Blog | Disruptware

Rob Burns Creates Groundbreaking Press Release Company prReach From A Market Vulnerability

Rob Burns is the founder and CEO of prReach a press release company that has some unique services that no one else is currently offering. They have a huge social media component, a video news release, and much more. Having been in internet marketing and SEO for 14 years, Rob knew exactly what this industry needed and has delivered.

Tweetables
We actually have a video press release. Tweet Buffertweetable text
I wouldn’t put all my eggs in the SEO basket. Tweet Buffertweetable text
When you write a press release it really needs to engage the reader or the journalist. Tweet Buffertweetable text
Don’t base you business on a tactic base it on a strategy. Tweet Buffertweetable text

Today's Podcast Highlights

[03.20 - I wanted something that would actually be a real business.]
[04.25 - With press releases, I think a lot of the technology is just so embedded, it’s so old that it’s really hard for some of the other companies to really be flexible and really grow with how the internet has changed things.]
[05.01 - A couple of things that separated us that makes us a little bit different is we have a huge social media component.]
[05.50 - We also have, which is completely different than every press release company, is we actually have a video press release.]
[06.48 - People also take those videos and embed them on their website so it adds credibility to whatever business you might have.]
[07.54 - There’s one PR who’s name I won't mention...]
[08.37 - I wouldn’t put all my eggs in the SEO basket.]
[11.24 - People would always write copy for search engines and it just didn’t convert.]
[12.27 - Everything eventually changes and businesses change and industries change especially when you’re based on these little microtype businesses that could make a lot of money in the beginning but they always disappear.]
[13.41 - I was relying heavily on another company and another source then I could have lost my whole business.]
[14.43 - Biggest questions is how to write a press release.]
[15.10 - There’s something called news jacking.]
[16.36 - If you have a counterpoint or something like that, that’s a really good way to get actual hits from that.]
[20.09 - When you write a press release it really needs to engage the reader or the journalist.]
[21.07 - I say probably 70% of your press release is your title and your hook because that’s what is going to show online.]
[22.23 - If you just have that little bit of an angle that relates, that’s something that’s really newsworthy then you’ve just got a ton of free traffic and a ton of free people that are interested in the same thing that you’re selling.]
[24.51 - We don’t charge if you want to add your own video.]
[26.24 - We do have tier one syndication which is pretty hard to get.]
[27.01 - Look how articles and stories are written and pretty much just write their story for them.]
[28.51 - We get sometimes 3000 to 6000 other sites embedding those press releases and linking back to your site.]
[30.36 - I’ve kind of actually thinned down as far as people I follow just because I just I’m still subject to entrepreneur ADHD.]
[32.05 - Don’t base you business on a tactic base it on a strategy.]
[32.46 - I don’t know everything and I’m always constantly learning but I’m at the point now where I’m dedicating myself to implementing everything I’ve learned.]

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Full Transcript

Paul: On today’s show we’ve got Robert Burns who is the founder and CEO of a company called prREACH. prREACH is a highly successful online press release company. Not only do they publish and syndicate press releases to tier one syndication networks. So in other words those like Associated Press. What they’ve also done is added more of a twist to each press release so that it gets the social mention and the social views as well.

Coupled with that, they actually create a news anchor style video release of your press release. All that is captured into one amazing package and it’s something that you can take advantage of and get some free traffic to your site especially at launch time but not only that ongoing whenever a new feature comes out or if you have some sort of angle that you want to promote then that’s the time to publish a press release and get some traffic. Without further adieu let’s get Rob onto the show.

Rob: Hey, how are you doing?

Paul: I’m great. Thanks. I really appreciate you coming on board. I really wanted to get you on the show because as you know disruptware is all about software and building really awesome software apps and SaaS products. The biggest issue with a lot of my customers and followers of the podcast is obviously getting traffic and converting that traffic and something you are an expert in especially from a free traffic perspective. prREACH is very much a groundbreaking and a press release service, I called it 'PR Web On Steroids' and that’s pretty much what it is, right? Give me your view, your elevator pitch of what it is.

Rob: Sure. We decided to launch prREACH really what I was looking for was a vulnerability in a market. I wanted to go out there and I wanted to look at something that would not just be … I’ve been doing internet marketing and SEO probably for the last 12 or 14 years. You see a lot of folks where they’ll just come out with this product or this software thing and it's a bit gimmicky and it’s just really more of a hustle. They’ll make a bunch of money and then it either doesn’t work or whatever or the industry changes and then it’s just gone and they disappear.

I wanted something that would actually be a real business but there’s kind of a vulnerability in the market where maybe they’ve just been static for too long which actually was the case with the PR companies and that’s really what prompted me to launch prREACH. I look at PR as far as online digital press releases really kind of like publishing where publishers for the longest time I mean they had a 17^th century marketing model where they would just dictate to the customers how they would be published. With the advent of the internet and how things have really grown and evolved, now people choose how they’re going to market themselves and how they’re going to market their products and their books. Really the publishing industry just got completely passed by.

Just like the record industry the same thing where they had this model where they said this is how things are going to be done and they didn’t really want to change with times and they just disappeared. With press releases, I think a lot of the technology is just so embedded, it’s so old that it’s really hard for some of the other companies to really be flexible and really grow with how the internet has changed things. When I came out with prREACH we just looked at so … what else can we add. What can we make this so that this is a 21^st century product and how can we build our platform so that it’s flexible enough if things don’t work then we can get rid of them, and if we need to add new things that we can and that was really my whole game plan behind prREACH and that’s what we did.

A couple of things that separated us that makes us a little bit different is we have a huge social media component where we actually … when you publish not only does it go out to tier one syndication which means like Associated Press and LexisNexis and Reuters and all the things that the big companies send to. We also have our own social media network that the press releases will actually go out to which is huge because 90% of the journalists actually use things like Twitter believe it or not when they’re doing their news. People, journalists, will follow Twitter to see what’s going on.

A lot of the third world countries if there’s something happening there then usually it’s going to pop up on Twitter before anywhere else or a YouTube video or something like that. We have this huge social media component and then we also which is completely different than every press release company is we actually have a video press release. We have a newsroom with an anchor person that will actually read off your press release and then embed that video on your press release. Every press release company in the world when you send out a press release, it’s basically you talking about your stuff where with ours we actually have somebody else that is talking about you. It gives you that much more credibility. Psychologically, it gives you a bit of an advantage.

Paul: It’s just like someone reading the news.

Rob: We don’t try to be fake news. We don’t try to fake somebody on – fake Walter Cronkite or something in there, but it is news. We call it a video news release. It’s just a news person reading it. People also take those videos and embed them on their website so it adds credibility to whatever business you might have.

Paul: That’s brilliant. Basically, let’s take myself I get a press release. I come to you with that release and you not only publish that and push that out to the big syndicated news networks or like Associated Press and everything like that but you also push that out all to the social media world and then you also create the video so you got the real media view of your news as well. Then you’ve got potentially like 3 different avenues for traffic and then obviously whatever that might pick up and I’m guessing links and stuff like that for SEO benefit as well.

Rob: Yeah. We don’t try … I would say we’re probably more SEO than most of the PR companies out there but I don’t ever really promote that. There’s one PR who’s name I won't mention PRWeb who went on and said, “Hey we’re the SEO press release company” and instantly Google said, “No you’re not” and actually just disappeared them from the internet for a couple of weeks just to prove that fact.

Paul: That’s power, isn’t it? I mean I’ve seen some recent news…

Rob: That’s completely vulnerable. I believe there’s absolutely huge SEO benefit in there I just don’t really outwardly promote it as much as most folks would just because I’m in it for the long run. SEO is one of the benefits but it’s not the only benefit. I wouldn’t put all my eggs in the SEO basket.

Paul: Just take one step back a second on that point. That’s power! I saw a recent news article about Google again being too monopolistic whether deliberate or not but the fact is they are. They are such a giant and at the push of a button they could just switch off your business from a traffic perspective just for the hell of it. I mean admittedly obviously from their perspective they’re argument would be that you're just playing the system but in PRWeb’s case they’ve always known that press releases attract links and stuff like that and they do have big SEO benefits. To suddenly turn around to that company and just say, “Hey but no stop doing that and here’s your punishment for a couple of weeks.”

Rob: Right. They made them scramble around to be more Google compliant. One of the things that really upset a lot of folks was they just started deleting press releases that Google said, “Oh these press releases shouldn’t be on this site” and they just deleted them. These were ones that people paid for and they just didn’t get reimbursed and so there was really some unhappy folks going on with that. Again to me it’s just you really need to look at the bigger picture. That’s a 35 million dollar company and they’re doing a silly biz-op play and they got bit for it. That’s what I don’t want to do.

Paul: There's like two things to that, there’s the fact is that one thing I say to people is that never build a business that’s reliant on another business. I see a lot of people building Facebook communities which is great and there’s nothing wrong with that but if you’re building that as your core business, so in other words if you’re selling access to your Facebook community and you’re really working on that as your primary business then that’s a mistake because your whole business is reliant on the Facebook platform being available and your account being open and stuff like that.

It’s the same with Google Plus communities and everything else. If you’re going to build anything make sure it’s on your own property, on your own site, on your own servers. And secondly, especially when it comes to accounts like Google never do anything for SEO value or you do it for traffic value and if you focus on the traffic and writing content for real readers and real visits then the SEO benefits just kind of come automatically, right?

Rob: Absolutely. That’s one of the things that was really even when I was in the thick of it as far as doing SEO work, people would always write copy for search engines and it just didn’t convert. It wasn’t engaging and if people went to the site then it’s really unless they’re just doing some kind of cloaking or something where there’s copy written for search engines and there’s copy written for readers, it was just a terrible strategy. I’ve always said your clients and your content are first and then anything around that because that’s your strategy. Anything around that is a tactic. I think the big challenge is most folks especially in the internet marketing world is that they just don’t realize what a big wide world it is out there.

They focus on their one little thing, their one little tactic and they make a business out of it and then when that changes and then they’re just decimated and then they have to start all over again. It’s just kind of a tough thing. Everything is vulnerable. Everything eventually changes and businesses change and industries change especially when you’re based on these little microtype businesses that could make a lot of money in the beginning but they always disappear. Now hang outs are the big thing and I use hang outs and I leverage them to death but I would not build my business on a hang out.

Just like with prREACH, we in the beginning actually our videos were YouTube videos. I really started kind of getting that feeling that this is kind of a vulnerability because if YouTube decides to who knows maybe they go to a paid model or they do some kind of crazy thing or they change their terms or whatever then my whole business is gone. I actually started migrating over to other platforms that I own where I actually own the videos and it was a good thing because there was some guy that was an affiliate marketer that was using my press releases and he started view bot spamming my YouTube channel so that his videos would rank and eventually got that channel banned.

It’s a perfect example of where I could have just … because I was relying heavily on another company and another source then I could have lost my whole business but by then I had already had everything … I just flipped a switch and I already had them on other channels and it took me 30 minutes to move everything over because I was already prepared for it.

Paul: Rob, let me ask you like I got all these people on my tribe who are launching software products or scaling or whatever and so they are going to be thinking right now I need to get a press release out there. I need to get my news out there. Should they just do one when they launch? Should they do one a month? What sort of angles can people take when they’re putting out press releases?

Rob: That’s a good question. That’s probably one of my biggest questions. Actually if you go to my site, when you go to blog section there’s a little pop up. You can opt in and get a … it’s '108 Reasons To Write A Press Release' because one of my biggest questions is … one, is how to write a press release and the other is what reasons do I have to write a press release. With software folks, there’s a lot. Some angles you might be able to take is of course there’s a launch so you can announce the launch. If it’s some kind of disruptive technology that might change the industry then you can talk about that.

You can also look … there’s something … it’s called news jacking where you can actually go to Google news and type in some phrases or sentences that are related to your product or your industry or your business and you can see what’s going on in the news. So then you can actually do press releases where you’re the expert commenting on that particular thing. Maybe something happened with Oracle or some database software that you might be tied into that’s tied into your software something like that, SQL or whatever and there’s some kind of industry change and you can say now you can be an industry expert and quote on that.

Paul: Depending obviously whether your targeting that demographic but you’re right. That’s a great point. You kind of look at what your market might be reading and what’s newsworthy and then you kind of piggyback. You find something that’s really, really trending and then piggyback on that and sort of tie into that story. I guess also because other journalists are monitoring that as well. So whatever the buzz word or hash tag is they’re monitoring that so you can kind of piggyback on that and see if you get a mention within the press.

Rob: Exactly. Maybe there’s a journalist that wrote something that’s related to your industry and then you write a press release that’s commenting on that. You can send it to that journalist and that journalist might interview you. If you have a counterpoint or something like that, that’s a really good way to get actual hits from that. A lot of people think too that you just put a press release out there and you’re just instantly going to … a journalist is just going to instantly call you and a lot of times you really need to kind of track down the people that are the thought leaders in your industry and write a press release and direct it towards them if you’re looking to get on the news or the media.

It’s really not that hard. My wife, she just got on the news, I think it's a 140 different markets we send to and actually we just sent out a press release and they just hit her up. She does so much news and she’s in the media so much and she has a huge media room so that they basically can do a little bit of research on her and say “Oh she’s been on Good Morning America and Oprah and all that kind of stuff.” She knows what she’s doing. It’s a lot easier for her to do that. But really anybody can do that. Any business, you think, “Oh my business doesn’t … it’s not newsworthy or it’s not related.” I mean my wife is an image consultant, a professional organizer. When she decided she wanted to do that, I didn’t even know what that was.

I was doing SEO so nobody was even looking for that. Now it’s different because there’s TV shows about it and all that good kind of stuff. It’s a lot more visible but at the time we actually kind of created a whole market around PR. We would do press releases like we would pitch different news sources like 'Spring Cleaning Your Garage' or 'Getting Organized For Back To School' or 'How To Change Your Image For Your New Job Interview' and things like that. That got her on the news which got her a lot of exposure, which got her a lot of traffic. Now she’s pretty much … that led to more nationally syndicated interviews which led to her actually being keynote speakers getting like $7000 to $10,000 keynote gigs speaking for Intuit and Hewlett Packard things like that.

Paul: Another thing because we go back a couple of years and we’ve met up a couple of times. I remember the last chat that we had and this kind of goes to my next question but we were talking about Upworthy and you'd mentioned that as a site to look at because they get extreme viral traffic and they use a lot of tricks around the headlines and things like that. Are there any particular angles that you would take or any advice as to how people could find an angle to get their press release at least read? The worst thing that anyone wants to do is just to say right brand name is now launched. No one is interested because they’re seeing that 500 times a day.

Rob: One of the biggest mistakes folks do is they write a press release. They’re in their own microcosm in their own little world and they're writing this press release which they think is something brilliant about them but nobody really cares honestly. When you write a press release it really needs to engage the reader or the journalist. It needs to touch on something that is a vested interest for the reader or the journalist where most people write a press release based on whatever interest the person submitting the release has. Does that make sense?

Paul: Yeah absolutely.

Rob: It’s not about you basically. It’s about the reader and it’s about the journalist. If you write for the reader and write for the journalist and that’s what Upworthy is really good at because their titles are just crazy engaging and there’s a PDF out there where they actually did a presentation like how do we write our titles. They usually write on average I think 22 or 27 different versions of that title before they pick the one and it’s always something that’s a hook. It hooks you in and brings you in. I say probably 70% of your press release is your title and your hook because that’s what is going to show online. That’s what people are going to see first and if that’s not engaging, if it’s like 'Dave’s Hotdog Stand Now Carries Mustard', nobody is going to care. If they tied it into GMO free something or other, some kind of angle that is newsworthy then that’s going to make a big difference.

Paul: Something really stupid like GMO mustard makes your hair go green.

Rob: Exactly.

Paul: Someone is going to read that, right?

Rob: Yeah. It’s got to be true. Actually that one probably is true. That’s the angle that you want to do is you want to look at a much, much bigger picture and that’s how people, the smaller business you’d be surprised because people in news they don’t have enough news for their cycle that’s why you just see the same stuff over and over again. They just can't find enough stories and enough interesting things. If you just have that little bit of an angle that relates, that’s something that’s really newsworthy then you’ve just got a ton of free traffic and a ton of free people that are interested in the same thing that you’re selling.

Paul: The newspaper or the media wants that as well. They want the traffic for their sites so they have to publish interesting stuff.

Rob: When you write about a press release think about how can I drive traffic to these people. That’s what they want. That’s exactly right. They’re looking for things that is going to drive traffic to their site or their channel or whatever media source or outlet that they are and if you can provide that for them then you pretty much own them.

Paul: So I need to write a press release. I need to perhaps do some searching, find out what’s trending I guess on Google trends, maybe look at Upworthy to try and get an idea of what sort of titles to or what sort of angles to take to make my title interesting.

Rob: Goggle news is another good source. Type in different phrases related to your business and see what’s popular. Look at those titles. Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon. Look at the top trending titles related to your business and industry because if those titles aren’t good, they’re not going to rise to the top just the way that those particular social media sources are structured then it’s just not going to happen so that’s another one. Even Twitter trending topics. Are any of your topics related to whatever the top trends are and can you tie a story into those trends.

Paul: Then what’s the best thing then? Should I write my release and then sign up for one of yours and then submit it? What’s the best approach?

Rob: It’s pretty simple. The way we’re set up is you just sign up and we have training that will just walk you through. Some unique things that we have that other press release companies don’t have, you can … we don’t charge if you want to add your own video. It’ll actually be … if you want to have a YouTube, it’s actually embedded and you can add different documents like PDF downloads or images, any kind of extra material that a journalist may want you can add it to your press release. The other thing too is we actually have a second section where you can write a 300 word summary for the actual anchor person that read your press release.

We found a lot of times just the way a press release is written and structured it doesn’t necessarily become the most engaging video when somebody reads it. How an anchor person or newsperson would read it is probably different than how a press release is read. There’s a separate section where you can write that so that what the anchor person reads is a lot more engaging which is great because then say you take that video, you put it on your site now that it is more engaging that increases time on page which is also a ranking factor and it hooks you in.

Paul: If I didn’t want to write the release myself, is there some service you can recommend or anything to get that?

Rob: Yeah. When you sign up there actually are some links on the thank you page that will send you to people that we … we don’t offer press release writing right now just because it’s actually kind of a conflict. We do have tier one syndication which is pretty hard to get. If we don’t put out quality press releases then we’ll get kicked out. Our editors are pretty stringent. If we offer to write a press release and then we reject it, it’s probably going to make folks upset so it’s a bit of a conflict of interest. We refer people but they’re still subject to our editorial process. Really that’s in your best interest because if it’s not a good press release you’re not going to engage anybody anyway.

Another good thing too as far as writing a press release is look at how, especially if you’re targeting certain journalists or certain markets, look how articles and stories are written and pretty much just write their story for them because a lot of journalist are so busy. If it’s well written and it’s engaging and it’s somewhat in their style whether if you’re going out for TV it’s going to be written a little bit different for TV than it is for a newspaper. If you kind of had the story already in the can where they can just take it and rewrite it a little bit then you’re going to be picked up a lot more also.

Paul: You’ve got some tips and stuff on your site at prREACH.com so people can at least get the basic structure outlined in their own head.

Rob: If you go to prREACH.com just go to our blog section and there’s a bunch of articles and training and different tips and ideas. I actually have one article on how to write a press release and I talked a lot about how we would do SEO which is pretty contrary to the way most folks do. I pretty much don’t support anchor text links anymore especially if you’re not a full time SEO and you’re not doing this all the time because everything changes so much. One of the big Panda and Penguin things that happened when they updated was an over anchor text penalty.

Paul: I guess just reading ahead or thinking ahead about what you’re probably going to say is I guess like if you do one press release with your anchor text optimized for some keyword, the syndication is so massive with your service that you could end up with hundreds and hundreds of links.

Rob: We get sometimes 3000 to 6000 other sites embedding those press releases and linking back to your site. If you’re a fairly new site and you don’t have that many links and all of a sudden you have 6000 anchor text links pointing to your site without one word then you’re pretty much going to be shut down for a while. Google with their LSI, their latent semantic indexing which is kind of a fancy scientific word for they know the shit you’re writing on your site.

Their LSI is so sophisticated that really I mean we’ve actually ranked sites that were talking about a subject related to a keyword but that keyword wasn’t actually even on that site but Google thought that it related, that it was themed close enough so I don’t think your anchor text really even matters that much. I think the quality of the content and writing about the subject matter will matter much more.

Paul: Got it. All right, we’re coming to the end of the show now but just tell me obviously you’re an entrepreneur like myself and you’ve come from … I know you’ve started off in PR and you’ve gone through a whole world of SEO and free traffic and now you have your own press release company. What do you look to drive yourself forward as an entrepreneur? Who do you follow? And any advice you can give to any of my tribe listening today who are building their own company and looking for ways to succeed, and motivation, and things like that. Anything you can offer there to help them?

