week, but yeah. So whatever works for you, I'm not sure if you answered this already, but, do you ever fire customers? Yeah. And, what point do you decide? Like I'm going to find that customer whenever they're a Dick to me. Yeah. And the second that it's gone over that line of, I'm trying to be as helpful as I can and they're just not being responsive. And sometimes, like I said, in that slide, people that are unkind for a reason, and sometimes I need to vent. And usually that ends up being like, On the lowest denominator there, and that's always a support person. So there's a difference between needing to vent and me being telling a person. I know you're frustrated. I'm so sorry about this. And then coming back and coming back, it just being vicious. I don't need to deal with that anymore. That takes away from my time developing a great app for that person. And for the other people who are really excited to you Rob Walling: [00:38:57] As a reminder, this talk is in our YouTube playlist called Building Your First SaaS, the ultimate crash course, if you haven't checked that out head over to youtube.com/MicroConf and be sure to subscribe to our channel while you're over there. We are pushing out. New videos almost every week at this point. And it's a valuable resource that as a founder and aspiring founder should be able to get some value out of. So I hope you're enjoying this podcast. If you are. We'd love to hear from you on Twitter @MicroConf @RobWalling. Talk to you next week.  

http://microconfonair.com In a recent blog post (https://allisonseboldt.com/september-2020/), Allison Seboldt, Founder of Fantasy Congress, pondered whether right now was the time to put a pause on her plans for the expansion of the product. During this conversation, Rob and Allison will chat about some of the elements that go into what that decision means, what steps to take to let things run on autopilot, and what comes next. Allison is a self taught developer and bootstrapping enthusiast. After working as a web developer for four years, she quit corporate life to pursue her passion project. Fantasy Congress is an online game that puts a fantasy sports spin on politics. Players draft members of Congress for their team and earn points based on legislative actions like votes, sponsoring bills, and debating on the chamber floor. Fantasy Congress is intended to be a fun way to connect with friends while also helping people stay engaged and informed in the political process. https://microconf.com MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Hey https://hey.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/hey   Transcript Hitting the Pause Button On Your SaaS with Allison Seboldt Rob Walling: [00:00:00] And we're live. Welcome to this week's MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob walling, every Wednesday, 1:00 PM. Eastern 10:00 AM. Pacific. We live stream. For 30 minutes and we covered topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom and purpose and allow us to value and maintain healthy relationships. We believe that showing up every day, shipping that next feature, next piece of marketing copy or closing your next sale is a way to build a sustainable company. We don't ask for permission to start companies. We build and ship real products. So the real customers pay us real money. Welcome to MicroConf On Air. You may be able to hear my dog in the background. This is live streaming in a pandemic. I have a couple of children at home, as well as a Sharpie who is steadfastly guarding the front door. Today. We are talking about hitting the pause button on your SaaS. It's a, an interesting topic. And a new one that I don't think I've covered before, where they're on this, this show or on other podcasts that I've done. I am pretty excited to dive into this. My guest today is Allison Seboldt. Of Fantasy Congress. She's the founder of Fantasy Congress @ fantasycongress.com. Allison is a self taught developer and a bootstrapping enthusiast. After working as a web developer for four years, she quit corporate life to pursue her passion project, which is Fantasy  Congress. Fantasy Congress is an online game that puts a fantasy sports spin on politics. Players draft members  of U.S. Congress. I love this for their team and earn points based on legislative activities, actions like votes, sponsoring bills and debating on the chamber floor. Fantasy Congress is intended to be a fun way to connect with friends while also helping people stay engaged and informed in the political process. So again, we're going to be talking today a little bit about, building and loans and putting Fantasy Congress on pause for the moment.  