Rob: Yeah. I’ve kind of actually thinned down as far as people I follow just because I just I’m still subject to entrepreneur ADHD that I’ve really just disconnected from a lot of that stuff. Books I’m reading, Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday is a really good one. It really talks about how the media is being manipulated and how easy it is for somebody to do. He also has one called Growth Hacker Marketing which I’m reading those side to side.

Advice, as far entrepreneurs I would say probably one of the biggest lessons for me as far as just taking things to the next level and running businesses as opposed to hustles is look at your strategies and not your tactics. For the longest time especially with SEO, I was just the tactic guy I had all these really cool crazy things that people would go, “Oh that’s brilliant. You can do this and this is what happens” and but it’s just a tactic. It’s not a long game. It’s not a big game. It’s not a business you’re building so look at the strategies. I still love the tactics but tactics are just part of a strategy and it’s implemented in there. Don’t base you business on a tactic base it on a strategy.

Paul: I think just the take away, obviously there's that, but the take away before you were just saying when you talked about entrepreneur ADD which we all suffer from is thinning out who you’re listening to. Actually you’re talking about focusing. Start unsubscribing from other people’s lists and stuff. Really just value the content that you’re reading, thin it out and that will obviously give you the freedom in your brain to focus on your core business.

Rob: There just comes a time when you have to stop looking at everybody else’s business and run your own business. For me, I don’t know everything and I’m always constantly learning but I’m at the point now where I’m dedicating myself to implementing everything I’ve learned. There will come a point where I’ll probably shift the other way and go back into my learning phase because it’s just something I love. At this point in my career and business, I just need to do stuff. There’s no book that’s ever going to teach you really how to succeed except for just actually doing it and sometimes even failing is probably …I look at it as tuition.

Every time I fail at something, I just don’t do that anymore and I’ve learned something and it may have cost me a little bit but in the long run when I’m playing in a bigger better field, then I’ve learned by that mistake so that’s one of the things. It’s pretty contrary because I know everybody else is like, “You need to absorb this.” I agree to a certain extent but I also think there comes a time when you just need to do stuff and just need to focus and get rid of all those distractions.

Paul: Brilliant. Rob, listen I really appreciate you coming on the show. For any listeners prREACH.com is the site you need to go to and there’s loads of tips and strategies on the blog that tells you all about it plus Rob’s download I think its '108 Different Ways To Write A Press Release'. So you can go and grab that at the site and create one of these really groundbreaking press releases for a hell of a lot less than any of the competition and ten times more powerful especially with the video content.

So Rob thanks very much. Really appreciate it.

Rob: Hey Paul thanks for having me.

Recommended Resources

1. prReach - click here

2. Upworthy - click here

3. Digg - click here

4. Reddit - click here

5. StumbleUpon - click here

6. Book - Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday - click here

7. Book - Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday - click here

Brand New App Survey-2-Sale Already Doubling Conversions

Trevor Page is the creator and founder of a brand new start up called Survey-2-Sale. It's a widget based app that taps into sales psychology to increase conversions. Trevor a second generation coder has been coding since the age of 10 yrs. when he created his first game. Since 2012, Trevor has been a full time entrepreneur.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tweetables
You can get a free trial. Tweet Buffertweetable text
I decided to throw myself into the unknown world of entrepreneurship. Tweet Buffertweetable text
If you have the suspicion that they may talk about it soon then reach out to them. Tweet Buffertweetable text
You need to give them a reason to fill out that survey. Tweet Buffertweetable text

Today's Podcast Highlights

[01.37 - Late 2012, I decided to quit my full time job and decided to throw myself into this completely unknown world of entrepreneurship.]
[02.47 - I’m tired of waiting to play my game. I’m just going to make it myself.]
[04.45 - I learned that I was a decent teacher.]
[05.45 - Lifehacker.com published an article about me and literally got 10,000 hits within the first few hours.]
[06.43 - I was publishing content to my blog 3, 4, 5 times a week.]
[09.03 - I teach people how to program.]
[10.23 - They can smell the sales pitch or something in your email because it never worked.]
[12.11 - I had my customers or at least my fans of my stuff reach out to lifehacker.]
[13.36 - If you have the suspicion that they may talk about it soon then reach out to them.]
[14.44 - I wanted to survey my audience with one of my products that I was building.]
[15.00 - You need to give them a reason to fill out that survey.]
[16.36 - They want to see how much they can save because it’s this psychological trick or technique.]
[17.37 - For 3 months I beat my best sales month ever 3 times in a row now.]
[18.19 - I was able to double my sales and absolutely within the first 2 weeks.]
[19.25 - He installed it and within the first month of him using it, he went from more or less $0 in sales to $12,115 in sales.]
[20.15 - Now I’m just implementing the new features that all the customers are asking for.]
[21.13 - It just causes that urgency to seal the deal when it comes to the sale.]
[22.42 - That generates 33% of my overall traffic that comes to my website right now.]
[28.15 - Whatever it is that you’re posting about, you’re doing your guest post about should be relevant to what the website talks about in general.]
[29.26 - I would tell them the name of my company once and I’d say write it down and I looked at what they wrote down.]
[32.07 - I just introduced recently a 14 day no credit card required free trial so there’s very low barrier to entry.]

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Full Transcript

Paul Clifford: On today’s show I have a young gentleman called Trevor Page who’s joining me to talk about his new start up which is called Survey-2-Sale. It’s an amazing little app and I’m not going to go into great detail. I’m going to let Trevor explain it to you. Essentially it’s a tool that really increases the sales on any website, right?

Trevor Page: That is the gist. I managed to solve that age old problem of I need more customers so I’m happy to talk about that today on your podcast.

Paul Clifford: That’s awesome. Tell me a bit about yourself? When did you get started? I think you’ve always been a coder, developer. That’s your passion at heart?

Trevor Page: More or less from birth. I was introduced to coding at a very young age. My father grew up as a coder himself so he passed that down, passed the torch on to his son. I’ve been doing it pretty much since I was about 10 years old, fell in love with it and went through the whole typical path of going to university, learning through computer sciences what I took in university, graduating, getting a job. Then around probably late 2012, I decided to quit my full time job as a programmer. My nice cushy office job and decided to throw myself into this completely unknown world of entrepreneurship. It’s been fun so far.

Paul Clifford: I got to ask you, what was the program you wrote when you were 10 years old?

Trevor Page: Oh my God! That’s a good one. I’ve never been asked that question. Probably it was a program that at the time … I’m a complete nerd so I don’t know if your listenership will even know what the heck I’m talking about but who knows. I was a nerd. I was really into what they called bulletin board systems, BBS when I was a young. There was a game that was on these bulletin board systems called Lord Legend of the Red Dragon.

All it was, was it’s a text based role playing game and I fell in love with it. The problem with these BBSs is that you had to call in with your dial up modem and if anyone else was on at the time you just got a busy signal. It was very difficult to dial in to these BBS systems. I said, “I’m tired of waiting to play my game. I’m just going to make it myself.” I think that was my first program that I created which was a text based Legend of the Red Dragon game on … I think it was a Q basic programming language. Good question.

Paul Clifford: Wow. I remember those days too. The bulletin boards which obviously predates the internet. I remember everything was about the fastest modem you could get. You remember …

Trevor Page: 56K baby.

Paul Clifford: Yeah. Well I was pre-used. I was I think 1200 baud, B-A-U-D I think we called it.

Trevor Page: I had the 2400 baud when I started as a youngin myself but then I upgraded to the 56k so good times.

Paul Clifford: Then the compression came in and you had … I wonder if GZip compression actually came in about that time because compressing the data … because the physical technology was obviously a lot slower. People came up with the software technology to compress data to send it over the modems so you can actually get more data across.

Trevor Page: Make sense.

Paul Clifford: Obviously the compression went into the modems themselves and then of course once you got up to ISDN, when those days came out internet came in and obviously we know the history from there.

Trevor Page: That’s right.

Paul Clifford: That’s fascinating, isn’t it? Don’t get me talking about my inner geek.

Trevor Page: I know. That’s what I’m trying to … literally biting my tongue because I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole that we’ve started. We’ll stop here.

Paul Clifford: You obviously been in development a long time and even started up a blog and started to teach other people how to development in Java, right?

Trevor Page: That’s correct. I learned that I was a decent teacher. Usually I say it was when I was in my job but my mom always said that I was a good teacher and I never actually listened to her because it’s your mom and they always try to encourage you. I didn’t listen to her but I realized on my own in my professional job that I was a great teacher because I was bringing these junior programmers on board very, very quickly onto my team to the point where I can leave them alone with a problem. I can just throw a problem at them and say, “Hey so and so I need you to fix this.” and I can come back at the end of the day and be confident that they fixed it and fixed it correctly. That was interesting for me to stumble upon.

I decided to take this skill and apply it to this new entrepreneurial venture which I started with a programming blog and put the 2 together and it took off. It went very well. I got picked up by a big name in the industry. Lifehacker.com published an article about me and literally got 10,000 hits within the first few hours of being on lifehacker. It was insane. Ever since my traffic has blown up from that point and I’ve seen a lot of great comments, great feedback from people who are going through learning from my materials on my blog.

I even went forward and actually just took most of that content and put in some unique content and published a book too. I went the book route, published that on Amazon and even started a video tutorials website based around the exact same topic teaching people the Java programming language. It’s been fun.

Paul Clifford: That’s brilliant. You’ve done a whole load of things. The book, that must have taken some time putting all that together right?

Trevor Page: Yeah. It was a slow process but I was very enthusiastic about the whole process so I was publishing content to my blog 3, 4, 5 times a week. Nice good quality articles about the Java programming language and in chronological order is how I was putting it all together. Basically the way I wish I was taught when I was in high school and university is how I put together my materials and it seems like how I wish I was taught is also how other people wish they could be taught because they seem to resonate well with it. So I think that’s why it really became the success that I’ve seen from it is because of the way I’m putting it together and the way I’m teaching it to the people

Paul Clifford: Got it. You know which is really interesting because there’s so much material out there. I think anyone who wants to start up anything can probably find the information but being able to communicate and train and educate people I think that is where the real skill is. Being able to communicate and bring people forward in their learning and you obviously have that because I’ve seen your site and I’ve seen you get lots of great feedback. Tell me a bit about lifehacker? That was great to get exposure there but was there any specific things you did to actually get published on there?

Trevor Page: Absolutely. Great question. I literally just reached out to them. I was trying to find ways to just tell them that my blog existed. I went into my repertoire of websites that I visited and I cross referenced that with my teaching materials. I said, “Okay would this website that I visited on a regular basis, would these guys be interested in publishing my stuff for their readers or listeners or whatever?” When I found a match, I just went on their website and tried to find a way to communicate with them. In the case of lifehacker, there was a little thing at the bottom of the page that just said send us tips. You just send an email to tips at lifehacker.com, and you know a short little email, I kept it nice and concise.

I said, My name is Trevor. I just created a new blog or I am in the process of creating a new blog. I teach people how to program. I know that you have published articles about programming before. I think this stuff might be of interest to your readers and that was pretty much it. It wasn’t anything fancy and within I think it was a month later without any sort of notification, without any emails back and forth, it just all of a sudden appeared on lifehacker.com this article about my howtoprogramwithJava.com blog so it was quite a surprise.

Paul Clifford: That’s brilliant. Literally just reaching out to them. That’s great to hear and I think for many people that are probably sitting there thinking I’d love to get published on something like that and probably don’t even think about doing the obvious just trying to contact them because I think many people would think, “Well I'll just never get exposure there.” I guess the lesson in that is just to go out and do it. You have nothing to lose. You just need to spend some time finding the right way in and send them a really good strong email.

Trevor Page: I mean to add a little bit more to that so this is now … I mean that was great. That was fantastic. That worked out well for me. I tried to repeat that same thing across many, many other websites probably 20 or so that I contacted after that and I don’t know it’s like they can smell it or something. They can smell the sales pitch or something in your email because it never worked. It never worked for any of the next 20 websites that I contacted. It could be that the 21^st people I messaged would have picked me up and gone with it. I think it’s just like you said, you just need to reach out and if it works, it works and if it doesn’t you just can’t beat yourself up about it. You just got to keep on going.

Paul Clifford: So it’s a numbers game.

Trevor Page: That’s right.

Paul Clifford: I was hoping you had some sort of art and some trickery that we could …

Trevor Page: I'd tried many, many tricks. If you want me I can talk about the tricks I tried that failed. There’s plenty of those. It’s your call.

Paul Clifford: Well sure just maybe just give like 3 little tidbits of things not to do then. Because they're obviously working …

Trevor Page: One thing I tried … I tried heavily was to, and maybe this is the fault of mine, I was trying to get republished on lifehacker. I tried reaching out to the original gentleman who published an article about me through Twitter. I tried to establish a relationship with him in terms of thanking him for the initial post. Telling him a little bit about my story and how he more or less changed my life with that one article. He responded and he was very positive. He said, "That sounds great. I’m so happy that I could do this for you." Then it was jab, jab, jab and then when I went for that right hook and introduced him to this new venture I had, nothing came of it.

Maybe I didn’t throw enough jabs before I tried to sell him on this new venture I had, who knows but that tactic didn’t work out well for me. One more I tried was I had my customers or at least my fans of my stuff reach out to lifehacker through the same medium that I did. Sending it to tips at lifehacker.com and just using honest feedback, they sent messages to them saying, "Hey, this Trevor guy has great content. I love it. I’ve never seen anything as good as this anywhere on the internet."

They were trying to get my video tutorials course on lifehacker that’s the whole reason behind it. I probably had 50 people email lifehacker all with fantastic things and still nothing has come of it . That was probably late 2013 that that happened. It’s been over 6 months that I haven’t seen anything come of it. I tried but there you go. That’s obviously an approach that doesn’t work either. You got to be in the right place at the right time it seems.

Paul Clifford: It could be simply your first thing was a course and it was something that they wanted to talk about at that time. It was probably hot. They don’t necessarily want to talk about that again and again. It could literally be that.

Trevor Page: That’s the takeaway. You can iterate on that and maybe sniff out some other websites that are talking about your type of material, whatever it is your material is. If you have the suspicion that they may talk about it soon then reach out to them. A little bit of research goes a long way.

Paul Clifford: Let’s talk about your new start up because I’m really excited about that because I’ve seen that a couple of times. Funny enough it was something I was thinking about doing last year. Obviously never got around to it, but not quite the same obviously, but one of the great tools and great businesses around now is called Qualaroo. They’re really good at trying to identify with the people at the other side of the website both using online questionnaires and things like that. I’ve done surveys and things to my audience but to actually get people and to entice people to give you that data is really quite hard work. So you’ve kind of taken that concept or that idea and then twisted it and made it really work. Perhaps you’d be better off explaining it.

Trevor Page: Absolutely, sure. I would absolutely love to. You hit the nail on the head there. I had the same sort of thought. I wanted to survey my audience with one of my products that I was building up. I knew that if I just reached out and cold emailed them and asked for a survey or if I put a survey on my website, you’re going to get a low response rate. You just know it going into it. You need to give them a reason to fill out that survey. I call it incentivizing the survey. I racked my brain over how I could incentivize this survey to give them something to make them want to fill it out and I landed on a coupon code.

I created this little widget that asks, your first survey question that you want to ask your audience, and it entices them with this little bubble that says you can save x amount so whether it’s $5 or 10% or $50 whatever you like it’s right there in front of their faces. So this thing pops up and it’s not intrusive. It’s in the bottom right hand corner. It’s nice and out of the way. It slides up and doesn’t take up a lot of real estate on your screen but it’s enough to capture their eye and they see this first question. And the first question could be something very simple like how did you hear about us or what’s your age range or I don’t know whoever, whatever it is you want to ask your audience.

They see that little bubble that says save 10% and they say, "Oh interesting. I can save 10% off of this product if I just give them this one little answer." They’ll say, "Okay well I heard about you on Google. I’m willing to give up that information." Then they say next. But then what happens is the magic. The save 10% bubble gets bigger or bubbles up and it changes from say 10% to say save 15% and the second question is on the screen. Now they’re hooked and I’ve seen this work over and over and over again. They want to see how much they can save because it’s this psychological trick or technique of … it’s not a bait and switch but it’s this reward that you can gain and you’re working towards it.

So you’re working towards this reward that you don’t know how far you can get with and it’s almost like gamification. They’ll fill out the survey and at the very end you give them their reward, their coupon code and because they put in this effort to attain this coupon code, they’re much, much, much more likely to redeem the coupon code and purchase your product than if you were to just flat out offer them the coupon code without them giving any work in return. It works really, really well.

For myself personally, I’ve seen an increase month over month now. Every single month I’ve seen this an increase of 200% in my sales since before I installed this widget. It’s been 3 months running because it’s a brand new widget but for 3 months I beat my best sales month ever 3 times in a row now so it’s quite exciting.

Paul Clifford: That’s brilliant. Essentially doubled your conversation rate. This tool will double your conversation rate and obviously pay for itself within its first month obviously depending on what your product is.

Trevor Page: My product, I was selling an ebook for $15 and I was receiving maybe around 1000 to 1500 visits to my website a month. Relatively speaking for myself, that’s not a very high volume or high traffic website and it’s a fairly low price point. I was able to double my sales and absolutely within the first 2 weeks I would have technically paid off the license cost for Survey-2-Sale for the entire year. I would have paid it off in the first 2 weeks. It’s quite effective and I’ve seen this sort of … and that's just myself, I’ve seen this sort of … these results from my customers that actually use it. One of them is John Dumas. Do you know him from Entrepreneur on Fire?

Paul Clifford: Oh yeah. He’s a great guy.

Trevor Page: He’s awesome. He’s been a very big supporter of myself and the Survey-2-Sale widget. He installed it on his product page where he sells membership to Podcasters Paradise, his mastermind group. Before installing this thing, he was seeing more or less $0 in passive income for his sales. Most of his sales occurred on webinars. It’s very non passive sales funnel that he had. So then he was interested in the Survey-2-Sale widget because I'd sent him a video explaining what it's all about and he was very excited. He installed it and within the first month of him using it, he went from more or less $0 in sales to $12,115 in sales. Just incredible results. I would never have guessed that it would have worked that well so I’m quite excited.

Paul Clifford: That’s brilliant. So this has just launched, right? I think you went live, was it last month?

Trevor Page: Yeah. I went live … John Dumas was pretty much my first real customer and that was February 1^st. He went live with it.

Paul Clifford: Wow that’s brilliant. How is it coming along so far? What are your plans for the tool?

Trevor Page: Right now I’m more or less I’ve done my, you know I'm past my minimum viable product stage. That’s great. That’s a goal that I’ve hit which I’m very excited about. Now I’m just implementing the new features that all the customers are asking for. Things like integrating with other email delivery systems. Right now it integrates with AWeber. It integrates with Office Autopilot and MailChimp. You can actually automatically grow your email list with this tool as well because you can ask the question on your survey … you can say what is your best email address and when they type it in, you can have it linked directly up to your email delivery system and you can get those people right into your automated sales funnels.

That’s another cool thing that this widget does as well as one feature that John had asked for. He wanted a countdown timer at the end of the survey. I was like, “Oh that’s a great idea.” I threw in a countdown timer a well. It count downs whatever you like however many minutes or seconds or days or whatever you want to give. It will countdown from 10 minutes saying you’re coupon code will expire in … it just causes that urgency to seal the deal when it comes to the sale. It’s nice. It’s cool.

Paul Clifford: Absolutely. The scarcity value, the Robert Cialdini principle.

Trevor Page: Oh I love his book.

Paul Clifford: Yeah.

Trevor Page: I’ve got it right behind me. I read it cover to cover. Great stuff in there.

Paul Clifford: It’s one of the cornerstones of every marketing bookshelf.

Trevor Page: Beautiful.

Paul Clifford: I went to see him live actually in New York once. It’s very inspiring stuff. That’s cool. You’ve got a good roadmap coming. Tell me about traffic. You got some experience in getting traffic to your other sites. What are you going to do in terms of getting exposure to this, obviously there's my podcast and that’s going to get you some customers, but in terms of general traffic strategy what’s your thinking around that?

Trevor Page: There’s the obvious routes like embedding a blog and giving away great content on the blog. That’s something that I think is a cornerstone for any traffic generating strategy. But one thing that I’m doing now that’s nice because I can do it with this app is that you can have a link inside of the survey itself. So you can have your little branding on the widget to say powered by Survey-2-Sale. That generates 33% of my overall traffic that comes to my website right now. Having that little logo on there is very good when you are on a customer’s website who is customer based are also your customer base.

A good example of that is John Dumas. He sells his products to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are my demographic. Because he has this widget on his website and other entrepreneurs are seeing it, they see it, they realize the value in it and then they want to know how to get it themselves so they click on powered by Survey-2-Sale and that’s how they land on my website and become customers. That’s one cool strategy that I’ve implemented that seems to be working really well.

Paul Clifford: I guess you’re doing guest posting and content marketing on other blogs as well?

Trevor Page: I haven’t done that just yet. Right now, because I am sort of fresh out of the gate, my initial strategy is like you said, I’m going on podcasts, getting the word out that way. That’s been my main sales driving factor if you will but eventually once I get my blog up and running then I’m going to go into the guest blogging and what not. Although what’s interesting is I just received a message from … I signed up for Neil Patel’s traffic lead program with Quick Sprout I think is what it’s called. He just sent an email whether or not it was in his automated funnel or not or if it was a live email that he just sent today, I don’t know.

He was talking about guest posting and how that is becoming something that you should be a little bit wary of. It’s almost like guest posting is becoming today’s blog comment spamming type thing. There’s only so far you can go before you start to actually get penalized which was something that was very shocking to me. I had no idea that that was turning into that. I don’t know if you ever read anything about that topic or not but I literally read it today and I thought well I should talk to someone about this. This is interesting.

Paul Clifford: Well what’s interesting … I don’t know when you got that but … so I had a conversation with Neil about that topic because that was on the back of an announcement that Matt Cutts recently made about the fact that they’re going to look at introducing a penalty filter on guest posting, guest blogging. What it's geared towards is since guest blogging became popular, there was like an army of automated tools and automated content generators and in fact not all of it was automated in terms of the content generation but the point is that a lot of guest posting, guest blogging was done just for link acquisition.

Trevor Page: And that comes across when you’re lacking quality, really is what ends up happening and that’s what Google is trying to avoid. I would assume.

Paul Clifford: Absolutely. Google’s principle is that they're obviously trying to avoid … is they call it gaming the system. Of course, everyone in the whole world wants to know how to get more exposure on Google so you’re going to try different tactics and techniques. What might be white hat today might be black hat tomorrow. There’s a lot of ethical work that was going on but it’s just not going to work in the future. Is guest blogging going to go away? No. It’s not at all and I think the key thing that people should focus on is producing the best quality content they can.

Every bit of content that I put out, I mean a lot of it is podcast, videos and things like that, but I invest a lot of time in making sure that content is the best it could possibly be because it’s evergreen. It lasts forever and it’s your voice out on the web. Whether it’s used for a guest post or whatever I want to make sure that anyone touching that comes out of it with a good quality experience. Either they’ve learned something or however it might be and I think if you focus on that and when you reach out to communities and blogs to guest post on, that you’re focused on their audience and their traffic rather than the links.

If you go at it from a traffic perspective and make sure your adding value, is good quality content, and if you’re thinking that way and reach out to people that way, then you’ll continue. Having a post on someone else’s blog with a back link, that’s just not going to get penalized because that’s the essence of the web.

Trevor Page: Absolutely.

Paul Clifford: That’s the way everything works. That’s not going to get penalized. They will know and they will develop their algorithm to look at the volume people and that’s where the risk comes in. I don’t know if Neil has published something recently but I know that we had a discussion on guest posting at that time when I interviewed Neil. We agreed on that point and that’s the big thing. Guest posting is not going to die but you just need to focus on it for traffic rather than links.

Trevor Page: Also what was mentioned in the article that he said was the relevance. Whatever it is that you’re posting about, you’re doing your guest post about should be relevant to what the website talks about in general. I think as long as you can stay on the course that way then that will certainly never be a bad thing.

Paul Clifford: Absolutely. Great. It sounds like you got a great product. You’re focused on that. You got a traffic strategy and a really neat one I think with embedding your logo as well. That’s got to be really, really cool. If anyone’s listening to this, then they can go to, is it survey2sale.com?

Trevor Page: Yup Survey-2-Sale could be the number 2 could be the word to, T-O. I’ve purchased all the domains so you should be able to land on the right page no matter which one you type in.

Paul Clifford: Good. Well you get a thumbs up from me because so many people forget to do that. It’s one of the things that … I always teach in my communities is that if you come up with a name and you think it's a really good name, for God’s sake buy all the domains. Don’t just buy the .com.

Trevor Page: Yeah. The test I did for that if this is helpful, hopefully it is for your listeners was when I told people the name of my product or my website, I would tell it to them once and I’d say write it down and I looked at what they wrote down. It’s incredible the different variations that you see that they write down. So that led me to purchasing survey dash the number 2 dash sale.com. I purchased survey to sell, S-E-L-L.com perhaps there’s a southern accent going on in there. I don’t know. It was a really interesting exercise for finding out just from saying, “Here’s the name of my product, now write it down” what comes out of the mix. That’s a good strategy for buying domains.

Paul Clifford: You bought the .net, the .org and you don’t have to buy necessarily every single one at least all the mains ones, right?

Trevor Page: The mains ones. I didn’t buy all the nets and orgs and all that for every single one but the main one exactly for sure.

Paul Clifford: Because you do get people out there piggybacking your brand and I hate that. I guess trademarking as well. Once you settle on a good name and a brand and you want to really back it, then you should trademark it as well. Not for the obvious reasons, there are a lot of people that think, "You got to trademark it in case someone else publishes something and you want to sue them." At the end of the day not a lot of people … it’s not about suing because that’s a big exercise and there’s a lot of money involved. It’s more what I find is if someone publishes say a YouTube video, that's talking about your product in a negative way so in other words defamation, you want to get that removed and if you got a trademark it’s really easy to fill out the form with Google on YouTube with your trademark number and it will disappear the next day.

Trevor Page: Incredible. I didn’t know that. There you go.

Paul Clifford: As long as it's defamation you know what I mean. It’s got to be a negative video. If someone is just reviewing it with authority then that’s different. There’s a lot of videos that go up who’s just trying to piggyback your traffic and the easiest way to get that removed is to fill out the form with Google and you’re in a lot stronger position to do that if you've got a trademark.

Trevor Page: Good to know.

Paul Clifford: There you go. Tip from Paul today.

Trevor Page: Yeah pro tip with Paul Clifford.

Paul Clifford: Listen Trevor I really enjoyed having you on the show. I think for anyone listening it’s a great tool. You can get it at Survey-2-Sale. You probably got it running on the site so you could probably see it. I think you got a free trial going, haven’t you?

Trevor Page: That’s correct. Everything you said is correct. You can get a free trial. Actually I just introduced recently a 14 day no credit card required free trial so there’s very low barrier to entry. Get it on your site, get it set up and see how it works. See how it goes, see how you like it and then if you like it, you can sign up for the paid versions.

Paul Clifford: Excellent. Great Trevor. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks to that. We’re going to keep in touch and for any listeners, who want to get hold of you Trevor then I guess go to Survey2Sale and fill out the contact form and have a chat.

Trevor Page: Yeah or just email me directly at [email protected].

Paul Clifford: To everyone listening to the show, Trevor and I are running a contest. Essentially all you have to do is leave a comment in the comments box below and let us know what question you would like to ask your audience. In other words whenever someone hits your site or looks at your product, what is the one question you want to ask them? Leave that in the comments box below and we will pick 2 winners by the end of the month. Each of those winners will win an annual license to Survey-2-Sale. That’s worth $648 to you so you can actually put this into action and increase your sales for absolutely nothing.

All you have to do is leave a comment below. We will choose the winners and we’ll let you know at the end of the month and you could be a winner.

Recommended Resources:

1. Survey 2 Sale - click here

2. How To Program With Java.com Blog - click here

3. Qualaroo - click here

4. Entrepreneur On Fire - click here

5. Influence Science and Practice (outlines the Robert Cialdini Principle) - click here to get the book

MIT, Y Combinator And A Series Of Startups Sparks Innovation For Austin NeuDecker’s Latest Venture Membright

Austin NeuDecker is the founder of Membright a unique mobile app that helps people control what they remember. He is a graduate of MIT and Y Combinator. He's considered a serial entrepreneur having been involved in a number of startups. As well, Austin dedicates a large portion of his time to mentoring in the San Diego startup community. He's passionate, experienced, and has a wealth of knowledge to share.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tweetables
Startup marketing has become an extremely quantitative art form. Tweet Buffertweetable text
We're trying to help people control what they remember. Tweet Buffertweetable text
There's a lot of different ways to come up with good ideas. Tweet Buffertweetable text
Sometimes small features for large companies accrue big benefits. Tweet Buffertweetable text

Today's Podcast Highlights

[3.49 - I got the itch again and I really felt like I wanted to be the master of my own destiny.]
[9.06 - As you get deeper into the startup and you start growing, a lot of the prioritization of those things and new things sort of come into the picture.]
[11.07 - At a high level at Membright, we're trying to help people control what they remember.]
[12.40 - What we did is we kind of made a really basic application that had that information in there and used some of the techniques we had.]
[16.36 - The Membright system reminds you daily of the things that you need to remember just when you are about to forget.]
[19.10 - We’re using space repetition in the backbone of the algorithm that drives the app and how it functions.]
[21.40 - It's really just entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs and building programs that are specifically aimed at solving those specific needs that early stage companies run into all the time.]
[22.07- Most of the things that we try to add are very pointed at solving specific problems.]
[25.00 - A lot of people's time at the beginning should be spent both finding that group and working kind of hand in hand with that group.]
[25.25 - Then I think scaling is all about how to identify and go after those communities without having to have the high level of touch that you’re going to have with those first couple of groups.]
[25.51 - There is definitely a lot of different ways to come up with good ideas.]
[30.07 - Sometimes small features for large companies accrue big benefits to the bottom line.]
[31.53 - When I used to see companies start it was, do you have two engineers or three engineers and one business guy? And that was kind of a recipe for a good company.]
[33.26 - The only way for you to get good user experience is to have users use it.]
[31.12 - Startup marketing has become an extremely quantitative art form where you have to know what your funnel is and measure every single interaction.]
[36.25 - We collect metrics on where the user came in from, when they engaged, which button they clicked, how deep they got into the product, how many cards they reviewed and how many decks they added.]
[37.17 - The first thing I would do is taking the idea itself and trying to create some representation of that idea without actually building much of anything and going out and market testing that.]
[37.35 - Trying to find some of those users that we talked about, some of those people that we expect might become those kind of extreme early adopters that are going to love this product so much that they're going to be mad if you took it away. ]

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Full Transcript

Paul: Hi there software entrepreneurs and welcome to today's show. Now, we're up to 21 shows now at the time of this recording and the Disruptware Podcast is doing extremely well, it's ranked well on iTunes, but it could really do with your help and support in subscribing and reviewing. Leave some comments on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you find the podcast.

Provide us some feedback and if you haven't got time to that, I totally get that, so just go to the blog disruptware.com and leave a comment, give us some feedback on what you want to hear on the show. Because what we're trying to do is provide you with strategies, tips, ideas and motivation so that you can build or scale your software business and have the success that a lot of the people that I have on the show are getting.

Today, what I want to do is have a chap called Austin Neudecker on the show and Austin is an ex-MIT grad. He's been in Y Combinator, he's a serial entrepreneur and heavily involved in the San Diego startup scene. Now, he's recently launched a new product called Membright. And it's a fascinating piece of software that runs on the mobile platform. And, without further adieu, I'm going to get him on the show to talk a bit about that and talk a bit about entrepreneurship and startups as well, because he has worked in a number of VCs and has a wealth of experience in that arena. So let's get started.

Hi Austin, welcome to the show.

Austin: Thanks for having me Paul glad to be on.

Paul: I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day. As you know, Disruptware is all about exploring different ideas, concepts and strategies that really work in the real world for people who are looking to sort of start up their new business. But also people who already have a product and have a software company and looking to scale.

I was particularly interested in chatting to yourself for a couple of reasons, one because you've had a lot of experience with a few startups. And some were good, some failed as well and I think we can all learn a huge amount of strategies and tips and techniques of things not to do and I'm sure you can help us out there.

Also, to tell us a bit more about your new company Membright and a little bit about the San Diego startup scene. To get started, tell us a bit about yourself Austin. What's your sort of background or how did you get in to this world?

Austin: Sure yeah, so I actually grew up in San Diego where I reside now, but I ended up going to undergrad at MIT in Boston and there I studied Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Business. After that, I basically tried to start a company right out of school which didn't work the first time. We were trying to do basically podcasting for publications like The Economist, to almost have like an audio version of all their different articles.

That was going pretty well. We started to raise some money, eventually decided to shut it down and I joined, I sold my soul and joined a management consulting firm. And I actually really enjoyed it. I learned a lot working across many different big industries. After a while, I got the itch again and I really felt like I wanted to be the master of my own destiny. So I left that and went back to business school at Wharton at U-Penn in Philadelphia.

After graduating there, I kind of knew I wanted to get back into startups. I ended up joining a couple of venture capital firms. So I joined, first, a firm out in the valley called Foundation Capital just doing sourcing for them, trying to find businesses that would be relevant to them. And after that, I joined a seed stage fund called Genacast Ventures that works primarily on the East Coast.

After that, I decided okay it's time to actually try to start something myself rather than investing in companies and started a couple...string of startups. One was a smart pill bottle which used capacitance as a means to judge exactly how much medication was inside of it and then alert a patient and a provider when someone was not being compliant with their medical recommendation.

Paul: That's cool. Is it actually sort of like an awareness of how much was left in the bottle or whatever?

Austin: Exactly, yeah. On both sides of the bottle where these capacitors that were judging kind of the resistance that the pills or the liquid created in the bottle and then up at the cap was a way to wirelessly transmit that information so we could process it and then send alerts back to the patient to say, "Hey grandma the blue pill is really important, you got to take it today." Or to the provider to say, "Hey, Johnny is not feeling better because he is not taking his medication or he is taking some medication, we need to change the medication itself."

Paul: Got it, or he's emptying it and filling it up with tea or something. Brilliant, so what happened to that startup?

Austin: So that startup is actually still going. My partner Josh is I think running it really well and I think they're in a couple of hospitals in the Philadelphia and New York area now and I think growing pretty well.

Paul: Excellent! And you know, just take a step back a second. You were working for a couple of VC companies and I think you said in...did you say in the sourcing role? Were you looking for potential things to invest in or were you looking for like potential funds?

Austin: Yeah, when you get started in VC and I think that's probably a whole other discussion to have, but when you get started in VC which I would describe as the best job you should never take. I was really just trying to find companies that fit the profile of what the first firm that I worked for wanted to see. So I was really looking around basically the East Coast trying to send interesting businesses to a West Coast investor.

And that was just kind of my way to get into the business and kind of understand better what they were looking for. And then eventually, I found a great role working for a guy by the name of Gil Beyda at Genacast Ventures which is kind of an unknown but I would say rock star seed firm that's been very successful in their first ten investments and I learned a lot working kind of as his right-hand man doing everything from this aspect to evaluating the business, what we called due-diligence. And then making decision on investing in them, sitting in to board meetings, following up with portfolio companies. So it was really the whole process of that investor goes through.

Paul: Got it, I guess to form a sort of takeaway for people, what would you say were like the three most important things that an investor would look for? And I guess that probably translates into what the three most important things that make a successful startup.

Austin: Yeah I think that that's fair. And I think so the kind of clichéd answer that you'll get and I think I'll mirror it to a certain extent then tell you why there are some exceptions. Is it that team and market matter the most in the beginning? Meaning like, is this a great group of people going after an interesting opportunity and hopefully there's some relevancy between the two? Do these people have some background or some reason why they're particularly geared to go after this opportunity?

And then kind of a distant third would be the particular idea that they have to go after that because the thinking generally is if it's a good team and it's a good market, they'll kind of pivot enough and find something that works even if their first idea is not the right one. I'll kind of caveat that whole thing with saying that's really important for an early stage startup something that's really just getting going.

As you get deeper into the startup and you start growing, a lot of the prioritization of those things and new things start to come into the picture. That's more about the particular product and the financials around that product whether you're going to acquire a customer for cheaper than their lifetime value is to the business. So these things kind of move in this spectrum. Then it's like, "Can you recruit talent quickly? Can you learn how to be more scalable fast?" Those things start to matter more as you get older.

Paul: Right, got it! So, from there, you did a Y Combinator startup right?

Austin: Yeah, then my next company was Yealthy and we went through the Y Combinator program in the summer of 2012.

Paul: Right! Just tell us a bit about that.

Austin: That company was basically trying to go down the tele-health kind of general path we were trying to give providers that's either doctors or nurse practitioners a way to mobile chat with patients. A really big opportunity, a really interesting opportunity, but as I was sharing with you earlier, it's always difficult in the healthcare space to find these entry points. Just given the regulation and kind of the large players that are existing in the space that have kind of an interest in keeping you out. Healthcare tech companies are kind of made or broken very quickly in the first year or two.

Paul: Right, got it! Now, you're at the stage now where you've just started a new company called Membright, right?

Austin: Right, yeah, that's right.

Paul: Now, we're in the sort of software space. Just tell me a bit about Membright, what's the concept behind that?

Austin: Sure, so at a high level at Membright, we're trying to help people control what they remember. We're trying to give them the tools that kind of mirror the way that your brain retains information and then give them the ability to either select existing information, whether that be input by yourself or somewhere that you find it online or finding existing content from kind of trusted content creators and then saying, "That information is important to me, I want to remember it." And then we do all the hard stuff that mirrors how your brain works to keep it in your head.

Paul: And you know what I loved about that as I was talking to earlier about how you went out to get your first customers on there, because often, one of my first questions I ask people is, "How do you get the first 20? How do you get your first 50? How do you scale from there?" Obviously yours is a brand new product but you got an interesting story as to how you actually got people using it straightaway. Tell me about that.

Austin: Yes, so one of the challenges with Membright was we've got this great technology and we've got some really interesting ideas of how to implement it but we didn't know specifically which application the technology was going to be best so we started building these tests. The first test we made was, "Hey let's put in some content for teenagers to learn how all the rules of the road." So when they go to take their DMV test, they are prepared to take that test.

So what we did is we kind of made a really basic application that had that information in there and used some of the techniques we had. We bought four different Nexus tablets and then I went down to the DMV for a couple of days. I knew there was going to be a long line as there always is at the DMV unfortunately.

Paul: Tell me about it. I discovered that as a Londoner coming to the US and getting his driving license. That was a bit of a shocker.

Austin: I'm sorry and welcome to America, but yeah, there's this long line out there and I figured, "Okay, these people are going to be waiting there with basically twiddling their thumbs. This is an excellent opportunity to get some user feedback and to see if it actually works. So we took those tablets, we handed them out to people in line and we said, "Hey if you really want to pass your test that you're about to take, why don't you use this tool for 10 minutes to 15 minutes while you wait? It's an easy interface, just click through it with your finger."

And we found that A, it was easy to get them to do it because they weren't doing anything else and, B, the first time pass rate of these 50-100 users that we had went up to about 50% more. So they usually pass it about 50% of the time, they passed it about 75% of the time and that was only using our tool for about 10 minutes, so we were pretty happy with those results.

Paul: That’s cool! Did you pre-load it with all the questions?

Austin: Yeah we did. We went out and got that content, we typed it in.

Paul: I got it, and how did you know it was just the group that did...that actually used your app that passed? You actually have to survey people coming out?

Austin: Yeah exactly. Kind of part of the deal was that you can use our tablet, you can mess around but you got to, on your way out...luckily, there was only basically one door at that place. I said, "Hey you did you pass or not?"

Paul: Yeah! What about the poor people who didn't pass? "But you didn't give me a tablet."

Austin: It was interesting, the few that didn't pass came back out and they said, "Give me that tablet, I'll do again." They said, "I got to practice some more." They would play with it some more, they would go in and they come out with a smile on their face.

Paul: Excellent! Did you make any sales off that?

Austin: No, we weren't selling the product at that time which is a great point. In some cases you want to validate whether people are willing to pay for it and in this case, the test was more is this effective, does this work. We were able to validate that hypothesis.

Paul: Ok, brilliant. For a customer buying this app, in terms of the actual content, the domain content, do they buy packages of that or can they load it themselves? How do you actually create the content?

Austin: Yes, so these are all great questions that...like I said we're very early. I can give you some initial responses, but I can't be held to them I think in the long run. The app is actually...I hate to say it but it's very alpha and it's got still a lot of bugs in it, but it's available right now in the Android, iPhone and web versions. You can get them on any of those and play around with it.

But, the thought eventually is can we find content producers. Let's say Paul wants to take this interview and he wants to say, "Hey Austin made five interesting points that any entrepreneur should commit to their own minds so whenever they're thinking about their startup, these things kind of come up in their head." So we would allow you to kind of have a button at the bottom of your blog which would allow a user to add that to their brain. It would go into their Membright system and the Membright system basically reminds them everyday like here are the few things that you need to just be reminded of today, just at the time you're about to forget it.

Paul: So you basically you kind of provide the framework and you partner with content providers, put the two together and insert into my brain please.