We're going to dive in. So Allison, welcome to the show. Allison Seboldt: [00:01:54] Hey Rob. Thanks for having me. Rob Walling: [00:01:56] Absolutely. we were just chatting before we hopped on that. I got we're. We're just, what a five hour drive away from each other here in the Midwest. And while I got six inches of snow yesterday, you didn't get any over in Chicago. Is that right? Allison Seboldt: [00:02:10] No, but yeah, last year for Halloween, we got three inches. So I'm very familiar with this experience of October snow. Rob Walling: [00:02:19] Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Cool. let's dive into this cause I'm pretty, pretty intrigued by your story. it's an interesting, you launched into, a, B2C play, And you people can follow along on your blog, actually. What is the URL of where you're blogging? Allison Seboldt: [00:02:36] AllisonSeboldt.com. Okay. Rob Walling: [00:02:38] And it's S-E-B-O-L-D-T. And I read it several of your updates and watched you watched your progression, but yeah, really, you've, as a developer, you're obviously, really leaned into this world of indie hacking. Can you tell us a bit about your journey from teaching yourself to code? So we'll go from, Hey, you already know the code, but deciding, Hey, I am going to build Fantasy Congress and I'm going to go all in on this. You want to talk us through how you made that decision? Allison Seboldt: [00:03:04] Yeah. I was teaching myself to code around like 2012, 2013, and in 2014, that's when I got my first job. And 2014 is actually when I came up with the idea of Fantasy Congress. So I came up with it. Originally, when I first thought of it, I was like, Oh, that would be like such an interesting side project to put on my portfolio, but I got a job and then I got busy and didn't really think about it. I was still obsessed with the idea though. I just, I couldn't get it out of my head. And I was working in the field for awhile. I tried starting it as a side project a couple of times, and it just didn't really work for me. coding all day or working 40 hours a week and then commuting and coming home. I just wanted to rest, I didn't want to continue coding and fantasy congress was a kind of labor, intense, sensitive side project. So it didn't really work for me. I was still obsessed with the idea though. And in 2017 I was thinking about, Oh, what I want to do next in my career. And I decided to save up money and just. Quit my job and dive into it. So beginning of 2018, I just dove head first into it. Total newbie had never started a business before, had never done anything like this before. And it was just like, Hey, I'll sink or swim. Let's see what happens. Rob Walling: [00:04:23] And here we are two and a half years later. Yeah. That's a that's interesting. So you didn't want to do it on the side. Cause that's obviously the path a lot of people take because they do have the day job and they want infinite runway in essence, which is what a day job gets you. Was it the desire to not do it on the side? Was it that you were tired in the evenings, you felt like your focus was split. what went into that decision to truly quit your job? Because some, while some people do that, it's obviously not the most common thing you hear developers do. Allison Seboldt: [00:04:52] Yeah, they were two pieces to that. So when I was trying, so I did try to start it as a side project a couple of times, and I didn't have the time management skills I think I have now. So it just felt too big, I wasn't, I never felt like I was making progress on it. I would come home and just dread, Oh, I have to do more work. So it was more just, I think I have a certain amount of coding hours in me per day, and like doing a side project while also having a full time job it was too much for me to handle today. Now I think I might have a little bit, I have better time management skills, honestly, like being an entrepreneur has taught me time management skills. So I think I would probably. It would probably be easier for me now, but at the time then it didn't really work for me. and then the other thing too, I wasn't really happy in my current job. So I was Oh, what do I do next? Do I go get another job? I don't know what if I don't vibe with that team. I just, the entire time, for the full four years I was working in the industry. I just, I was obsessing over this idea and I was like, Oh, I, I've tried to start this side project and it's not working. I feel like the only way it would ever actually happen is if I worked on it full time. So I just, I decided I was at this crossroads and I was going to go for it. Rob Walling: [00:06:13] Yeah. And that's, and it's a luxury to be able to do that. a lot of people, it's hard for them to save up enough money to be able to, to do that. congratulations for being able to pull that together. I'm curious, I've never heard of, when I see the idea for this. It's a no brainer. It's of course that should exist. Does it exist beyond that? Did it exist before you built fancy Congress or did you truly innovate in this space? Allison Seboldt: [00:06:39] no, I did exist previously. there's been a few different iterations of it. The most popular one was in 2006. It ran from 2006 to the end of 2007, I believe. and it was started by some college kids in California. And they, it, it's funny, I've talked to the previous founders a little bit and they said, it got, it picked up steam. They moved to DC to work on it, but it wasn't profitable. And I believe they sold it to Politico in 2008 and political kind of turned it into some other game. and then they pursued something else. And then there's been other people who have started similar side projects or done similar things on the internet, but none of it's ever. Really taken off. I feel like no one seems to have treated like a business. From my perspective, when I was thinking about starting this as a side project, obviously I Googled, okay, this has to exist already. Surely somebody else has done this. And I did find these previous versions, but nobody was charging for it. Nobody seemed to be like making money off of it. They all seem to be just side projects. Like I did this thing and I put it up online or in the case