Austin: Exactly, it’s just a very empowering feeling because this is something that we've all kind of given up on memory. We've basically said if I need a piece of information I’ll just Google it or I'll find it in my Evernote or something. But that doesn’t work for information we really need. You can’t go up to someone and forget their name and then say hold on a second while I look you up on Google+ or something like that. Or you can't be communicating with someone and then say "Hey, hold on let me look up my Evernote, 5 Negotiating Tips." For that type of content, you just need to know it and we take care of all the hard stuff that puts it into your brain and keeps it there.

Paul: That’s fascinating. I think it’s something that everyone wants is to improve their memory. I speak to or put the hand up and say "my memory is rubbish" I mean I know mine is. And I kind of know some techniques to improve my memory or let me put it another way, I would know formal techniques of how to remember stuff, but the issue I often have is how to switch on that engagement to ensure that I choose to remember it. And I guess, where I'm going with that is that if I want to remember a list then I can visually picture the items on the list, sort of piling on top of each other in my head. And if I go through that process and engage my brain to go through that process then that list will be committed in my head. But like nine times out of ten in your everyday situation, you forget to use that technique. So any tool like this or something that you can use on a habitual basis or form a habit out of I think will be amazing for improving memory.

Austin: Yeah, and these like you said there’s a lot of different memory techniques out there, there’s things called like The Memory Palace where you can picture things, you picture Napoleon on a horse with an ace of cards on his head. And there is a Mnemonics, and then there’s things like "space repetition" and we’re using some of these tactics especially space repetition in the backbone of the algorithm that drives the app and how it functions. So we’re basically saying "we will take care of all of that hard stuff." You just basically have to select content or pick some existing content that’s in the app and say "this is important to me and I want to keep it in my head" and we will kind of help manage that, so we're managing the brain for you.

Paul: Got it. And that’s going to be really, really cool when that launches. How far away do you think that is?

Austin: So like I said, we've kind of soft launched it kind of quietly to the Apple and Android stores. But I think it will take probably a couple more months for us to kind of get it pretty enough and be happy enough with the product to really go after a larger launch strategy.

Paul: Sure, understand. Okay, brilliant. So let’s move on a bit because you’re in San Diego now and you are very much part of San Diego scene. What are your thoughts, in terms of the startup world down here now. Because you know everyone I talk to is just talking about how much this place is just rocking with tech startups and there’s lots going on, and the activity and the momentum is building and building. What are your thoughts on that?

Austin: First off, that's great to hear. I always love it when I see an ecosystem. When I came here about a year ago, I felt like there was a lot of interesting startups, there was a lot of activity happening but it tended to be fairly siloed. It looked like there were groups around town that were trying to help startups in their own kind of bubble. But people weren't working kind of across groups to create a sense of real community. If someone was kind of entering, they didn't have like an entry point into that world or they couldn't see across multiple startups to join.

My experience both as a VC and in programs like Y Combinator led me and a couple of other individuals in town to kind of get together and say, "Hey, let's change this. Let's make this more of that community feel that it has in other cities." We started a bunch of different programs that the whole main goal is to do that, there is no like owner of this startupsandiego.co group. It's really just entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs and building programs that are specifically aimed at solving those specific needs that early stage companies run into all the time.

Paul: What does that involve? Do you like run workshops and things like that?

Austin: Speaker things happen all the time around the town anyway, so we didn't want to add an additional thing that was kind of not needed. Most of the things that we try to add are very pointed at solving specific problems. Our mentorship hours which I kind of modeled after the YC mentor hours that I had experienced are really just finding very successful people in town that have kind of been through it, they’ve exited a company. They're investing in companies and they would sit down with you for kind of these short, kind of speed dating mentorship sessions where they are focused on one particular problem that you have.

We run these events very frequently. We run them every other week and then we run once a quarter a very big mentorship night. We have about 30 different mentors and maybe about 30 to 50 companies participating.

Paul: Ok. And so, I would go to one of these events and I'd express like my problem and I'd be partnered with someone to basically expose it and talk over a solution.

Austin: You basically have four meetings in a row kind of like speed dating. Each of those meetings would be 30 minutes and as soon as that meeting starts, the mentor would say, "Okay, tell me a little...three minutes about what your business is and where you're at and then let's talk about it." They say, "Okay, this is my startup and we're currently at this level and right now I'm trying to figure out how I can do Facebook advertising better. They say, "Great, I know about that. Let's dive into it."

Paul: Right. I got you. Brilliant! That's fascinating! In terms of your experience, what would you advise people starting up or people scaling? What key sort of strategies or tips can you give my audience in terms of starting up making sure their product works? And then, anything in terms of scaling and in terms of getting traffic, getting conversions.

Austin: I guess I was steeped in the Paul Graham's ethos of kind of like getting in front of your customers and making sure you find people that really love your product. I think that's kind of worth talking about deeper where I think there's a lot of engineers that start companies that really believe that the product itself will eventually be good enough and then we'll kind of win the day. People will hear about it, people will share it and somehow it will kind of blow up.

But that's extremely rare for it to happen that way. Most likely it happens a very different way which is build something which is highly needed and highly loved by a very, very small group of users. A lot of people's time at the beginning should be spent both finding that group and working kind of hand in hand with that group, really trying to understand who those people are and what their needs are and filling those needs so much that those people, if you took it away from them they would be pretty upset.

They don't have to necessarily pay but they need to have that kind of visceral reaction. This product is something that is required for me now and once you find that, you can start to figure out, "Okay what attributes did that community have that I think I can use the same metrics to identify a similar or approximate community that's maybe a little bit bigger."

Then I think scaling is all about how to identify and go after those communities without having to have the high level of touch that you had to have with those first couple groups. If I were to make it more tangible, when we started with Membright, we were looking for who's going to be that group of users and we happened to come across another guy in the San Diego ecosystem. He told us that he was playing this game called "Ingress" which I'd never heard of. Basically, it's a geo-location game based on Google's Android platform and you kind of go around town and kind of claim different parts of town and like fight the other team by placing things on the map.

Part of that game has this glyph-hacking thing where you need to know these gestures. We had seen that other people that had used our application were reviewing let's say 20 different pieces of information a day. That would take about two to five minutes in their dead time. That was great. It was kind of nice to have.

But for this group, these Ingress users, the ones that got their hands on this tool saw, "Hey I can get two times the items if I actually memorize these gestures." They saw such a benefit in it that they were reviewing 400, 500 cards a day. That gave us a great indication that wow these people...we didn't even know about this group but they really liked this product and they really feel like they have a need for it. So that was kind of the way we identified that group for us.

Paul: Coming back to one thing you said though, finding something that's like really, really in demand for a small group of people. Do you think that's also very, very difficult for a lot of people to do? Coming up with those unique ideas is quite rare. Coming up with a ground breaking product is quite rare and yet you don't have to do that just to come up with a successful software product, right?

I do kind of advocate that what you can do is look at something that is working in another market or something that maybe runs on a different platform. Or something that's very old fashioned and then re-invent that and take it to a new market or take it to a different population or make it more modern or slicker or whatever. By doing that, you’ve already proven, you already know that the market is there and ready for it. By making it fit this newer market, then you already have half the work done, you already know there's an appetite there for it, and so all you got to do is build it and obviously deliver it. Do you see where I am going with that?

Austin: I think there is definitely a lot of different ways to come up with good ideas. One way is kind of like taking an existing product or technology from an existing industry and reapplying it to a new market. I think that's a very good one but definitely not the only one. Kind of what you said even in the same industry, if I could take a product and just even slightly improve it, but find people for which that slight advantage is actually very meaningful. Then you can really still have an amazing product.

I hate to use examples like these because I think that they're part of the driver why people think that startups are easy when they're very, very much not. But taking Instagram for example. There were lots of photo-sharing applications out there before Instagram came on the scene. This wasn't like a new thing, but they kind of slightly tweaked this kind of filtering system and seems like a pretty small feature difference, but for some reason, that was kind of the thing that really took off for them.

I think that that's particularly a useful way to think about B2B businesses and SaaS businesses because sometimes small features for large companies accrue big benefits to the bottom line.

Paul: I interviewed Chuck Longanecker the other day and we were talking about this very thing. He came up with two concepts which really struck me. The first one was friction. If you can work out how to remove the friction of using something and make things simpler, then you will increase adoption and obviously you'll improve the emotional side of using something.

The second thing is what he said was that, "Our life is all about experiences and experiences form the fabric of our sort of existence as it were. The more you can touch or have an impact on someone's experience with something, then the more they'll become engaged with it and use it."

If you can find a product that's selling now and work out how to reduce the friction and how to improve the engagement and the user's experience of it to such a degree that it makes it fun, interesting or valuable to them, then I think that's one of the core fundamentals to making the really successful app.

Austin: Yeah, definitely. Chuck's a smart guy and I tend to agree with him and definitely on this one as well where...it is interesting that startups these days are finding user experience to be one of the most important parts of the company. When I used to see companies start it was, do you have two engineers or three engineers and one business guy? And that was kind of a recipe for a good company.

It's funny now that people look at, the VCs look at the world and even other entrepreneurs look at the world and they think of, "Okay, what I need to start my company is a software designer, a business guy and a user-experience designer." It's very interesting, that's definitely Chuck's approach to the world given kind of how he approaches his businesses.

I concur with it, I think that I'm gonna be a little bit of a hypocrite because Membright right now is definitely not the easiest thing to use in the world. But we view our approach to go that way very quickly. We want to make this a tool that's easier than all other ways to put in information and to commit things to memory as just an example, so I agree.

Paul: I guess to your credit though as well that the other thing about something like Membright is you need to get something out there working and get feedback before you make it perfect in terms of the UX and everything else. Because you got a concept there that you're really trying to prove in the market. I actually think it's very important. Get it out there, get the feedback and then look at the UX side of things.

Austin: Totally. Yeah, to me those things are not only non-exclusive but they build on each other. The only way for you to get good user experience and I'm sure Chuck would back this up is to have users use it. The only way for you to know whether they're going to click on this button or that button or where their eyes are going to focus or if they're going to find the specific way that you display the analytics to be intuitive or not intuitive is for you to put that in front of a user and look over his shoulder and see what he does.

You can kind of trick yourself into thinking that you are the super user and you are going to design it for yourself and therefore everyone else is going to love that. That's not how the world works. That's generally not how product design is done now.

Paul: The other thing that I think when I'm talking to people who work on their startup and all that, sometimes they get so focused on the UX and on building the perfect product that's going to build this amazing experience that they forget like Marketing 101. They forget about some of the core fundamentals like getting traffic, getting a lead capture, actually getting leads and then creating a funnel so you can actually sell these things. And I think sometimes that a lot of this bread and butter marketing stuff to which every business online now is implementing just gets overlooked.

No matter how good your product is, you have to get this core fundamentals in place to actually get eye balls on the product to start with. You know what I'm saying?

Austin: Definitely. I absolutely think there's an interesting evolution going on within the marketing role. When I went back to school or when I went to school in the first place, MIT had actually a very famous marketing department and that's because as opposed to the rest of the world at the time which was thinking about beautiful pictures and great commercials and funny messages and stuff like that, MIT was thinking very quantitatively about how do we set the right metrics, how do we measure people's engagement, how do we frame things the right way to increase the amount of acceptance of a message.

I was really steeped in that ethos and kind of learned a lot of from a guy, Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational is his book. It's a great book and it teaches you about how to basically trick users into accepting your product and your pricing and all those things. But I would say is kind of a more broader view of the world. Startup marketing has become an extremely quantitative art form where you have to...like you said, know what your funnel is, measure every single interaction.

We use a company called "Mixpanel" to mark exactly where the user came in from, when they engaged, which button they clicked, how deep they got into the product, how many cards they reviewed and how many decks they added. These are key metrics for us to figure out, "Are we being successful with this set group of people? Is this marketing message collecting the right type of people? Is our product working with taking people through the funnel?" So even though we are really early on this stuff, this is the mentality that we have as entrepreneurs.

Paul: Absolutely great! Austin, it's been really fascinating chatting to you, what advice would you give sort of entrepreneurs sort of starting out? Where should they start?

Austin: The first thing I would do is taking the idea itself and trying to create some representation of that idea without actually building much of anything and going out and market testing that. Trying to find some of those users that we talked about, some of those people that we expect might become those kind of extreme early adopters that are going to love this product so much that they're going to be mad if you took it away.

How do I get my product in front of those people as quickly as possible or even just the idea of the product and see if they're connecting with it. From there, I might start to build out a little bit of an MVP and test that and just incrementally build as I get pulled from the market.

Paul: Austin, it's been a pleasure and an honor having you on board. If any wants to follow up, how should they get in touch with you?

Austin: They can email me directly at austin@membright, that's M-E-M-B-R-I-G-H-T .com and I am happy to field any questions.

Paul: Obviously, go to membright.com, have a look at the app, but bear in mind it's in alpha stage, but I'm sure Austin would love some feedback on that.

Austin: Yeah, we love feedback. Every time anyone uses it, please send us a note and let us know how it can be better.

Paul: Brilliant! Thanks so much Austin, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Austin: My pleasure Paul.

Recommended Resources

1. Membright - click here

2. Foundation Capital - click here

3. Genacast Ventures - click here

4. Y Combinator - click here

5. Startup San Diego - startupsandiego.co

6. Paul Graham - click here

7. Book - Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

8. Mixpanel - click here

Simple And Compelling Is Digital Telepathy’s Winning Formula To Ground Breaking Design

Chuck Longanecker is the founder of Digital Telepathy a design company that has created some ground breaking sites. They are responsible for the design of Tim Ferris's 4 Hour Body, Neil Patel's Crazy Egg, New Relic and more. The inspiration and idea for this company actually arose from a job loss and a general lack of fulfilment in the typical mundane day-to-day jobs. Chuck had a vision that was far greater and far more powerful. He wanted to inspire change, to help people, to make a difference by creating designs that simply make things better. He called it Betterment.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tweetables
Our goal is to be Officers of Betterment Tweet Buffertweetable text
Our experiences are what binds us together Tweet Buffertweetable text
It's repetitive motion every day that builds a company Tweet Buffertweetable text
If you make a few things better everyday, you eventually get exponential results Tweet Buffertweetable text

Today's Podcast Highlights

[5.54 - As we became more savvy, we realized we couldn't become phenomenal at any of these things as long as we kept doing them all.]
[6.41 - We wanted to create something new and put it out there, something that hadn't existed before instead of creating more of the same.]
[7.04 - We had all our own ideas in-house and we decided to create a budget of time to start building stuff.]
[7.51 - We just hit the ground running and helped determine and iterate what the product actually is for clients.]
[9.37 - We have to test, we have to learn, we have to communicate with potential clients or customers or users, do that customer development, create the prototypes, iterate the prototypes until we actually see some growth and then we can go full bore into what the product's going to be.]
[10.8 - There's uncertainty everywhere. We kind of embraced that.]
[11.32 - We wanted to build something so simple because it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complex.]
[14.19 - If you make a few things better everyday, you eventually get exponential results.]
[16.28 - Our goal is to be Officers of Betterment, creating betterment, no matter what we do.]
[16.52 - Our experiences are what bind us together, and kind of create what I call this experience DNA.]
[19.34 - Look inward, look at what you love to do, look at what you're passionate about and where you want to make a difference.]
[20.00 - Look out where the friction is, where is there something that you can solve, where is there something you can make better.]
[20.35 - Executing that vision and actually culminating it to a complete vision takes a long time.]
[21.20 - You want to affect a large group of people or else there's not a good chance of success.]
[21.29 - It's repetitive motion every day that builds a company, and so you have to be comfortable doing the same thing everyday.]
[22.40 - When we blog, we try to share what we've learned with all of our readers of how to do things better. We share our process, we share our culture, we share how to design, we share all these things so that they could take it on their own and make things better. ]
[23.31 - The thought process is if we help people make their users happy, the users are going to take care of those websites.]
[31.55 - As you get older, I think your priorities change a little bit as they should.]
[33.11 - It's not a matter of how long you work, it's a matter of where your headspace is at, how well you work together as a team.]
[34.57 - It's interesting to be motivated by your mind and the family as opposed to other things.]
[35.15 - To make a greater impact, you've got to do pretty big things.]
[37.53 - Make sure it is something you're passionate about or a problem that you want to fix as opposed to just a market opportunity.]
[38.05 - if you have an opportunity to work with someone you trust, I think that's pretty great.]
[38.32 - When you're alone as an entrepreneur, it's tough, right, because people will not understand what it's like to be you within the organization.]
[38.51 - If you can be different, be technical and creative or vision and marketing or operationally sound or something like that.]
[39.11 - If you have a great team, that great team can come up with a great idea.]

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Full Transcript

Paul Clifford: Hi there software entrepreneurs and welcome to the show. Now today I've got an amazing interview with a guy called Chuck Longaneckerer, and Chuck is the founder of a company called Digital Telepathy. Now for many of you who may not know who that is, or what that is. Essentially this company is behind some of the most ground breaking sites and personalities on the web today.

For example, Tim Ferris's site, Neil Patel's sites, New Relic, a lot of tech startup sites, they all go to this company to talk about design. The reason is the design and user experience is really, really at the core, everyone who works for this company. Chuck's done an amazing job of getting everyone involved in the ethos of purist design and we've got some great insights to share on the show.

Instead of doing the show as a normal podcast from base camp. What we decided to do, in fact I jumped in the car and went down to his office to meet and greet some of this team in person. Let's get on with the show, let's meet Chuck obviously some background noise because this is a live interview but I really think you're going to get huge amounts out of it. Chuck welcome to the show, thanks for coming on board, I really, really appreciate you spending some time with us today.

Chuck Longanecker: Good to be here.

Paul Clifford: You know we're in your fantastic office, I can see some really amazing talent around. You've got what I can sense is like a real great culture of people like really fascinating interested in design and in their work. Tell me a bit about yourself when did you actually start, what got you into building this amazing company.

Chuck Longanecker: Yes, love to tell you a little bit more about that. So I started DT a good 13 years ago when I was 25, which is if you do the math, you know how old I am now. I started kind of on a whim. I got laid off from a startup in 2000, that I was working at, and I had a little tiny severance I think I had a $5,000 severance and I said "I'm going to see how long I can stretch this, and live on this and what the hell, I'll start a company."

Kind of work on my own because I wasn't really fulfilled working for other people. Somehow I'm still here. It was a really, really long road but I think I was born out of my lack of fulfillment with the jobs I was currently doing or I was doing in the past. Which kind of stemmed from you go in, you do your work, you go home you're not satisfied about what you're doing.

You don't get to kind of see the fruits of your labor, you write a white paper, and someone reads it, maybe they make a decision on it. When the web started to increase some popularity, we got to make something and it was put on an IP address that anybody in the world could see. Even if you weren't successful for those sites, you could actually have other people see the fruits of your labor which was really fulfilling.

Luckily the web actually took off. At first I was convincing people that they needed websites, which is kind of funny to think about now and going to the local lead generation events, and you know just like sweating it. Eventually everything kind of picked up, and luckily we embraced design as what our core competency is and how to use design to create amazing experiences and grow businesses, specifically startups.

Luckily, everything that we've kind of followed our heart and started doing, started supporting us back with what the demands are, and now design is one of the most sought after elements of a service that we can provide. I think we got lucky, I couldn't be happier with how things happened.

Paul Clifford: I remember those days when the web really, in its infancy ... I got involved in creating some sites as well and you would show those to clients and all that, and they'd be going, "Yeah but so what? How's that going to benefit me? How is that going to generate leads?" All those early conversations where you really had to sell the whole concept of having a website to these companies. Of course, obviously that really, really took off.

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah we used to have to fight for the budget from the white pages or the yellow pages. What a ridiculous idea now but at that time, we'd have some very progressive clients that are like I'm going to take a month off from the yellow pages and put it into this site and see if it can do more. Luckily, we were able to pull that off.

Paul Clifford: Often, you were actually selling to not even the marketing department, it was still within IT.

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah.

Paul Clifford: Amazing days, amazing days. But obviously, you started doing that and where did you go on from there?

Chuck Longanecker: From there, we started to learn that what our sweet spot was. We started off giving all kinds of different services, from hosting to email marketing to SEO, and right when the social media came out, we jumped on that. Anything that someone would pay us for, we would do for them, we'd figure it out.

As we became more savvy, we realized we couldn't become phenomenal at any of these things as long as we kept doing them all. So we focused in on design and specifically user experience and user interface and then we looked to see where...who had the greatest needs for this, right?

The emerging startups that were building these products, inventing new technology had the greatest needs for these as well. They were also the ones that were willing to be the riskiest. We like to be on the cutting edge of design.

As we worked with bigger brands, they were more conservative. As we worked with startups, they were just willing to go for it. We're driven as designers by the work that we do and how exciting it is, not how big the budget is per say, and also how many people we're potentially impacting and how we're impacting them. We want to create something new and put it out there that hasn't existed before. Invent something more so than just create more the same.