of the college kids in 2006, they were primarily trying to make money off of ad revenue, which didn't work out. So my thinking was, if I treated this more like a business, more Draft Kings fan duel. Maybe not like betting on it, those are definitely businesses. So if I focused more on, can I get people to pay for this? Maybe it would be more sustainable and grow and become this thing that I think is a really big thing that I think it could be. Rob Walling: [00:08:12] and is that the revenue model? Do you charge like a monthly or an annual subscription fee? Allison Seboldt: [00:08:17] Yeah. So right now I have two audience. so there's recreational players and then there's educators. Cause I learned in the process of making this, that civics educators find this very useful tool. so for the recreational players, they pay a monthly subscription fee and then the educators pay a flat yearly fee. Rob Walling: [00:08:36] Got it. And what's the range of those fees? Just to give folks on it, Allison Seboldt: [00:08:40] the recreational players right now, it's $19 a month. And then that's so you sign up and that allows you to create leagues and then you can invite anybody to play in your league for free. And then, for the educators, it's $149 for a year, and you can create as many leagues and add as many students as you need to. Rob Walling: [00:08:59] Got it. And is that similar to pricing of a fantasy football? App like a FanDuel or whatever. I don't really watch sports. So I don't know much about sports betting thing or fantasy or what, Allison Seboldt: [00:09:12] it, it's like kind of both. So that's how most fantasy sports apps make their money is based off of, vetting. So I, I haven't done those myself. Honestly, I think it's usually a, you sign up for free and then you add your account and put money into it. Or you pay you like pay to enter a league. And if you win, you get like a prize or whatever, and they take a percentage of that money or something like that. So Rob Walling: [00:09:37] I see Allison Seboldt: [00:09:37] there, most of them are not paid to play, I'll say right. Rob Walling: [00:09:41] That's what I was thinking. most, there really isn't B to C SaaS. It's arguable. If there are any B2C SaaS apps that are at, at scale. Oh, and cause they just tend to use the Fremont some model like that. It's either going to advertising or it's monetizing something. That's not the people because consumers are just did you consider it a model like that, more like the fantasy football model where people do, contribute and then take you take a cut. Allison Seboldt: [00:10:06] so initially I'll say in, when I first quit my in 2018, I was thinking, originally that version two, that was my MVP. That was based off of the midterm elections in 2018. And I was thinking, okay, so it'll be freemium because I didn't know any better. I thought anything, I thought every app had to be freemium, honestly. And I was thinking he had to be freemium and then I'll make money. I'll try to follow this fantasy sports style. like people can win money off of it or whatever. And I consulted some lawyers and the lawyers were like, you definitely cannot do that. Do not do that unless you have a lot of money to spend on. Yeah. Licenses and legal fees and whatnot. And I was like, okay, I won't do that then. so I, then I thought like I do the normal freemium approach, which is where you can sign up for free. And then if you want extra features, you'll pay for them. there'll be like a special, better account that you can sign up for an upgrade. I never got to that point, obviously, because freemium is. It's so hard just to ship something, especially like the very first time you're shipping, something like this. And so I never got to that point to create extra features. but yeah, so I did explore the, the fantasy more traditional fantasy sports style aspect of it and walk away from it quickly. Rob Walling: [00:11:25] Yeah. And that makes sense. And there are a lot of businesses that work at scale. Or that work with a lot of funding or that work with, again at scale with a million users that just aren't, they don't make sense when you have a hundred or 500 users and you either have to monetize them differently or the, or they just don't work. there are even eBay doesn't work with 500 people using it. You need. Millions of people, you need the network effect. Facebook doesn't work with 500 people unless it's a really tight knit group. It's only at Harvard or whatever. and obviously, fantasy sports, a fantasy sports site with only a few hundred people on it is probably more, it's probably a, a much more challenging thing to run, but it sounds like that there was an inflection point as you were building this where you became aware of. the worth of Fantasy Congress for educators. And you specifically said like civics instructors, how did you, how did you find that out first off? And I guess perhaps, secondly, is it co university or is it a more high school level folks? Allison Seboldt: [00:12:24] I's more high school focused. Although I have, I've had professors from West point reach out to me. I've had a few different, college professors reach out to me. So there's interest there as well. Yeah. So what happened in 2018 was I was trying to build this freemium app and I think got to the beginning of the fall. And I was obviously nowhere I wasn't in any position to start charging for upgraded features. so I was kinda like, Oh, I