That led us to specifically user interface, user experience for startups. As we got into that, it was so exciting, we got to meet all these entrepreneurs that had all these great ideas and we're satisfying their visions. We're like, "Hey, we want a little piece of that, too." We had all our own ideas in-house and we decided to create a budget of time to start building stuff. That was probably one of the best things we had done. It allowed us to go from what would be a kind of traditional interactive agency or company into a real product company.

We experienced all the pain and agony of figuring out what the product is, of getting it to scale, bringing on users, monetizing then eventually going through acquisition. That allowed us to kind of go to the phase that we are at now which is we have a very startup centric service offering we provide that is very agile that kind of works based on objectives, not on tasks, on what we're accomplishing so we don't take a scope, we don't go through a normal technical spec. We just hit the ground running and help determine and iterate what the product actually is for our clients.

Paul Clifford: Which of course ... and your clients obviously understand that way of working as well, right?

Chuck Longanecker: They have to or else they won't work with us, and it's okay, right? We have really ... we don't have a sales team. We have very frank conversations. We try to help people first and if there's a good click, a good fit, they understand the way we work. Usually it's a reflection of the way that they work and so we just seamlessly work in there and kind of take over as their Chief Design Officer within their company.

Paul Clifford: Right. Does some of that stem from like the whole lean sort of approach as well really not ... as you said, not build out scopes and specs like that, but let's sort of mock something up, let's see if that works and see what the reaction and the feedback is or customer development as they call it in the Lean world. But trying stuff out and then molding it and then changing it and iterating it and then eventually ...

Chuck Longanecker: Absolutely. We wanted to approach everything with a very common sense approach. When we first found Eric Ries and his writings were like ... this is the way we've been thinking and finally someone organized it, we were so relieved. We were like, "Oh good, we can just kind of follow what he's figured out as we were doing portions of it." Fortunately, we got to work with Eric as well so we better implement some of that Lean approach and methodology. See absolutely, we look at it less like we're deciding to go Lean, we're deciding to go agile and more so that let's go common sense.

When someone comes to us to build or design something and ask us how much it's going to cost, the answer is we have no idea, right? We don't even know that the approach that you're moving in is correct. We have to test, we have to learn, we have to communicate with potential clients or customers or users, do that customer development, create the prototypes, iterate on the prototypes until we actually see some growth and then we can go full bore into what the product's going to be.

Or if we're modifying an existing product, there's so much digging of quantitative, qualitative analysis that we need to learn from to determine what's the greatest path. The whole thing, as Eric would say, is that startups are uncertain. There's uncertainty everywhere. We kind of embraced that. If we need to change, we need to pivot, then the way our model works since it's just a recurring subscription we can pivot on a dime. It doesn't matter, right, and it doesn't cost them any more money.

Paul Clifford: Because you're not working within a fixed framework.

Chuck Longanecker: That's right. That's what's allowed us, aside from what we do on a services perspective, to keep building products so we're able to carve a certain percentage out of our staff to build these products and continue to learn, continue to go through the agony and get more and more ambitious with every product we build.

Paul Clifford: Right. As we're talking about products specifically, one of your great products that you sold I think to Crazy Egg was Hello Bar. How was that born? Did you just come up with this idea one day and thought, "Hey, it'd be really cool if I did this."

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah it was ... I have to give credit where credit's due, Matt from Sitepoint had started Flippa, and Flippa which is a website for selling websites had a little bar up at the top that they had hardcoded in. It's like wow, that really grabs your attention but doesn't take away from the experience of the site.

We were looking for an idea, we had kind of written on a whiteboard and said the next thing we build, we want everybody else to look and say, "Man, I wish I would have thought of that." We wanted to build something so simple because it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complex, right? We got this idea and we asked ourselves, "Okay, what's one thing you want someone to do on a website? A visitor comes to a website, what's the one thing that you want them to do?" You've got 2, 3, 4, 5 seconds, right?

Our theory was you want to deliver a simple message and a call to action, and where do you do that on a website? It's kind of random, right? You could put it in your nav, you could put it in the header, you can make a big red button, you can do all kinds of interruption kind of stuff but the user's not going to be trained to look at a new place on the site. So we decided the top area of the site and putting a toolbar up there that was unobtrusive and smart would be a great way to get attention, deliver that message and call to action and then go away if you wanted it to go away.

Fortunately, it did catch on and so we actually spent a ton of time designing that little 33-pixel bar. How does it look best on all these sites? We had a lot of different versions and we used an iframe tool so we could actually have the bar and we'd bring in all these different sites and we'd try them on big sites and little sites and beautiful sites and ugly sites. And finally came to a point where we found something that looked great and then we had to go through the whole thing with color. Strangely enough, we came up with the orange that actually worked well with everything as well.

Paul Clifford: I think the simplicity of it is ... what you just said, it's really hard to make something simple and really easy to make it complicated. I think that's something ... I mean I always struggle with that, I must admit, and when you're building software, trying to keep the features out, trying to say no, and when you look back at some success stories like I think Buffer for example, it's a very simple concept, what they're doing in terms of the social sharing and everything, but hugely successful. I guess is that something you really instil within your team, within the people who work with you as sort of one of your design ethos's for one type of expression?

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, absolutely. I mean clearly we can't claim that it originated from us. Dieter Rams, it's one of his 10 design principles which is keeping things simple, design is simple. But what we do instil specifically is this concept of betterment. If we walk around after this and you listened to some conversations, you're going to hear people say betterment or make it better, right? Kind of our methodology is not just design this, design that. It's actually what designs do it, makes things better.

The concept of betterment ... there's a definition which is incremental improvements to create exponential results. If you make a few things better every day, you eventually get exponential results. There's a formula that we use internally that involves simplicity, and it's very simple of course: simple plus compelling minus friction.

If we go find friction, and friction's easy to find, and we don't look just at something that that is friction, we look at some friction that is affecting many, many people. We actually look a way to remove the friction or replace it with something simple and compelling. Simple because why make it complicated, that's not actually solving the problem.

Simple adds to the almost emotional IQ of a user when they come to a site, they naturally will be able to understand how to use it. The compelling is just that little delightful thing, compelling is a touch screen over a button membrane. It's something that just lights you up a little bit that makes it feel a little bit good, gives you a bit of a positive feedback when you use it.

Paul Clifford: Right. So that's obviously instilled in your team when they're approaching design, right?

Chuck Longanecker: Correct.

Paul Clifford: I guess that's probably what makes ... or nowadays, probably what makes or breaks an app to a certain extent, do you think? Because I've heard the term emotional design used a lot, and the way I connect with that is that the market in terms of products is quite saturated. Very rare something completely new comes along, right? There's lots of me-too products, but I think the ones that win are the ones that really draw you in because you just love to use them. I guess, and there's not necessarily a question here, but I'm just following your thinking in terms of taking those what you've in that formula and applying it into design user experience is what creates the emotional design, does that make sense?

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's definitely part of it and that equation works towards anything. It can work for manufacturing, it can work for...it doesn't have to be just design. Our goal is to be Officers of Betterment, creating betterment, no matter what we do, we happen to be doing design right now. That's our tool that we do it with now.

To branch on what you said as well about those simple apps maybe the better ones or the ones that win. I think it's a little more than that as well is that life is made up of moments and a collection of moments makes an experience. And experience is the fabric of life, right? Our experiences are what bind us together, and kind of create what I call this experience DNA. It's how we see the world and how we're moving through the world.

I think if you can find ways to make really great experiences and meaningful experiences through these apps, that's what allows them to win. That magic, right, it's talking into your phone and having it send directions for you. That's not complicated on the front end, it's incredibly complicated on the back end. But that magic in that experience it reduces all that friction and allows you to do something you couldn't have done in the past, right?

I think that's that kind of a-ha moment you have with these apps. And even something like Flipboard, which came out a while ago but I saw people buying iPads to use Flipboard. And they didn't invent RSS or they didn't even curate the content that well. It just looked really good and it was fun to flip through, right?

You could absorb it better, right, as opposed to looking at Facebook, just the News Feed and kinda then going page per page. You can actually have this more immersive experience. So, I think the experience is just like that one thing that defines us. It's a funny thing because it's hard to define an experience in general and what is a good experience. But that's why we use all these customer development and Lean tools to validate our ideas, right?

Paul Clifford: Yeah exactly. I guess If you're talking and a lot of people listening to this will be ... there's plenty looking to scale. But it's also people looking for that idea, people looking, who want to build a SaaS app or any software. What I tell a lot of people is don't try to find the unique idea, they're very, very rare. Find something that is working because then you know there's a market and then work out how to make that better in some way. Can you offer anything along those lines in terms of advice to help people ... how would anyone look at something to try and make it. You know create an app that's going to touch people in the way you described.

Chuck Longanecker: I'm really big on your personal like higher purpose and values in life, right? One thing I warn people against is like, "Oh look, there's a new market opportunity over there. Let's go take that," right? It's in the financial market or it's in the real estate market. But if you really don’t give a shit about those markets, you're not going to succeed or if you do, it's not going to be fulfilling for you.

I'd say first, look inward, look at what you love to do, look at what you're passionate about and where you want to make a difference. That's kind of the first step, and so I love digital, I love experiences, I love design. All of these different aspects and so that's the way I want to impact things.

It's different for everybody. Some people are passionate about fitness, some people are passionate about healthcare, some people are passionate about travel, right, so I would start there. And then look out where the friction is, where’s there is something that you can solve, where’s there is something you can make better. It could come from your personal experience but you have to be careful with that, right, because some very particular people have very particular habits and wants and needs and that's a very small market.

If you can identify what that problem is on a larger scale, and then you can use, what the third part is your skills to be able to fix it, right? If you have competencies in those areas and you can see a way from the beginning to end, you know you're on the right track to fix something. Now executing that vision and actually culminating it to a complete vision takes a long time. You have to peel back those layers. I feel like sometimes, it takes me a couple of years to peel back the layers to the pure essence of the idea and then I could truly execute it at that point.

You're always looking for it, you're always working at it every day, you're always kind of shaving off another layer. We have a-ha moments on our product filament everyday and we're like, "Oh wait, it's this!" The next day, it's not something else but it's more of that, right? It's micro dialing things in to be more and more clear about what you're going to do. I think putting those two together, because it's a long and arduous road, so you got to be passionate about it. You want to affect a large group of people or else there's not a good chance of success, right? And then you want to be able to have these skills that you love to do every day. It's repetitive motion every day to build a company, and so you have to be comfortable doing the same thing every day.

Paul Clifford: Yeah, got it. I think that you touched on filament there for a second and to a certain extent, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's almost the case in point. I think you've identified that there's all these websites where they're needing to put in plugins do this and bits of code to do that. Where you've come from is really these are the best plugins or bits of code that you need to improve your traffic or your social or whatever in your site. And you're almost curating to a certain extent these little apps. But where you're delivering is maybe, using your term, reducing the friction and implementing them straight into your website. Is that fair to say?

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, that's right. I think we got lucky when we figured this betterment thing out. The way we look at it is that on our services side we're helping clients make their business better with our services and if we're not making their business better, our services should no longer be used, right? That's our measure if we're creating impact and value for those customers.

When we blog, we try to share what we've learned with all of our readers of how to do things better. We share our process, we share our culture, we share how to design, we share all these things so that they could take it on their own and make things better. With filament we had the a-ha, we're like, "Wait a second, this is for people making their websites better and these simple tools."

What it was born out of is that design is hard, it's very hard. It's hard for us, we've been designing our new website for 6 months now. It's very, very difficult and it's expensive because of that. We feel that design should be more democratized because it's the end users that are losing in this. You go to a website, it's difficult to use. You want to do business with these people but it's just too confusing, right?

We want to create these tools so it's easier to have good design and ultimately impacts the user, right? The thought process is if we help people make their users happy, their users are going to take care of those website owners. They're going to do business with them or follow them or share, whatever it is. That's the idea of filament that was born.

The friction that we noticed is that as we do a lot of this work for our clients and activation rate, which means if you have a web app that you have to drop code for, a good one is like 50%, which means that everybody you sign up, you lose half just automatically. Then you have all the rest of the following, you have to deal with at that point. Dropping code is really tough.

The other thing is that that curation you hit on as well is what apps do I use? How do I improve my site? There's not a good source of what the best in class apps are and there's not necessarily guidance. There's great sites like growthhackers.com where you can go to and you learn a lot of this stuff. But no one kind of brings it all together for you. Our hope was to help both users, website owners, to be able to move those apps into their site, help the web app creators to get those apps installed more easily and then ultimately the users to have a better experience.

Paul Clifford: Yeah. So people can go to ... is it filament.io, is that right?

Chuck Longanecker: Yes.

Paul Clifford: And they can just register straight away and start using those?

Chuck Longanecker: Yep, completely free.

Paul Clifford: And it's really drag and drop, isn't it? I mean I've used it, I've got it on one of my sites.

Chuck Longanecker: There is one little dirty secret which is you do have to drop our code once but then you don't have to do it ever again. If you're on WordPress, there's that WordPress plugin that negates that.

Paul Clifford: Right, cool. Let's just talk a bit about maybe the startup community in general because since I came to San Diego, really knowing it from a marketing perspective and I found like a huge sort of thriving hub of startups either starting in San Diego or moving some of them further south. I've kind of always believed you don't need to be in the Valley to have a great startup. But I can see things really accelerating here. Is that what you see now? How has it changed over the past year, I guess, or 2 years?

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, I can tell you how it has changed over the past 10.

Paul Clifford: Right.

Chuck Longanecker: I'm the old guy here. In the early 2000s, it was pretty much non-existent. You had DivX, which was pretty great. The rising of active.com, which went public not too long ago and was recently purchased. As well as ProFlowers, and those guys provide commerce. But aside from those larger organizations, we didn't have much going on.

As the Web 2.0 movement came, we had a nice surge of new startups happening but had zero capital. Capital was a little drier in general at that point in time, and it was even harder to go travel to get that capital to actually build stuff, and stuff cost more to build if you were to think about it. You'd have to go raise a good amount of capital and then take that capital back to San Diego, and a lot of VCs didn’t like that.

There was a little start-stop that happened during that Web 2.0 period. That was frustrating but we do have a few startups in town like TakeLessons and Mogul that came out of that era, as well as desk.com that started as Assistly was sold to Salesforce recently. Now you have a whole another set of ... I guess the game has changed, right? Now you have people using AngelList and raising their seed in angel capital.

You have people actually finding funds here in town or raising capital from outside of town and a lot more fast-moving startups. Before we were a lot of bootstrap people, which is great. I've been bootstrapped my whole career, but it's a long road that's why I'm on a 12-year-old startup. It definitely is ... it's like the third coming and I think this time it's got legs.

The thing that was missing the whole time was community support. One of the challenges about San Diego it's a beautiful place to live. It's so beautiful that it's really hard to get people to come together. It's very spread out. Everything is 15 minutes away but it seems like everybody is always 15 minutes away and not here. Sometimes it's hard to get people together, it's hard to keep them together. The surf when the surf is good. Coding isn't happening. But I see that changing and I see the community of entrepreneurs supporting it which is really great because you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You don't depend on some type of marketing or PR organization here in town, you don't depend on capital, you just depend on yourselves and I think that's the only way we're going to be able to thrive in this community here.

Paul Clifford: Right, okay. I also see Santa Monica coming up as well. In fact, I think I looked at yesterday and someone sent me a link for like a mapping tool called Represent, have you seen that?

Chuck Loganecker: Ah, no.

Paul Clifford: Yeah and I think ... do you still run like a San Diego hub or website for startups?

Chuck Longanecker: I used to do Startup SD. I've relinquished that as it became too much to handle.

Paul Clifford: Right. Whoever's doing the hub, if you like, or the online hub should look at that as well. Because what Represent managed to do is, I think it's just open source code but it just instantly maps on Google maps all the start-ups in the L.A area. And so all of a sudden you've got a complete map for Santa Monica which is very dense and a lot of app in there and I think that would be good to have that type of thing in SD as well.

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Clifford: It's a very, very cool tool.

Chuck Longanecker: There is a site called startupsandiego.co, that they've been amassing database of all the startups there as well, so that's a good place to check out.

Paul Clifford: Yeah, maybe I'll touch base and get them to do that. I don't think it's complicated to do this because it's open source, right?

Chuck Longanecker: Right. Yeah absolutely.

Paul Clifford: I'm notorious for hacking codes.

Chuck Longanecker: We need more people like you.

Paul Clifford: I don't know, especially talking to someone at the top of the design world, sometimes I feel guilty about some of my sites which are just generally hacked together using WordPress and the most good-looking theme I could find on CodeCanyon. Put those together and that's my site.

Chuck Longanecker: But the great thing about that is you always have to start some place. I mean quite often we'll talk with people and we'll say, "You know, you're not ready for the most polished design yet." Just get it out there, get it working, grow it. And then when you get traction, that's when you start really investing in the design. If it is amazingly designed, it doesn't mean that people will come, right? It helps but there's still ... unfortunately sometimes, the best design, aesthetic design in the world doesn't always perform the best either.

Paul Clifford: Yeah. It's really about taking that massive imperfect action, as they say, right? Just get something out there first of all and then improve on it.

Chuck Longanecker: I love Reid Hoffman's quote around ... I think he said if it doesn't look like complete shit, you shipped too late.

Paul Clifford: So much truth in that. There on the startups we're also talking about age and how that's changing. What are your thoughts on that? We touched on that earlier.

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, it's funny, I feel young. I think we're both pretty young in all consideration of the idea. We were just mentioning about how venture capital is looking to invest in younger and younger people based on the drive and I guess maybe their ability to survive on ramen and redbull and just not having the family, not being tied down and just being able to hustle. Because ultimately at the end of the day, they want to get 10x, 20x, 100x out of what they're looking to do.

As you get older, I think your priorities change a little bit as they should. Or maybe you found a bit of success already and your ambitions are different. You learn to slow down and appreciate life passing you by as opposed to staying up all night to try to push the code live or get coverage in a tech blog, and you kind of realize that's not the stuff that necessarily matters.

Hopefully I'm not talking VCs out of investing in me but I think that that is a paradigm. I don't think it's necessarily true. I think on the other side of the other hand, I feel like I've personally become a 38 a more mature leader. And, I've been able to sit back and make my mistakes, I still make a lot of them, can catch them a little sooner now. I can be more calm and learn how to actually put a better product out there and the product is made by a team, and the team are people, they're humans.

They're not human capital, they're actually humans just like you and I. And invest in the culture and invest in them is first and foremost our priority. What happens after that is amazing. You have happy people that are passionate about what they do and the product just takes off and becomes so much better. It's not a matter of how long you work, it's a matter of where your headspace is at, how well you work together as a team.

It's not the team necessarily that practices the longest or that studies the hardest or that works the hardest. It's the people that work the best together. We've invested a ton in culture and I think that's hard if you're a young person, it's really hard to be able to lead a company to do those types of things. You don't have that experience, you haven't had all of those mistakes that force you to learn, you can't read about that stuff in a book really.

Paul Clifford: You don't understand the life experience element of it. I also see another angle out of that as well especially and maybe this applies more to bootstrappers. I also think when you go through the family phase and you need to feed the kids and you need to send them to school and all that, then another sort of drive comes out. I think for one of a better phrase, the more mature entrepreneur or the person who is leaving their corporate job and setting up on their own, I think they should never be overlooked because I think they're more hungry.

They've burnt their bridges. They have to deliver. I think often some entrepreneurs who pivot a lot probably come out of that sort of world. Because it's not about the product. It's about the person who can actually make it happen, and often I know from myself I need to push up, backsides sometimes just to get stuff done. And having the family driver is always there.

Chuck Longanecker: It's interesting to be motivated by your mind and the family as opposed to other things that could be motivating you when you're young and distracting you. I think that's definitely true and I think naturally, you also want to make greater impact later in life. To make a greater impact, you've got to do pretty big things.

I think as opposed to just creating a product that has a ton of users, you want to create a product that creates world change and there's a lot of value in that, too. I think that's another thing that goes overlooked at times as well. It's interesting, I can't remember this specifically but I think there was a series of startups, I think it might have been Twitter, it might have been one of them, that were starting with people 35 and over. So there's a list out there some place that we can maybe put in the show notes, and it's pretty amazing to see which companies were started later in life by a lot of this organizations.

Paul Clifford: Yeah I'm wondering if there's any data on that collectively it would be really interesting, because I know, and we touched on this earlier, but I know I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur and that's probably why I always worked for startups when I was much younger. The last one took a lot longer to mature, to sell, etc. The problem with being in a startup for so long is when you have the family commitment and kids and schooling and all that sort of stuff, all of a sudden your committed outgoings is so high, it's really difficult to make that leap. I think for people who are in their desk jobs who want to leave, it is possible to do that and you can do it. It just takes that action, that step to actually get out and do it.

Chuck Longanecker: And the support of family.

Paul Clifford: Yeah.

Chuck Longanecker: Not too risk-adverse.

Paul Clifford: Yeah, I know. Try persuading a wife that you want to go to San Diego.