don't know. I'm just going to try to ride this out and then figure it out after that. And I had always thought educators might be interested in Fantasy Congress. I just didn't know how to begin reaching them. I thought that they would need like all kinds of crazy extra features. So what happened was they actually found me. Which is crazy because I maybe did 50 yellers worth of Reddit ads. And that was all the marketing that I did for Fantasy Congress in 2018. But somehow they found me and labor day weekend, it got shared on a. Facebook group of 4,500 AP government teachers. And they just went crazy for it. they all signed up at once that too use day after labor day, they were all trying to get their students onto the app. And I had this like really janky draft, like live draft app that I had written with WebSockets I'd never used WebSockets before. So like, all of these classes were trying to draft at once and they were crashing my app. so I just shut everything down, sent everybody an email. And I was like, Whoa, I don't know where you all came from, but you all found me and we just need to take a breather here. so I found out they all came from this Facebook group and I just that Tuesday after I shut everything down so that everybody in email is we're having issues. We'll figure it out. I was just okay, this seems like an opportunity. I need to ask for money here because these people seem really motivated. Maybe like educators could be part of, I could pivot to focusing on educators. If they'll pay me, I will pivot to them. So I started asking for money and they paid and I was like, okay, this seems viable. I think I just, I think I just validated. Rob Walling: [00:14:36] Yeah. That's a cool story. And it's one of those that, I often talk about the success involves hard work, luck and skill in varying combinations, depending on your story, and it's obviously we're putting in hard work to build this and you had built up the skills of being a developer, and then you started building up the ability to ship product and everything. And you got a little lucky with someone posting to a Facebook group, someone discovers you based on $50 of ads or maybe it was something entirely. Maybe they just Googled you and found you. So then that leads to now you have these two different, customer segments. You have the consumers that you mentioned earlier in 19 bucks a month, then you have the educators 149 a year. at brings us to last month where you posted a blog post and you said you hit a thousand dollars in revenue, just over a thousand dollars and 550 of that was recurring revenue. but at the end of the post, you said Fantasy Congress is still my passion, but it's time for a break. I'm curious what you mean by a break? Like what does a break mean to you and why did you come to that decision? Allison Seboldt: [00:15:40] Yeah. So to me, a break means I've been grinding on this full time and just, it's been my one and only, so to me a break means I'm just going to like probably, I don't have any features planned to ship out in the next two weeks. Usually it's Oh, I know exactly what I need to do today. I know exactly what I need to do tomorrow. It's work, and I'm just right now, I'm just taking a step back to assess and reflect on. What, where, where should I send my energy next? I came to that decision because, so I was doing like contracting work to support myself. And that ended in June. And I thought, Hey, I don't have anything lined up. I have some savings built up. I this environment that we're in right now with all the educators moving online and the political environment and the election coming up, it really seems like Fantasy Congress could really take off this year. So I'm just, what if I, take some time to just focus hard and completely on fantasy Congress go full time on that. I set a goal to reach ramen profitability by the end of October. And last month, even though I made, almost 1200 in revenue, just in last month, when I was looking about how I made that revenue, I didn't feel like I could replicate it and let alone like double or triple it, in October. So it was Hey, I'm not going to reach my goal. So it let's just take a step back and reassess what happened and then, pick it up in a couple of weeks or a month and then go in a new direction. Rob Walling: [00:17:12] Got it. Yeah. Working for something, working on something for two and a half years and not having the traction you want is hard. And I feel like a break. I feel like that could reenergize you given how much passion you've had for this thing over two and a half years, do you feel like that's what it's going to give you? If you take a step back for a month or two that you'll come back, re-energized or do you think it will offer new ideas that you come up with while you're having that downtime? What do you hope to get out of that break? Allison Seboldt: [00:17:44] this is just like something that I've always done. Anytime. I started to feel burnt out or stressed out about something and not to say I was like, totally burnt out on fantasy Congress. when you go really hard and you have a goal in mind and you don't reach it, like that's a bit defeating. So any time I've set a big goal for myself and been a little disappointed that I don't meet it. I always just take a break. This is just something, when I was teaching myself to code and trying to get a job, I like did this too. And I always felt like my biggest breakthroughs came when I was taking those breaks. It was not actually giving up or whatever, but just like throwing up my hands and just like not thinking about it and pouting, and just walking away. And then, I'd be washing the dishes or something then like a big breakthrough would come to me. So it's more just about. Letting my brain decompress and. Just giving myself time to reflect too. I think sometimes I get to do into my coding bubble and I'm just so focused on shipping features or whatever. And in the past like week or two, I've been doing just this reflection and not. Actively, it's always on my mind, your business is always like in the back of your mind, you're always thinking about it, but not actively like sitting down with a pencil and paper and like trying to figure out problems. And I've just been reflecting. It's Oh, I should probably reach out and talk to my current customers and get some feedback from them. So sometimes when you're too deep in the weeds, it's hard to see the obvious stuff. So it's kinda just like pulling back and taking a break and. Looking at the big picture, I guess that's how I look at it. Rob Walling: [00:19:18] Yeah. I think that's good advice. And I see, I think that's something I do well in the short term. Like during a day I find myself fatigued. I walk away, I do the dishes. I make lunch. I walk the dog. I'm really bad at it, in a way that you're doing it, where I, if I'm grinding on something and I'm not making progress for weeks or months for that matter. I need to get better. And I think if you're watching this or listening to it, like it's something to be aware of in yourself is taking a week off two weeks off, three weeks off, maybe it's completely from work. Or maybe it's just from that task. Or maybe it's that project. If you have the luxury to do it. And if you're an entrepreneur, you may or may not depending on the situation you're in, but I think that's good advice. We do have a question from the audience, Paul, actually we have a couple of questions. So Pablo asks, did you ever evaluate selling it as a. as part of a path forward, Allison Seboldt: [00:20:08] that's something that I would be open to eventually in the future, but I wouldn't want to sell it right now. I haven't, I don't know if anyone would want to buy it as is right now. I feel like I haven't figured out any of the obvious problems that. Someone who's looking to buy a business would be looking for. I haven't been approached by anybody, but again too, this is my passion, this is my baby. So I wouldn't want to sell it unless I feel like it's in a really good place. Rob Walling: [00:20:37] Very good. And then Pablo asked another question. He said, when you were finding, contracting assignments, how did those potential customers or potential clients react to you having a startup on this side? Or did you not, or did you not tell them that you were running fantasy Congress when you signed up to do contract work for them? Allison Seboldt: [00:20:59] It was a huge benefit to me. People loved hearing about it. Honestly, I feel like half the jobs I got was just because I'm the fantasy Congress girl. Like it was you hear about that and like people remember you, first of all, because that's very unique and silly and, people, and then you have this work out there that you can show people like, Hey, And a lot of people we're hiring to are business owners, so business owners are more likely to trust other business owners. I feel, yeah, when you're doing, I don't know if it's so much, in the corporate world. So if I was trying to go back and get like a full time job, I think people might be a little wary because it's like, Oh, is she going to quit the job? in six months, if this takes off, but with contract work, people were like, Oh, I know how long I have you and you know how to ship. It seems to be a huge benefit. people really, it really resonated with people. Rob Walling: [00:21:48] I remember in my early days of, as I switched away from a, it was, I guess I had been a contractor, then it took a salary job and I was switching back to contracting. This is 17 years ago. I launched a couple of things on that, a couple of small side projects and the fact that they were out in the world and that they were. being used and that they did have some small amount of revenue and that they were in production, just all these things really did impress people a lot more than I felt like it should. It was like this wasn't actually, at least my stuff was stuff I built in. I've spent three weeks in coated at nights and weekends and stuff, fantasy Congress, two and a half years. that's another story. I, man, when I look at fantasy Congress, I see. Such opportunity with like just the social media, like the Facebook group posts you talked about is exactly how I think this, the virality of this, the viral potential with these rabid fans, is how I feel like, like the way this has to be grown. when you watch, like Fandel only advertises on TV because now they have buckets of money. Most of it, venture capital, I'm guessing they're not. Profitable. Yeah. But even if they are it's because they've hit scale in those early days, all these fantasy league folks, they go after, content marketing. They do, they could do PR it's something that's so many, a B to B SaaS founders can't do because we run boring businesses. Who, what PR outlet, what news org or magazine or anything wants to write about a new email service