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, well there can be worse places to go.

Paul Clifford: Exactly. Chuck, we're coming to the end really and I’ve really enjoyed our chat. The filament.io we talked about, we talked about design, culture and the culture of employees and motivating your staff and your team and everything. For people who were thinking of starting up, any sort of tips or any advice you can give them in terms of what's important to get right in terms of their new app or their website or anything like that?

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah. I'd probably summarize a few things I've said, which is one is make sure it is something that you're passionate about or a problem that you want to fix as opposed to just a market opportunity. I think that's number one. I think that misery loves company and I think if you have an opportunity to work with someone that you trust, I think that's pretty great.

I've worked with friends and it's ... right now my business partner is a friend and there's ups and downs. I wouldn't trade anything for in the world, I trust him more than anybody else other than my wife and that's been phenomenal. To be able to share that with someone you care about, to work on things ... with these things and to not be alone. When you're alone as an entrepreneur, it's tough, right, because people will not understand what it's like to be you within the organization.

Other entrepreneurs will understand but you only get to see them every once in a while. Find a partner in crime, I would say, if at all possible. If you can be different, be technical and creative or vision and marketing or operationally sound or something like that. Don't be the same because it's those differences that create your strengths.

I would say that, and then I would say build your foundation on culture. If you have an opportunity ... if you have a great team, that great team can come up with an idea. Ideas are so cheap, right? Every time we take a shower, we get a new idea, so it's about finding the team, it's about aligning the values and the culture of that team and about making that idea everybody's because that's what will be executed even better.

Sometimes it's hard to start with a team because there's no capital to do so, but I think if you're going to be inspirational, it's a good place to start to get people to kind of believe in you and start there, it's a great way that I think start a company on that foundation itself.

I think there's a period when you start a new company or a new product, I'm sure it's a like the hero's journey, right? There's highs and lows. There are times where you just need to keep on pushing and there's times where you just need to kind of shut it down and try something else. I don't believe, and waging the war for years and years on end if you're not seeing results, it's like the definition of crazy is to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I just go out there and as they say fail fast, but be excited about making mistakes because you're going to learn from it. When you get those wins, just keep following that path.

Paul Clifford: Right. That's brilliant. Chuck, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I found it really exciting and interesting interview. If people need to get a hold of you, via digitaltelepathy.com?

Chuck Longanecker: Yeah, dtelepathy.com. And we recommend everybody to takes a look at our blog, we try to give away all our secrets on it. So you can sign up via email, or if you want to say hi, just hit the contact button.

Paul Clifford: Brilliant. Chuck, thanks very much for coming on the show.

Chuck Longanecker: Thank you.

Paul Clifford: If you enjoyed the show, you can get the show notes from disruptware.com. And if you are not a subscriber and you're listening to this from the iTunes store, then please visit disruptware.com and sign up.

That's it for this episode. Look out for next week's show. I'm Paul Clifford and thanks for listening.

Recommended Resources:

1. Digital Telepathy - click here

2. Eric Ries Author of The Lean Startup - click here

3. Flippa - click here

4. Hello Bar - click here

5. Flipboard - click here

6. Filament - click here

7. Active.com - click here

8. SalesForce - click here

9. AngelList - click here

10. Start Up San Diego - click here

11. CodeCanyon - click here

10 Growth Hacks to Accelerate Your SaaS

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Today I want to give you 10 growth hacks that really work. This collection of growth hacks comes from Thomas Schranz who's the CEO of a company called Blossom.IO. I've taken his ideas and expanded it to make it relative to my audience, but I think these things really, really work.

Let's start with number one, the first one is all about positioning. Essentially this is one of the hardest things to really understand but one of the most important things to get right, it's all about your why, your reason for being, what you are all about, what your company is about. It's how the questions you need to be asking yourself is what is your reason for being.

How are you going to make an impact on your customers world, how are you going to change things what things do you hate, how are you going to change your customers lives. What do actually stand for. A lot of this thinking comes from a guy called Simon Sinek who did an amazing TED talk and it's all about finding your why. If you get that right, you get that drive and understanding right, and communicate that to your customers, then you'll find...You'll get an amazing fan base. To give you an example, my reason for being here, is that I want to create the biggest community of successful entrepreneurs. This is why I'm driving huge amounts of content out to my fan base because I want to help them in any way I can. That's my purpose, and that's what I really, really want to do. Get that right, it's the reason why people buy Apple for example, over something else.

Apple didn't always have the best technology okay, but people would still buy them, and people buy all their other products as well, because they got this ethos, they got their reason, and its purist design, however you interpret it. They've got that mastered, you can do that too.

Number two, content marketing. Now content marketing is really what's behind, most of the successful companies out there right now.

Look at Neil Patel who's really driving that message. Content marketing is all about producing educational content, out into your audience. The more educated they feel, then they're going to come back and they're going to buy your product. It's not an overnight win, it takes some time. Let me give you five tips on getting your content marketing strategy right.

1) Make every post focus on just one topic, one purpose and make it educational.

2) Know your audience or persona as we call it in the content marketing circles. Your persona is who you're writing to, what sort of person they are. So that your writing style, or your communicating style works as to how they are going to understand it.

3) Title. Use an engaging title, make sure that people are going to click on it. Use the tricks, like the 'top three', '10 strategies to ' and so on. Some good sources for looking at different titles that work are Upworthy and Buzzfeed.

They're masters at this type of stuff. Study some of their content, and you will start to get an understanding on how to actually put that together.

4) Is the engaging image, use an engaging image to really capture people, to make them read further into the post. By engaging image, don't use an image that so obvious, that's directly related to the content, abstract it. Use something quirky, something a bit different, something to make people think how's that image connected to that content, and then they make the connection. Never ever use stock images. You do need to think out of the box there, but it makes all the difference.

5) Put a call to action on every post. People are...Imagine they are engaged with your content they are coming to the end and they're thinking what do I do now.

If you don't have that call to action, you know getting them to subscribe, getting them to do something, even click buy. Make sure you have a call to action for every single post. Okay that's content marketing.

The third thing in growth strategies is reuse your content. The reason you do that is because every piece of content you create, has to be amazing.

James Shramko has this analogy where he uses a bottle of wine called grange. Grange is like the best wine, that Penfolds produce. The reason he uses that analogy is that he's basically saying every piece of content that you put out there has to be your best. It has to be like the best bottle of wine. Overtime it matures and it will last for a long, long time. It'll keep drawing customers and visits into your site.

That's great, we know we got to create amazing content. But amazing content takes a lot of time. Because it takes a lot of time, how can you maximize it? You maximize it by re-purposing and reusing your content elsewhere. So from your initial arts call, your initial white paper or whatever it is, then you re-purpose that into SlideShare, maybe ask some questions on Quora, make sure there's PDF available, and publish that on PDF sites.

Make sure you got an e-mail, maybe a podcast, maybe a video podcast, you have your YouTube channel, Tweet it, put it on Facebook. All those other things, but they're all connected to the source content, the really good piece of content that you put out. Me talking to you right now is a video, but this video will turn into a podcast, a video podcast, a blog post, a PDF, it will go into lots of different ways and mediums of communicating to my audience.

Number four, landing page conversions. Okay, focus heavily on optimizing every visitor that comes to your landing page. Okay, you need to know the metrics, you need to know where they're coming from. You need to be split testing your landing pages, so you can measure the conversions and obviously improve them.

Now if you listen to an interview I did with Lars Lofgren from KISSmetrics the other day then you'll know that and he's the Growth Manager for KISSmetrics and since November to like February, so what's that four months, you know he doubled...he doubled the conversion rate of his homepage. Basically that's like doubling his customers, all right, and it's all down to understanding the metrics. That was his focus. Obviously a lot of split testing involved but it makes a massive difference to the company. Really do focus on your landing page conversions.

Now number five is capture the lead. Okay so, in marketing, we're all used to this, it's like the first thing that you are kind of trained on. And Marketing 101 is everything is about getting the lead and building a list. In the software startup world, a lot of people are so focused on the software, making the software amazing, they're forgetting about the leads. Basically you've got to do everything you can to capture leads.

Every visitor that comes to your site, you've got to convert into a lead so that you can re-market to them further down the line. Because remember they're not going to buy straight away, you need to keep selling to them all the way through. You need lead capture in the header, in the sidebar, in the footer, pop-up, whatever works for you. Just make sure you're actually doing it.

Six is the drip campaign. So your autoresponder sequence. Once you got that lead, make sure that they go into a sequence so that they can continually be reminded about your product and educated about your product and obviously pre-sold and sold about what your offer is.

Number seven. Social proof. If you got testimonials. Use it. Push it. Essentially create case studies. Everything you can to push social proof out to the visitors that have been to your site. Okay, it's so, so important. And what you got to think about is the whole buyer life cycle. No one buys on their first visit to their site. Okay, they go through different stages. They go...they start off with awareness, then they go into like real interest, and they become a prospect. Then they're almost about to buy, then they buy. Then eventually they become your evangelist.

At all those different stages, especially just before buying what they're looking for is social proof. They're looking for evidence that other people are having success with your products so make sure that you gather that and use it and push it out to your prospects.

Number eight is customer retained revenue. Okay, essentially this is all about making sure that once your customers click that buy button that they become an evangelist at the end. The first place to do that is their on-boarding process. As they come in to your product, you got to make sure that they get that warm and fuzzy feeling when they come onboard into your product that they feel good about their purchase.

You need to reinvest time to ensure that it's really slick, polished, they're getting answers straight away, your support needs to be really focused on new customers. Everything to get that user adopted and using your system. You know, if I buy KISSmetrics, I get a phone call the next day from someone saying "how are you...how's it going, did you get everything you need?" Offering free training. Everything like that.

Because they know that it takes time, it's a brand new application and it takes time for you to get invested. With someone following up and dealing with you directly, then of course you're going to buy into that. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone can afford an inside sales team. What you can do is focus on your boarding process. There's a great site called useronboard.com.

You should look at that for examples of how and how not to do it. Of course, once you've got them on board then work out how to extend it. Work out...once you've gotten there, how to actually increase revenue. How can you increase the retention or lower churn. However you want to turn that.

Number nine is annual payments. Cash flow is the life blood of any business. And in SaaS you rely on monthly, but make sure you've got an annual option available to you. Okay, or available to them. Because if you can get them to pay it annually in advance and give them a discount for doing that, then you are getting the cash in right at the front, which is where you need it.

Number 10 is increased awareness. Use your customers as your evangelist, as your referral partners, get them to refer other people, give them an incentive to do that. The Dropbox case is the perfect example there. 22Social who I met the other day, what they do is they give you a free license if you refer three paying customers. So imagine what that's doing to their growth. It's really, really working. Focus on increasing the awareness of your market using your customers.

That was 10, I think highly effective growth hacks that you can implement in your business. What I'd like you to do is leave a message or leave a comment on the blog at disruptware.com. Let us know your growth hacks or let us know what you thought of this video post. I think you'll find that really, really useful. This is Paul Clifford from Disruptware. Thanks for watching.

Recommended Resources:

1. Blossom - click here

2. Simon Sinek TED Talk - click here

3. Upworthy - click here

4. Buzzfeed - click here

5. SlideShare - click here

6. Quora - click here

7. Interview with Lars Lofgren - click here

8. User Onboarding - click here

How To Name Your Product

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Today I'm going to be talking about how to name your product or even company.

So firstly, let's just cover some base ground rules. Now, all we're talking about today is names, not necessarily the brand, even though some people obviously connect them because they are aligned, but branding is also a whole different conversation. All right, so today we just want to talk about the name, okay?

Firstly, don't go crazy about finding a name, and by that I mean a lot of people go spend weeks on this thing. And they do surveys, they go and run contests and spend lots of money on a branding agency and all that sort of stuff, and, yeah, you could do that, but it's not that important in the big schemes of things. What is important is your product, and that's where you should be focusing your money and your time, just on that piece. So forget about spending weeks and weeks on the actual name and just follow some basic rules. And that's what I'm going to cover today.

First of all, domains. Domains for your name. Whenever you're checking your name, you need to make sure all the main domains are available, so don't just get the dot com. If someone else has got a dot net, dot org, abandon the name. Just don't do it. Once you've chosen the name and it works, you need to buy all the primary domains available.

It's going to cost you like an extra 50 bucks or something, but that 50 bucks is going to save you...anyone else jumping on your brand, piggybacking it, grabbing it, and then trying to bribe you to get it back. I mean, it's just a nightmare, so always get your dot com, your dot net, your dot org, your dot io, your co.uk, maybe Australia, depending on how global you want to get, but just buy all the primary domains, whatever you do. Okay? Protect your brand.

Okay, number two, don't be a guru. You might have seen them, but don't use words in your brand like ninja, guru, beast, hijacked, auto this, auto that, bot, blaster, explosion, tsunami. All those kind of words, don't go there. It cheapens your brand, okay? Anyone who sees that, they're just not interested, or they are interested, but they're interested for the wrong reasons, so don't do that. The closest I might go is crusher. I used crusher in one of my products, only because it was on the piggybacking of Gary Vaynerchuk who came out with this great book called Crush It, and it tied in quite nicely, but that's where it ends. All right? Don't do it.

Okay, so number three, trademarks. Pay attention to trademarks. Never ever use someone else's brand in your domain name. You might think it might be cool to start with, but it's a big mistake because if you do get some traction and you get some customers and you get a cease and desist letter, it's all over. You've got to redo everything. You've got to re-brand, redo your site, and it's just a mess. All right, so just don't do it. Trademarks are there for a reason, and also don't sort of play on a misinterpretation of someone else's brand, as well. It might seem kind of cool to start with, but it won't work in the long term. All right? If you get this bit right from the start, then you never have to worry about it again.

Okay, so number four, different types of names. All right, so let's just look and dig in a bit, so there are two fundamental different types of names that you can use. There's a descriptive name, which kind of describes, obviously, what your product does. Things like Toys "R" Us is a descriptive name because it tells you that it's something to do with toys, and "R" Us, everything to do with that. Ryan Hooper recently launched a product called Product Hunt, a community's product hunt. Okay, it makes sense, so that's one tactic.

Never use a descriptive name for your company, though, because it limits your scope. For example, if you created a company called Acme Web Design, then, as you grow, all you can really do, all you're named for is web design, right, so if you decide to get into software or something, then there's no synergy between the two, so don't use a descriptive name for your company. Keep that more abstract.

Descriptive names or what I call invented names or abstract names. So these are things like Oreo, Varo, Crazy Egg, Aria. Aria is the name of a really smart hotel in Vegas, and it came up with a branding agency, actually, called Igor. I'll put a link at the bottom of this video, but Igor caught a successful branding agency, and they publish a really good PDF on developing your brand name, so I'll put that below so you can actually study that, but it's really, really good.

You've got descriptive names. You've got invented names. You can combine them and do something in between, something like Evernote did or KISSMetrics, but those are the key things you need to think about. So descriptive names or abstract names. All right? I kind of like abstract names, but that's what you need to work out yourself.

Next thing, number five, is the two-word combo, so the two-word combo and letter-switch strategy. Now, this is where a lot of people struggle, and you'll find, obviously, you're in a quite mature market. Finding the unique name nowadays is just getting harder and harder, but here's some little tricks that you can do. Firstly, make sure that whatever name you come up with is easy to communicate. So you don't really want to be spelling out names to people. If you have to spell it out, then it's not a name to go for, but what you can do is do a one-letter switch.

For example, if you did content, and content, but with a K. You can say it's content, but with a K. That's okay, and that's as far as you can go, but don't go any further than that. Once you have to spell out double L or one L and all that sort of stuff, it's just not going to work. Make sure it's easy to pronounce. Make sure it's unique and not too similar to someone else.

Two-word combos are things like where you could put whatever your purpose is, so let's say you're creating an editor program and you come up with all the words connected with editor like note, write, scribe. Then what you can do is put adjectives around those. If you've got note, then you can call it Cool Note, or Avid. Avid's a good name. Avid Note, and Avid Note is actually available, by the way.

A good tool for helping you develop those is a tool called Impossibility.org and again, I'll put the link below, but Impossibility.org, it does that. It helps you put in one word and then it will wrap it around different...wrap adjectives and nouns around that word. So you can come up with some really cool names. Obviously, it would check with the domains available, as well. Okay.

The character-switch method is, as I said, where you can change a C to a K, change an S to a Z or Zed, so wings becomes wingz. Lyft, the car company, is instead of L-i-f-t, they switched the i to a y, so it's L-y-f-t. That's the letter-switch strategy. Another one to look at is the foreign-word strategy. Foreign words can be real winners. This is where you can use Google Translate, for example, and try and find a foreign word that's loosely connected with yours so it has some reason for being. You'll find that you can come up with some really cool names like that.

If you look at things like Hulu. Hulu's the online video service, and that sort of came from the Mandarin, meaning to sort of have precious things and also interactive recording, so it has like two meanings, but it all makes sense to Hulu, which is an online video broadcasting service. Finnish is quite a good language to use. They have some quite pronounceable names that make sense and roll off the tongue.

Swahili is not bad, so you can use Swahili, as well. One of my products, my content-marketing product called Kudani came from that. Kudani is loosely translated from Swahili, meaning to imagine or to invent, so that's how I came up with that. Greek and Latin are always favorites. The only hard bit about that is they've been around a long time and there's a lot of names that all come from Greek and Latin, so it's quite difficult to come up with something unique from those languages.

Okay, so number seven now, domain hacks. Now, domain hacks were quite cool. A domain hack is where you can use the suffix of the domain, so the country part of a domain to finish a word. For example, Bitly, so Bitly was spelled B-i-t.l-y, and l-y was the country extension Libya, but to be honest, I don't think you should go down that road. It starts off as quite cool, but the thing is about using another country's extension is that country owns that extension and they have the power to change things, and things change.

Relationships with other countries change. Only last month, we were in Russia for the Olympics, and now there's the sanctions and everything going on, so things change very, very quickly, and I wouldn't want to rely on another country for my business. Bitly had this, so Bitly renamed to B-i-t-l-y in 2011, and it's probably...I don't know the history, but it's probably on the back of vb.ly. Vb.ly was another short, now vb.ly. Vb.ly shortened links to some porn sites, and Libya didn't like it and they killed it. Then that whole business got killed overnight. A lot of people think it's actually to do with just economic reasons rather than the porn reason, but whatever. The fact is that it's out of your control. You have no control over that.

Other examples of domain extensions are dot ST for Sao Tome, dot PT for Portugal. I mean, there are loads of them. Domain hacks, they're quite cool, but I wouldn't risk it. I would try and stay with a whole word at the front end of my domain extension, and you will find one. You've just got to get into it and use these tools that I'm recommending to find really cool names.

Okay, so, of course, the last thing is trademark. Make sure you trademark your domain. It sounds a bit obvious, of course, but one of the real reasons for trademarking domains, it's not just to protect your brand from the big corporate lawsuit or anything like that. What it's really useful for is when you get other sites that pop up and start talking about your company, and if you don't like what they're saying, it's a lot easier for you to go to Google or Facebook or whatever to get those sites removed or those pages removed or to create a complaint if you've got a trademark number because then you can say that it's infringing on your trademark. It actually puts you in a more powerful position to do something about it without having to spend lots of money going to a lawyer. Okay, so that's it for trademarks.

Now you've got all this. You can go and create your logo. I'm going to create a post all about logo hacking. Don't go out and spend thousands of dollars on a designer. You don't need to. You can get a logo up and running very, very cheaply, but that's it for today on domains. I hope you found that really, really useful.

Leave your comments below. Let me know what you think, and if you have any other ideas or any other sites for creating domain names, then please let me know.

Recommended Resources:

1. Book - Crush It - By Gary Vaynerchuk

2. Igor - who name Aria - click here

3. Impossibility.org

Two Dollar Trial And Referral Program Has Led To 24,000 Users For 22Social

Founders, Rene Banuelos and Jerry Rocco, have proven to be the strength behind 22Social. Their combined skills and experience has paved the way for the creation of an app that is truly a collaborative effort. Jerry's direct marketing background and Rene's development skills have made this team an unstoppable duo. In less than one year they have taken 22Social's user acquisition to 24,000.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tweetables
We're encouraging people and rewarding them for sharing our software. Tweet Buffertweetable text
Bring vivid awareness to the problem and then we solve it. Tweet Buffertweetable text
Make your advertising remarkable and valuable. Tweet Buffertweetable text
Make your offer impossible to refuse. Tweet Buffertweetable text

Today's Podcast Highlights

[07.25 - The motivation has been really working with business owners and seeing the frustrations that they've had.]
[07.38 - It's not easy especially someone that's new to start getting results online and especially in social media.]
[08.23 - The technology makes it easier for you to get your stuff up and running fast.]
[08.55 - We've put up a first product and decided to let people use it and see where it went from there and really listen to a lot of feedback and that’s really has been shaping the software.]
[09.48 - A year and a half getting no feedback with technology can kill you.]
[11.16 - Everything we've learned from the past has been applied to 22Social in some way.]
[14.27 - I've been programming since I was 14.]
[15.16 - Trying to find the right talent and keep getting in-house versus outsourcing a lot of it.]
[16.40 - We really learned where we had to improve our software in terms of making it easier and simpler to use.]
[17.31 - I think one of the biggest reasons why we keep growing is just our pricing point.]
[18.23- We're encouraging people and rewarding them for sharing our software.]
[20.31 - It's just a regular fan page and our offer is "Try It Free".]
[21.11 - We collect their name, email address and we pop them in an email auto-responder right away.]
[22.16 - We bring vivid awareness to the problem and then we solve it with a unique promise.]
[22.54 - We're seeing about a 30% opt-in rate.]
[25.54 - I think being part of, being in front of our audience and being in front of our users, and being accessible has played a big role on the fact that people have stuck on with us.]
[28.40 - Within a few clicks you can get a picture, a product, words, whatever, and a call to action right in the flow of traffic.]
[33.09 - By giving that other person your content it's a win-win.]
[35.51 - One of the reasons is that low entry point of $2 to get on a trial account versus staying on the free account that converts over to a regular subscription after 30 days.]
[36.27 - Make your advertising remarkable and valuable.]
[38.01 - Make your offer impossible to refuse with a user-friendly proposition that provokes scarcity.]

Disruptware is building the largest community of software entrepreneurs on the planet. Make sure you are on the list.

Full Transcript

I met up with Rene because he is a founder of a software company (22Social) and I like connecting with as many successful startup as possible and getting them on my show, talking about their successes. Because his technology is all about Facebook marketing and includes an amazing streaming piece within Facebook using Google hangout, so we thought rather than do like a podcast like we do normally, let's do it as a hangout. With that being said, let's just check first of all that everyone can hear me okay.

If you're listening, just type in the chat box below and say, "Hi Paul" and for those of you listening on iTunes or on the podcast, sadly you can't do that especially if you're driving, but otherwise we'll make sure this broadcast is just as useful to you guys on the podcast as is to the people watching on the video.

You'll be able to get the show notes online on disruptware.com and in any links or anything that we discuss on the broadcast and obviously that will be available as a transcript on the blog and go there and get everything you need. Without further ado, I've got on the line, I've got Rene as I said, I’ve also got Jerry Rocco, who is also a co-founder and head of marketing as well.

We're going to talk to them both. Talk to them a little bit about their background, of how they got into creating this amazing software and more importantly how they actually got customers, which of course is what we’re all interested in, and then what we'll also do is just talk a bit about software itself, and hopefully give you a demo and give you an idea of how you can actually use that in your business as well, to get more customers, get more leads, and obviously convert everything into sales. Let's get started and say hello to Rene, hey Rene how are you doing?

Rene Banuelos: Hey, how’s it going Paul. Thanks for having us both here. I'm really excited here especially the fact that you're doing it in a different format, you're running a hangout and then repurposing that to podcast, I think it's great, I think that's what a lot of people should do, thanks for pushing the envelop there.

Paul Clifford: More importantly thanks for taking time out of your busy day, in fact I can see the view behind you, that's PETCOPark, right? With the Padres event?

Rene Banuelos: Yeah, PETCOPark is right behind me. They've been installing a new huge screen TV in the last few weeks or so, they're testing that now, I don't know if you guys can catch it but anyway. Yeah, it's a great view, but I'm not looking at it you guys are so, turn around.

Paul Clifford: I knew obviously we’re going to be doing this today and I knew you'd be doing it in your office. I love the location where you are, sort of a startup area in San Diego. I thought I had to beat that and I was trying to think how I could do that. So I actually moved all my gear outside into the garden, out of my crummy office, so hopefully behind you, you can see something a bit more interesting than the blank wall. We’re outside, as long as no birds decide to take over the mic or land on it or my dog doesn’t interrupt us then we're pretty much all good to go. Just before we get started, let’s just check Jerry's on the line, hey Jerry?

Jerry Rocco: Yeah, can you hear me?

Rene Banuelos: Yeah, now we can.

Jerry Rocco: Excellent. Fantastic. Yes, I'm on the line? Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. I’m probably in the least interesting place. I’m in my home office just writing and doing some videos, so I'm glad to be here and sharing what we're doing with everybody.

Paul Clifford: Awesome. I haven't done many hangouts before, so you know, to everyone listening, I’m kind of playing this a little bit by ear. Obviously Rene and Jerry have been doing this for absolutely ages, but as I'm in control today, so if things don't work quite as smoothly as they should, then you known, by all means, let us know in the chat box, leave any questions in the chat below. Let us know that we're coming through okay and whether you've got anything you want Rene or myself to answer.

Let's get started. Now, Rene tell me a bit about yourself. So 22Social, great company, you're really going places. I think when we first met we went out to a bar in, I think it was Nick Unsworth's event and we're chatting away and you’re telling me that you’re getting customers on and you're converting your free customers even into paid at something like a 10% conversion rate, which I thought that's fantastic, but before we get into the nuts and bolts of that, just tell me a bit about yourself. How did you actually get into all of this?

Rene Banuelos: Well actually it's higher than 10, but Jerry is going to cover that, but just a short story about me. I have a pretty diverse background, I love business, I love marketing. I've also been programming since I was 14. This company I guess in some ways has a few of my personalities in it and a few of the other co-founders personalities as well, but mainly this has been a work in progress.

We used to build the Facebook marketing systems that were white-labeled and one day we just said, we're tired of other people asking us to build them systems and then they don't use them or they don't promote them so they don't go anywhere so we said, “Screw it, let's take the bull by the horns and do it ourselves and start promoting it.” It's been exploding ever since, but back in the early days even before it was 22Social that's when I met Jerry Rocco.

I have a great team. Some people who follow 22Social that you might have met Andrew and some of the other guys. We met up with Jerry back in the early days and realized that Jerry had a lot of the internet marketing skills that we didn't. We have similar backgrounds as well, we’ve both done network marketing, we've done different things. We figured it was a perfect match, so he jumped on board and decided to help us out.

We continued working on, like I said, on several internet marketing or Facebook marketing systems, but then when it came to really shine; I guess 22Social is the result of a lot of practice projects that we were paid for in a nutshell. But, I think the motivation for mainly the most active or more the original founders for Jerry and also Andrew, myself, is been really working with business owners and seeing the frustrations that they've had.

It's not easy especially someone that's new to start getting results online and especially in social media, especially because it's really misunderstood that we figured, “What can we do to simplify the process as much as possible?” I say that so many times on different interviews because it is, that's the reality of it. The easier it is for you to setup something like a landing page or a funnel and with 22Social actually inside Facebook, the better result you're going to be.

Because you’re going to be able to spend time what I call a human side of it, which is connecting with people, which is working on your offer, working on your words, and all the other stuff that you can't easily replace that with a machine. But, if the technology makes it easier for you to get your stuff up and running fast, capture the leads as best as possible and harness that information, so like I said before, you just focus on the human side then we are doing our job. That's really what drives us, it’s making it easier.

Paul Clifford: Got it. But you didn't start off, like with this did you? When you got started, you got together and start creating some software, what you see today isn't what you intended it to be, is that right?

Rene Banuelos: Well, good question, we've been through what Eric Ries, from Lean Startup calls is the learn loop. We've put up a first product and decided to let people use it and see where it went from there and really listen to a lot of feedback and that’s really has been shaping the software. One example is really we weren't really working with hangouts. We couldn't do it when we started, so that was a transition or a result of that feedback loop and a lot of exploring on our part.

A lot of it too is one of the features, our clone or syndication or simulcasting feature, I used three words already. Mainly in the software side, simulcasting is more popular word, but that one wasn't even in our imagination back when we started so we're constantly updating. We had a major upgrade in the last week or so two weeks I guess, that's big, if anyone else is building a project.

I've heard stories of people spending a year or year and a half putting a piece of software together, that's a year and a half of not getting feedback, especially with technology that can kill you. Fast forward a year and a half what you thought was great at the beginning may not even be relevant once you launch it, so speed is critical.

Paul Clifford: Very true, very true. Looking at the, again, coming back to Lean Startup, I did this, this afternoon. I have another SaaS application which we're building and I got this great idea and the first thing I do is I mock the whole thing up and I do it in a wireframe using a tool called Balsamiq.

We just get on the phone with prospects, with people in our market and click through the screens. Say, "Is this, does this solve a pain for you?" and get that immediate feedback even before we start building. Often, we either get the validation or we get that, “Nah, it’s not that good really, I can do it this way.” Saves just like a fortune in terms of development process just by using that principle.

Rene Banuelos: I mean we actually launched a product before, I mean we have feedback before this is not our first product, like I said we built marketing funnels before. Everything we've learned from the past has been applied to 22Social in some way. That's where we were confident to actually just launch a first product. We turned on the system and got people to buy and use it and tell us from the live system. I mean, I like what you're saying Paul. The cheapest, quickest way to do that is better, if you're doing it with wireframe that saves a lot of time.

Paul Clifford: I think the ultimate goal if we can ever get that working is to actually get someone to buy from a wireframe. If I can actually sell my app from a wireframe.

Rene Banuelos: That would be great right? Get it kind of like I guess a kick starter right buy a 100,000 copies or subscriptions to my software, "Okay, I'll see you back in 60 days, I'll enable it and you’ll have your membership or your subscription enabled, right? You’ll be able to use it." That would be amazing.

Jerry Rocco: That's how we met Rene.

Rene Banuelos: What?

Jerry Rocco: That's kind of how we met.

Rene Banuelos: Yeah, actually if you want to tell that story Jerry, go for it.

Jerry Rocco: Yeah, a little bit. We actually, we met through a Facebook ad when you think about it. But now, we met through Facebook, but not traditionally through Facebook., It wasn't like we became friends on Facebook through our personal profiles. You went through an ad, one of the ads on the right hand side, right?

Rene Banuelos: Sneaky Jerry man, your funnel got me.

Jerry Rocco: I'm not a traditional like social media marketer. I'm more of a direct marketer, but we formed a relationship, even so, ironically through Facebook, through a direct marketing relationship and now here we are in a hangout together years and years later. But, our first endeavor together was you came to me with pretty much something very similar to 22Social.

The whole system for my team and I said that sounds awesome, I love it and you had put together a proposal for me. I said, I love it, it sounds good, but how about we sell it first and then we fulfill the orders later and so that's what we did. We sold the Facebook product put a 146 people on a webinar, we sold 86 of them and then that's how we became friends and business partners, selling that.

Rene Banuelos: That wasn't even, that was a little more than wireframes. It was actually the artwork of what the finished product was going to be. It was very easy on the eyes. Andrew did an amazing job back then. Andrew was already part of our team. That helped out a lot, but yeah that's how we got going. We were going to do some of that. I almost forgot that's how it happened, you're right. We've done that before. That's how we sold some marketing funnel, Facebook marketing systems in the past actually, but just from screen shots from the Photoshop output of it.

Paul Clifford: Got it. Your background before that, it wasn't in software right? I think you mentioned you're in, obviously you knew internet marketing, you knew social and everything, but how did you create the software aspect, did you hire people, did you outsource it, how did you actually go about that? You have this idea in your head and you need to like get one or two, I don't know how many you've got, but developers to actually build something.

Rene Banuelos: Actually Paul, I think you're asking me, but actually Paul, I'm a little bit of a rare breed. I've actually have a software background. I know if you caught it initially, I've been programming since I was 14 and I think that's helped me come up with ideas because I know what can be done, what's feasible in a short span in terms of development.

A lot of the architecture behind 22Social, I put that together and we just hired developers to help me actually implement and write all the software, and a lot of it I wrote myself. We haven't had to go through that I guess that most people would, so we're different in that sense. I think in a lot of areas like even our branding I think Andrew Lane has done an amazing job with our branding, our colors and logos and all that, we didn't have to look for it.

We mainly, if I can say, it's been in recruiting. Using a word from network marketing, but trying to find the right talent and keep getting in-house versus outsourcing a lot of it. Jerry in some ways almost recruited himself by finding me almost through that ad, that's what solved our problems. If I could give anyone advice it's really either recruiting people in your team or recruiting people you can actually create a win-win situation with and work together and solve different problems right...leverage each other's strengths. That was a long answer to that question.

Paul Clifford: Oh, no, no, it’s cool. That makes complete sense especially if you come from a development background, but let’s look at the business side though, first of all, because now this is obviously this is the hard bit, in actually getting customers on board. Tell me about it. How did you get like your first 20 customers? How did you actually get them on board with you?

Rene Banuelos: Wow, the first 20 or private first couple of hundred were hard work. We got referred to a group of people and one of the MLM companies that I believe are still using our software. We did a lot of testing with and I won't name them, but it's probably the group of people who were least tech-savvy in the marketing industry. I guess the good thing about that is we really learned where we had to improve our software in terms of making it easier and simpler to use, but that's really what it was. Going back to your question is, just through our relationship that referred us those few, first 100 or 200 clients.

Paul Clifford: That relationship though, that referral relationship, what did they do? Did they market to their community your software or something like that?

Rene Banuelos: Yes, exactly, that's what they did. At that time it was a network marketing company. We connected with one of the leaders in that company and that person promoted it to their reps and that's how we got the first few hundred accounts.

Paul Clifford: Okay, and then now, how are you scaling? What's your model like? What's your pricing module and how did you get customers into your funnel?

Rene Banuelos: I think one of the, Jerry you might want to answer this after I do, but one of the biggest reasons why we keep growing, we keep getting leads and Jerry gets excited every morning as he sees the emails of new leads or sales coming in, is just our pricing point. If you, we're not an opportunity, we’re not a networking company, we're not really an affiliate program either, but we allow people to earn a subscription to our service for free by referring three of their friends.

Either if you're in internet marketing, you’re probably working with a lot of colleagues and you need our software. All someone would have to do is refer three accounts and then we would waive their fee completely. Some people get one, some people get two or three. Some people get four or five referrals and even more.

That's allowed us to really go viral, because we're encouraging people and rewarding them for sharing our software. I think that's one of the reasons why we've grown so much from that.

Jerry Rocco: I could actually show our funnel pages if anybody wants to see them.

Rene Banuelos: Sure.

Jerry Rocco: Okay, I don't mind doing that. I’m just going to make sure I can stop these videos here from playing.

Rene Banuelos: Just be very descriptive for the people who are listening to us and in the future on podcast.

Jerry Rocco: Oh that's right, that's right. Okay, let me just share my screen really quick.

Rene Banuelos: If you don't mind Paul?

Jerry Rocco: If you don't mind?

Paul Clifford: Yeah, yeah, no of course.

Jerry Rocco: Okay, cool. All right. I'm just going to...people might be wondering who is this guy sitting in this dark room in his beach apartment or whatever. If you can bluebox me, folks if you want to take a look at these. This is when Rene said why I am excited every morning. If you look at the far right hand side of my screen it's right now it’s like 3:17. I know what time it is everyday because I can look at what time my leads come in and it’s usually a few minutes from the last one.

At 3:16, 3:10, 3:10, 3:00, 2:53, this happens all day long because we were talking about the funnel right? We spend about a $100 a week on just simple promoted posts. No expensive sophisticated marketing on Facebook whatsoever. This is the growth that people are looking for. I haven't even gotten through till the beginning of the day yet. At 6:40, 6:40, 6:38, and it goes on and on. This is just one page of 100 leads and this goes on throughout today until 12 and then it goes into March. I can keep going and I'll show you the pages that actually generate this and you can see now I’m on March 11th and it just keeps going. All these leads just keeps going.

Paul Clifford: For people listening on the podcast, what Jerry is showing basically his inbox in Gmail, which is just showing hundreds and hundreds of emails coming in with every new lead that’s coming through your funnel and I guess what you're saying then is that the way you're doing that is you're getting free registration through promoted posts on Facebook, right?

Jerry Rocco: Well, what we're doing, here, I'm going to get another page here. This is our fan page that we're on right now. It's just a regular fan page and our offer is "Try It Free" and then we do a lot of free content around trying it free. When people try it free they click on this link right here and for your podcast listeners, this is the landing page inside Facebook and this is one that Andrew designed with me and the call to action here is "Try our free Facebook app, it's fast, it's easy, it's risk-free."

We're going to give you this awesome page. We have a bunch of social proof on here, a bunch of testimonials on here and we have a bunch of buttons for people to take action. Get it free, get it free, get it free, and then we have a lot of social proof. When people click "Get It Free", they pass through to another page and now we have their commitment and at that point we collect their information. We collect their name, email address and we pop them in an email auto-responder right away, so that way they're already a lead, and that's how we generate our leads because they get it free.

As soon as they get it free, they're pushed over to this video and there's no video playing right now, but there’s usually a video playing right here and you're name is in the top left hand corner because it's Facebook. We know who you are and so we put a picture on the top there because you’ve already clicked the button and accepted our apps. So we know who you are so we say, “Hey, Rene if that’s you, then this is your last chance to see this video.”

Then we just say, then what we do is we bring up another problem, which is half of, most of your connections today are on mobile device and most apps out there, almost all of them aren't mobile. You just got an awesome app that was free just like everybody else's, but here's a glaring problem that you don't even know about and if you're watching my screen for your viewers as McCauley Culkin over there going, “Oh no the pages don't work” on our landing page.

We tell them what’s at stake, we bring vivid awareness to the problem and then we solve it with a unique promise that’s easy to take which is, let us solve this effortlessly, automatically for you for only $2 and if you leave this page you won't get this $2 offer again. The fear of loss there is we're going to save you $20, you won't have another chance to try our software. It's $22 a month, but you can try it for $2.

Then we say, once you try it, if you refer three you can get it free so you can get everything we offer for $2 and that's been good for us because it's been easy to get our customers in the door and capture leads and then we're seeing about a 30% opt-in rate, a 30% upgrade from when they get the free app, because we don't even know if they have a fan page when they get the free app.

That's kind of a qualifier. Most of them...we try to target only people who have a fan page, but when they get the free offer, then we know that they're interested and then we show them, we educate them a little bit more, bring about a problem, solve it for them, make it easy and that's how we convert at 30% for the second offer. That's pretty much it.

Then we just kill them with value over and over and over and over and over again until they get excited about what we're doing. They share our product and I could even show you the admin panel where you could see how many, it's about 40%, 30%. I think our system numbers every week we do about 33% to 38% every single week, go from light to pro, that doesn't mean they stick that way throughout time, but that's the initial immediate conversion.

Paul Clifford: Right, okay. So you got around about 30% to convert from free to the trial, the paid trial, the $2 trial, right? And then what sort of percentage then convert from that more basic, renew...in the $22 a month?

Jerry Rocco: You're saying what's the average life of a customer?

Paul Clifford: Yeah, well I guess what I was thinking is what percentage, you got 30% to convert to Pro at $2, what percentage then if you know convert then into the full amount?

Jerry Rocco: You know, numbers suggest around like 85%. I don't have anything right now, 85% to 90%.

Paul Clifford: That's brilliant.

Jerry Rocco: At least for the first month, we found our average user sticks around for, and we've only been around for like, really pumping this product out for a year, our average user is about 8 months.

Paul Clifford: That’s pretty good though. You got 8 months worth of customer revenue converting the majority like 80% odd percent $2 into paid and so there must be a trick. Are you doing like some really good educational, are you pushing good educational material to them during that trial period to make sure that they really get good adoption, you know what I mean by that? So that they really come on and start using it, see the benefit, which of course then creates the extension.

Jerry Rocco: Not as much as we should, but we do some.

Paul Clifford: We're all the same.

Rene Banuelos: I think to chime in on that, we took a little break from that probably towards the end of last year. We really saw the feedback of people saying where are you guys, we need to know, we need to learn from you and I think that's what worked initially and that's what is starting to work again is committing to what you just said Paul is actually providing a lot of value and a lot of training and that's what Jerry, Jerry has done a really good job in the last few weeks.

Also providing a lot of support. We run two hangouts a week. Tuesdays we run a marketing hangout at 12:00 p.m. Pacific and Wednesdays we’re on support hangout for the newbies who want to just ask any questions. I think being part of, being in front of our audience and being in front of our users, and being accessible has played a big role on the fact that people have stuck on with us.

Paul Clifford: I can see that and then having the live broadcast weekly and especially via hangout method, you can really connect. I think you break down any barrier in the internet and focus a lot more personal right? Obviously that’s working for you really, really well.

Jerry Rocco: Absolutely and you were talking about feedback loop earlier. On our Tuesday hangout, I had asked everybody, I put a comment up and I said, just tell us what business you're in, and we’ll try to apply this concept to your business. Thirty-five people immediately replied just to that comment and that actually went on our wall and then about another 35 replied outside that comment within just a few minutes.