provider, none of them, however you were just recently covered, or by you. fantasy Congress would just recently covered it in roll call.com, which is a new site for, U S government, stuff. Did that, did you seek that out or did they just discover it and decide to write about you. Allison Seboldt: [00:23:34] This is funny. so in July, my big thing was my big focus was pressed because I agree like people always tell me, Oh, this has such a chance to go viral. What I've learned though, from a little bit of research is that virality is actually depreciative. So we think. The vitality is this thing where, I post something, then all my friends see it, and then they post it and it grows and grows. But actually in reality, when they've studied virality, it's more somebody with a gigantic audience shares it. And then like from that gigantic audience, it like putters out, So like people retweet it and people retweet, it becomes less and less. I do think it has a good chance to go viral. in July I focused on press. I was like soliciting a bunch of reporters. I didn't get anything. I got a little bit of feedback. Oh, this could be super interesting. And then nothing ever came of it. this reporter for roll call was actually one of the people that I solicited. And so none of that took off in July. Oh, I'll go back and visit that some other time. it's something I'll go for some other time. I'm focused on some other stuff. and then, so right after I put up my September blog post, which was like last week or whatever, this reporter reached out to me on Twitter, which is where I initially DMD him. And he was like, Hey, I was just about to reach out to you. But I saw that previously, you had reached out to me crazy. Let's do it. So he, I don't know how he heard about it eventually, but. Yeah, it was so funny. It was me reaching. I did reach out to him. It didn't do anything, but then at some point he came across it. So at least I was targeting the right people. Yeah, Rob Walling: [00:25:07] that's right. And that's the thing. I like your point about virality. When I was saying by reality, I don't mean Oh, for every person that signs up to more, are gonna sign up for it. That's truly a viral loop. And so I was misusing the word, but when I think about it, I think politics. Is a space that a lot of people don't care about, but the few people that do or the S I say few, the tens of millions, but it's, whatever it is, 10% of the population, or some number that people that are really into it, they're really into it. It's like sports. It's like Dungeons and dragons. It's like punk music, it's they're rabid fans. And I like my inclination. When I look at this, I know you're on a break now. I don't want to put a bunch of thoughts in your head that this works or doesn't work based on really inexpensive marketing, right? Because your lifetime value and your monthly costs or monthly fees and all that are just too low to do a lot of extensive advertising. I think of influencers, I don't know if you've heard of Justin Robert Young, but he runs politics, politics.com. And he's just pennant. He's like a blogger podcaster. And he talks about politics and he also talks about technology and all this other stuff, but I don't know how many folks like him are out there, but he's doing like nonstop daily, political podcasts and blog posts right now about the upcoming election. So influencers like him or what you're talking about with that amplification. And it's how do you get. How do you get on their radar? How do you get fantasy Congress on their radar as well as. the PR angle, I think you were on the right track with that. I know it didn't work out in July, but who has the audience that cares about this kind of stuff, And it's the press it's folks like Justin Robert Young, even a little, obviously the Facebook groups that are already built, cause you building it one at a time with ads or, you trying to pick off one at a time with customers. I think. Is a pretty long road with an app like this, given the little price point, but finding the people who do already have aggregated those people in one place, less than then, but you don't, you know this already because you're reaching out to journalists. I know that's a hard way they go and it's it. It's a lot of reaching out and a lot of rejection and stuff, but, I do wish you the best of luck with it as you, take your break recharge and, figure out where to take it next. We are actually at time. So I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me for 30 minutes today. Folks want to reach out to you on Twitter. They can see your handle on the screen. There you're @ allison_seboldt , and of course at @fantasycong on Twitter and it's fantasycongress.com. Thanks again for joining me today. Allison Seboldt: [00:27:36] Yep. Thank you, Rob. Rob Walling: [00:27:39] All right. And thank you for joining us for yet. Another episode of MicroConf on air sometime produced the standard and I'll go out and figure out how many episodes is this? What do we think? 40 50 doing them first, daily, and then biweekly. And now weekly, we have some exciting coming up around SaaS podcast. We will be a. Lisa more information about that in the next couple of weeks, but stay tuned to the MicroConf Twitter account and our email list. Thanks as always to Haight and Stripe for being our headline partners for the year. And we're out. I'll see you here again next week. Same time, same place.    

Everyone wants the formula, the recipe, the framework that says how to make the magic happen. Well here you have it. With The Dinner Party Strategy you can now confidently create an email onboarding strategy for your trial customers. In less time than it takes a hipster bartender to make your locally sourced craft cocktail, you'll get the simple 6-part framework that builds connection, adds value, and drives revenue for your brand. https://microconf.com MicroConf Growth 2017 #microconf #microconfgrowth2017 #microconf2017 MicroConf Connect → http://microconfconnect.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail → support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners ► Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Stripe ► Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Basecamp

http://microconfonair.com At MicroConf, we have been fortunate to have the support of some incredible sponsors to help us invite guests to our events on a scholarship program. This week, we're going check in on one of those scholarship recipients, Veni Kunche, founder of DiversifyTech.co We ask Veni about her experience at MicroConf, how she decided to build and launch DiversifyTech, and how she has continue to grow and monetize this social good service.The State of Independent SaaS Survey is now open!  Help us develop critical analysis of the current world of Independent SaaS by heading over to http://stateofindiesaas.com.   https://microconf.com MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Hey https://hey.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/hey

Steli Efti (Close) talks at MicroConf 2015 on how to build your own SaaS sales machine if you don't have piles of money from venture capitalists lying around. In this video, you're going to learn the core principles of selling, how to write emails that get opened, why 90% of success is in the follow-up, and more. Check out Steli’s MicroConf speakers page for more talks ➡️ https://microconf.com/speakers/steli-... https://microconf.com MicroConf 2015 #microconf #microconf2015 MicroConf Connect → http://microconfconnect.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail → support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners ► Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Stripe ► Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Basecamp

http://microconfonair.com Bootstrapping SaaS can be a bit... lonely. Lots of folks are working from home, might only have a couple of colleagues that they can bounce ideas off of. We're excited to chat with Irma Mesa, the founder of Cafecito (https://meetcafecito.com), as she is actively building a SaaS company that combats that sense of isolation. The 2021 State of Independent SaaS Survey is now open for responses. Help us pull back the curtain on the how the bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders have faired this year. Complete the survey at http://stateofindiesaas.com MicroConf Connect: Join the conversation with over 1500 founders, including a dedicated MicroConf On Air channel ➡️ http://microconfconnect.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe   Hey https://hey.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/heyhey

Think you can't aggressively acquire customers using outbound sales for SaaS? Think it's too expensive, too inefficient, too distracting? Think again. You can do it. Jordan Gal show you how he and his team does it for CartHook. From list building, to qualification research, to cold email automation, to scheduling demos. Everything from faceless prospect to free trial to paying customer. It's all outsourced, affordable, and scalable. And Jordan will show you how to put the whole thing together. https://microconf.com #microconf #microconf2015 MicroConf 2015 Check out Jordan’s MicroConf speakers page for more talks → https://microconf.com/speakers/jordan... MicroConf Connect → http://microconfconnect.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail → support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners ► Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Stripe ► Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Basecamp