It was just like, “Well, we know who our customers are and what their business is." It's really that simple. Not only that, I mean we can go back and go through, because every time somebody clicks on a button because Facebook is the world's largest person registry, what Rene is created is the ability to pull a profile out of Facebook. This is all spam compliant and it's actually one of the only sustainable ways to get ideas out of Facebook because all those scrapers are going to be gone eventually.

Facebook’s pretty clear about those terms of service. They want you to develop the lead and that's what we offer somebody is the ability for them to create a page that has a button on it that people can click that button, pulls the Facebook profile out and it goes into a lead manager for them. It can also trigger a sequence of auto responded messages.

If you are a pro-marketer that's definitely recommended, but you can get to know your customers by clicking on their profiles, who they are, what time they clicked on your profile, when they were born, date of birth, where they live. You can see what they had for breakfast, if they posted it. It’s a lot different than the old crumpled up piece of paper.

Paul Clifford: I love that. I think you call it, is it SRM, social relationship manager, I think. So basically CRM, a customer relationship manager almost, built in to Facebook and that's really, really powerful. As we're moving into the product itself now, maybe if you just give us some other key benefits for people listening, what is the magic thing that can really, by using your software that can really help develop their business.

Jerry Rocco: There are a couple of different people that can use our product. There is the person who is just getting started and most of the time they're, the trouble with them is they don't know how to get their product to market fast, speed to market, like Rene had said earlier, they're stuck with programming, financial excuses, barriers just to getting their product in front of their customer.

For them within a few clicks they can get their picture, their product, their words, whatever, and they’re call to action right in the flow of traffic and then once they get their offer up there, it's easy to tap into traffic through Facebook. For the newbie, it’s just easier to get their offer where everybody is. For the Pro Marketer, we have a lot of other benefits, as far as, not only being able to get your offer where everybody is, you can get multiple offers there.

When you're doing advertising, you can collect better leads because everything is verified through Facebook as in the web where you can't verify anybody’s email address, name and identity, Facebook we do that. We can also get fans that multiply themselves because if you fangate the actual app, which means you restrict this page to only your fans, who have to like it first. So it builds your list, builds social proof, gets you free exposure, then they land on your page.

As a Pro Marketer, like I said you can extract that information, put it in an email auto-responder to build that sequence, that trust and relationship on an automated basis and the mind-blowing stuff is you can extract the ideas of the people who click on the button, so then you can put that back in the Facebook ads manager, what they call the custom audience and only market to the people who have been on your page and been through your process.

When you do that as a Pro Marketer or Extreme Pro Marketer, you’re always looking for your lowest cost per click and if you're paying for advertising in Facebook and you should be, and you're sending traffic out of Facebook and your competition is sending it in Facebook, you're going to be at a disadvantage. Because if you’re buying traffic from Facebook, it's better to keep it in Facebook and that's what we offer the Pro Marketer.

For the guys who've got a bunch of affiliates, or the company that has got a lot of affiliates or reps, if they can create one successful sales funnel, anybody can duplicate that sales funnel with two clicks, $2, and two minutes basically.

Paul Clifford: Wow, that's amazing and that's the cloning feature isn't it? That you have?

Jerry Rocco: Yes, and I can demo any of this stuff in real time if you want to see it.

Paul Clifford: Right. I think it's a link below, so basically anyone listening here can actually click the link below the screen and actually take a whole copy of a whole page and put it in their own Facebook page, right?

Rene Banuelos: Exactly and one of the things we added in the last few weeks is actually it's you're not just taking a copy of the page, you're actually emulating the page you clone, which means or simulcasting is another word. Any time let's say Paul somebody made a copy of your 22S page, installed that in their Facebook page, any time you change any of the media, let's say you have a new hangout next week, that's automatically updated, if you change the headline or the copy or anything like that, it automatically gets propagated.

For affiliates or network marketing teams it's perfect because the super affiliate or the main affiliate can create a funnel and have it be reflected if there's a change in copy because it converts better, it all automatically gets reflected to all the pages that clone the original. In a network marketing team, if the leader of that team creates new hangouts every week, changes the video, does anything, the down line doesn’t have to worry about all that.

It gets, automatically gets, propagated and the ones who do want to, who are a little more experienced, a little more savvy, who want to overwrite that and say, “You know what I like the whole page, but I want my own headline” then they can do that as well.

Paul Clifford: Right.

Rene Banuelos: They can actually override that and keep their own headline, so it doesn't come from that parent page.

Paul Clifford: Not just affiliates though, say if I was a company just selling my own product, then I can build my own page, my own demos, I can do all the testing and everything like that myself, and then I can ask, then my affiliates to clone that page and I know that they're using a funnel that converts.

Rene Banuelos: Exactly, exactly. Right on. Correct. I mean that's the thing with uses, we've had talks with online radio stations. Imagine from a radio station perspective let's say, you normally have an audience, right? I mean let's say you're an entrepreneurship radio station. There's a lot of people who'd be interested in having that content especially quality content on their Facebook page.

Allowing them to clone let's say like a radio station page on to their Facebook page, gives them that content. One of the hardest things to do for most people, non-marketers is to create content. By giving that other person your content it's a win-win. They get to actually provide that content to the tribe and you get the exposure. So that’s the other way to look at it as well, to apply it.

Paul Clifford: Brilliant.

Rene Banuelos: Don't know if I confused you, but!?

Jerry Rocco: I love it because affiliate marketing, you have, if I enter into an affiliate marketing relationship with Rene, my most prized possession, my list, I'm going to give it to him because I am selling his products and then he's going to enter into a relationship with another product creator and then my list, which I had was all mine, I gave to Rene, now Rene shares it with another product creator and I'm diluting my most prized possession my list.

With 22Social it allows the product creator who's the best at doing the demos, the best at doing the selling, the best at answering questions to be demonstrating on an unlimited amount of pages, but all of those independent reps keep their own likes, keep their own leads, sharing the profits from the sales, but never jeopardizing the integrity of their list because their list never goes to the main affiliate and they don't suck up everybody's list and we know how valuable list is, because you just got to keep filling it.

Paul Clifford: Sure, sure, absolutely. I guess for anyone listening if you ever want to try it out I think there's a button at the bottom of the screen, which I put on there, it took me two seconds, where you can just join 22Social. What you can also do if anyone is on is just click the like button at the top and that will actually just like the Disruptware page, which will be much appreciated some love would be really, really cool. For other people who are looking to get in touch with Rene or Jerry, how should they get in touch with you?

Rene Banuelos: Jerry?

Jerry Rocco: Okay, I was going to say our page is always the best place to find us, you know private message our page or post something on our page. Depends on what they're looking for. Contact us personally through the pages it works as well just ask for us and we'll probably read that or Jerry or Rene at 22Social.

Paul Clifford: Cool, just before we finish let's just have a look, does anyone got any questions, you know that want to ask...had a couple of questions in the chat box. Rene or Jerry do you want to just cover a couple of those?

Jerry Rocco: Sure, this is interactive, it's a hangout, so anybody can ask anything. Whether you're mobile or not, which makes it the hangout. Rene did you see something on there that you wanted to talk about?

Rene Banuelos: Yeah, I think Rich Love has a few questions here and he says can you talk about how we get, he puts 10% conversions, but we actually get higher than that, and I think one of the reasons is that low entry point of $2 to get on a trial account versus staying on the free account that converts over to a regular subscription after 30 days. I think that's one of the reasons, Jerry correct me if I’m wrong, but he also has another question he says, so you want to cover that since you answered it.

Jerry Rocco: Sure, I actually, I'll give a 5 step formula that I usually follow through with any offer that'll work that I followed with this offer and you could probably apply it almost to anything. The first step is one, make your advertising remarkable and valuable, so you want to stop people, you've heard get their attention right away. You want to take it remarkable, but you want to make it valuable in any advertising you do.

If you look at some of the stuff on our page, you notice there's a lot of value in it, but I'm also asking for that sale. The first thing I do is make it remarkable and valuable. The second thing I do is, name and vividly describe their urgent problem because you want to bring that to the forefront and stir some kind of emotion right away. The third thing I do is prove that I can solve their problem, wait no wait, one, two, three, hold on a second.

Paul Clifford: It is five right? It is five.

Jerry Rocco: This is my copywriter's cheat sheet. I actually wrote it, but I keep it next to me. One is make your advertising valuable, two is identify and name their urgent problem with vivid awareness, three solve their urgent problem with a unique promise, so when you get to 22Social, you know it's a unique promise. It's different than anything else you saw. The moment that your visitor sees that they think they know what's going on, they're gone. Always keep them on their toes and keep them engaged.

Solve their urgent problem with a unique promise. Then four, prove that you can solve it with unquestionable proof. We do that which is a ton of social proof that just kind of happens automatically first, thankfully. If you don't have social proof yet, you don't have testimonials, things like that to answer objections, you can always go with undeniable facts that agree with the world view of your ideal customer.

Then five, make your offer impossible to refuse with a user-friendly proposition that provokes scarcity. So that's why we have, it's only $2, it's automatic, it's right there, you already clicked the button, just get it over with, finish it, give us the $2 or you're going to end up giving us $22 later. So that's kind of what we do, hopefully that was helpful.

Paul Clifford: No, that was really, really good actually. You can see how compelling your offer on your page is. The $2 thing that you do, even that looks quite simplistic from my perspective. I can see myself almost wanting to sign up because you've made it so point and click. Simple, okay, basically it's literally drag and drop. You don't have to do anything complex and before you know it you got something live, streaming within your Facebook page, which I think is really, really powerful. And of course that's...your business is growing now for you've been growing this for like about a year now, is that right?

Rene Banuelos: I'm sorry?

Paul Clifford: Rene, is it about a year now you've been growing really, really focusing on getting your customers on broad?

Rene Banuelos: Yeah, it's been May of 2012 which is, no 2013, not 2012, confusing my years there. So it's been less than a year actually. We've had explosive growth we keep getting fresh customers every single month, every single day actually, so it's been insane.

Paul Clifford: How many customers you're up to now?

Rene Banuelos: We have more than I think is 21,000-22,000 close to, not quite 22,000 free accounts, I mean total accounts, free and paid.

Jerry Rocco: More than that.

Rene Banuelos: I don’t check it every single day. I should probably.

Jerry Rocco: I'm looking at them right now...it's like 23 or 24,000, yeah. I can't do the math right now, I’m trying to add them all up. It's right around there give or take a thousand from 22,000-23,000.

Rene Banuelos: Wow, you’re right we passed 22,000, we should’ve...that should have been a big landmark for us.

Jerry Rocco: We went right passed 30,000 likes on our page and none of us blinked right? We were just like, ‘oh we just went to 30,000’, all right, just keep going and that was two days ago now we're at like 33, 30 - , I don't know, we gained like a hundred and something fans a day and those are almost exact to the amount of leads in customers we get a day because they have to go through the funnel. So a lead does actually equal sale for us. In an environment where everybody is saying, "You can't sell on social, you can't sell social."

I think one of the things that helped us too is, we went out and said, "Yes you can. Stop listening to everybody who says you can't." In fact we just took down our website. I don't know if you’ve checked out our website. We don't need a website to win online and neither do you, go to Facebook. That was our website. Something we learned from Ryan Holiday when he had said, when he was looking for the name of his book which is "Trust me I'm lying." It's confessions of a mass media maven written in red.

It's an awesome book. Probably one of the best starts of a book I've ever read, but he says, "When I came up with that title and people either loved it or hated it, I knew I have the right one because it polarized people." Anytime you can polarize people, the people who are listening are going to listen harder, and the other people are going to listen because they hate you.

Paul Clifford: Yeah, yeah, that's brilliant. On that point though, you said, even your home website goes straight to Facebook. What are your concerns long term? About your whole business, babysitting and revolving within Facebook, do you...you know how these things happen, right? People get banned, I’m not saying you’re not doing anything wrong at all, but things can get out of control and obviously you're whole business is based in that. How do you feel about that?

Jerry Rocco: Did you see my email inbox? Those are mine, they're not Facebook's. They're in my email auto-responder, all that data, all those Facebook IDs. You think I only have one Facebook account? I mean for doing advertising. If I had all those IDs and I had all that data and if everything exploded today on Facebook, I could still go in and market to all those IDs.

It's all about the list right? And Facebook allows us to build the best list possible because I know those are real people. Where Google messed up and gave me a thousand email addresses, they don't know, who I am, they're trying to figure that out. But Facebook knows exactly who I am and who you are, and who Rene is and that’s the benefit of having that list, it's a real list.

Paul Clifford: Okay, but still you know the software, the technology, you know, is still based within Facebook and so...

Rene Banuelos: Obviously, Paul, there are some risks with that, I mean, like with anything, there is some risk with that and mainly, I mean one strategies is to actually abide with what Facebook wants to do long term and not go against the current and keep feeding it because we generate fan pages all the time. We get a lot of people who never have a fan page to create one.

We also encourage a lot of people to actually use our app platform to drive traffic. We're feeding the giant and that's one of the reasons for that is, I mean if you don't then you're...they have no reason to keep you right? And I think that goes for apps in general. I mean, if you're feeding the giant, that giant likes you, but I mean obviously you can't eliminate all risks right, so.

Paul Clifford: Right.

Rene Banuelos: I don't know if that answers that.

Paul Clifford: No, no, no, I totally get you. I totally get you. Listen before we go. I know your time is short, we just got a couple more questions coming in so I think Rich just wants to ask how you can become an affiliate and I guess he can get straight in touch with you, maybe by that link at the bottom?

Rene Banuelos: If you have a Pro account you could actually remove the link at the bottom, so it doesn't have to stay there. So yes, I think it was Marcus who asked that right? Yeah.

Paul Clifford: No, Rich was actually asking how he can become an affiliate.

Rene Banuelos: I'm sorry. We actually don't have an affiliate program, but if he has questions or anything like that, he can message me, but we don't have an open affiliate program. Let's say, I was reading the other question Marcus Raven actually asked another question, says would all our apps have the 22 logo in the bottom and that's the one I was reading. Sorry I got a little sidetracked, and basically, no, you can remove that 22S logo from the bottom of the page if you have a Pro account. A lot of people keep it cause they want people to click on it get an account from us and earn their three accounts and have us waive their fees so, but if you want to, you can.

Jerry Rocco: I think Marcus might be thinking about re-selling the apps, that's usually the question and yes you can. So the follow-up question which maybe on Marcus' mind, can I re-sell these apps cause for $22 a month you get 10 of these apps with a complete with mobile companion and all the features, so you could go out and set one up for a local business or another one up for a local business and they could get a free account and they’d be able to manage the app as well, as long as you had a Pro account cause there is a shared management feature as well.

Paul Clifford: Wow. There you go, another benefit for you. I’ve kept you guys for long enough. I really appreciate you coming on board with this interview. I found it fascinating. Not obviously about the software, but also about your marketing strategies as well. Rene and Jerry thanks ever so much for sharing your insights and the inside of your business, I really, really appreciate that.

Jerry Rocco: Been a pleasure, thanks for having us.

Rene Banuelos: Thank you Paul.

Paul Clifford: You're welcome, and that’s it for today's session. If you’ve listened to this on the podcast, then go to disruptware.com to pick-up the show notes and otherwise this video will be on the Disruptware page and also on the blog as well. By all means leave us some comments or let us know if you have any questions and I can refer them to Rene. Thanks for listening. This is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.

Jerry Rocco: Thank you.

Rene Banuelos: Thank you.

Recommended Resources:

1. 22Social - click here

2. Balsamiq - click here

3. Book - Trust Me I'm Lying - by Ryan Holiday

The Question Is Not How To Get Funding

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A phrase I see everywhere is, "How do I get funding?" and it's completely the wrong question that anyone should be asking.

So why is, "How do I get funding?" the wrong question? Because the question should be, "How do I get my first customer?" You only need one to get things moving. Many people think, especially when leaving university and things like that, you know, they've got this great idea and they're just going to get out and get funding and that's where the game stops. And of course investors know that's where the game starts.

It's not about getting funding so I can get a job to create my product. Investors won't buy ideas. They're not interested in ideas. There are three things that investors are interested in and let's just talk about those for a second.

The first one is team. Everything is about the team and in some cases the team might be just you. You as the individual, that is who an investor or anyone is looking at to work out whether the company is going to succeed or fail. The reason they're looking at that is because experience dictates that entrepreneurs very rarely get it right the first time.

What usually happens is they have the drive, the determination to make the company work. The product might be crap. It might be totally wrong. The market might be wrong. The customers might be wrong. Everything might be wrong, but the successful entrepreneur knows how to recognize that and has the guts to twist it, turn it, or pivot, as they say, and make it into something that will work. That is the core difference and that's why investors always look at the team first. In other words, you.

The second thing is traction. Traction is all about getting customers on board. How do you get your first customer? Nine times out of ten the best way to get your first customer is to phone them or to meet them or to show them face-to-face. You only need one or two. Once you get one or two, then you get your idea validated especially if you can actually get them to put their hand in their pocket and pay for your product.

So the question you might be asking is, "Well, hang on, I need some money to create my product. So how do I go about doing that?" Well the thing is what you need to do is take the mockup and try to sell your mockup. Create a wire frame. That's not going to cost anything. Take that to who you think is going to buy your product and see if you can get them to fund something, 20%, 50%, whatever, 100%. But that way if you can get money coming in the door, then you can fund the actual product creation and also that is more than validation that you've got a great idea there. So it should give you the confidence to move forward, build your product and then sell it.

The third thing that investors look for is the product, of course. The product has to be right. It has to be saleable. It has to be scalable. It has to be unique. It has to be different. It has to have an edge. It has to be taking something to a market. Even if it's reinventing a new wheel, that's actually fine too but obviously the product is important, at least to get the initial bite from investors.

Don't underestimate the first two things, team and traction. That is above all the biggest factors in anyone looking to invest in business. If you get that right, if you start getting some customers on board and you're driving that forward and you're really, really pushing that and you have direction and if you recognize that something might be wrong but you are able to change it, then investors will find you. It's a lot cheaper to give away equity once you have customers than when you're just trying to find funding for an idea.

I hope you found that really useful. Leave some comments below and let me know what you think about this topic.

Productize Don’t Customize

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It's not uncommon for customers to request customizations of software products that they are interested in. However, you should never ever customize your product, instead you should always productize.

So here's the situation...you have your product out there, you're an early stage startup and you're starting to talk to a lot of customers and some really big enterprises are really interested in your solution. So you're getting closer to getting them on board. They're a great name. It's going to do wonders for your business and so you're really excited to have that and when it comes to the crunch then they come out with that phrase, "I'll buy it if you can do X and Y for me".

So basically what they want is customization and this is where the alarm bells need to start ringing. Okay, you've got to remember that your product is a marathon. It's not a sprint and the quick wins like this, they look great on the surface but they have a huge pain behind them.

So they want customizations, you don't want that because you want to stay as a product. The thing is customizing any solution even though the ideas are probably quite good, it leads down a rabbit hole. Okay, a complete mess, you know, you have to do things like create branches and at the end of the day you're not a software development house, you're a SaaS company or a product company and in my experience it always goes wrong. It's a lose-lose for you and the customer.

You lose because you have to commit resources to features that aren't necessarily on your road map. You then have to maintain more than one branch of code. You need to spend more time with them in account management and their bug fixes are probably not going to be necessarily aligned with the bug fixes for the core product. And sometimes, I've seen it, where clients want to claim IP or intellectual property over their ideas and of course, you can't then reuse those ideas for anything else so it's a complete nightmare.

And of course the client loses as well. Although they don't see that straightaway and you need to explain this to them. For them it's going to get more and more expensive to maintain and of course, you have to charge them. You have to charge them maintenance on top of the customization, because it's not a SaaS anymore. And they get behind your core road map because they're on a separate branch.

You're product is moving in this direction and every time they want some new features or on your core you've got to merge those in, which creates another project, another stream of customizations, another stream of bug fixing and everything and it gets more and more expensive.

And one of the worst things that I've seen is at the deal stage, when the customer says, "yeah, I want this but I want X and Y", what normally happens is once they go live and they get implemented and they start adopting it, they actually come up with a whole load of other priorities that are actually more important than the initial things that they wanted at the start of the project.

So then you're in a huge mess because you're trying to shuffle around and re-prioritize stuff that you've committed to and then they want other stuff because now they're starting to use it and they're starting to see things that they want to change.

So basically never go down that road. Okay, but I understand the pressure, I've been there. So this is how I've solved that previously in some of my previous software companies and specifically one big SaaS startup, where you had a lot of pressure like this.

So what I do is I create what's called a 'Customer Expedited Road map'. Okay. And the way to handle that is that essentially, first of all, when a customer asks you for the customization, the blanket answer is "no" and you outline the reasons that I've already gone through. Secondly, you explain to them that you do have an expedited road map process and this is how you go into a bit more detail.

What you do is you take their requirements, you look at your road map and you work out how you can create product features to deal and provide a solution for those specific requirements. So basically you're productizing their requirements.

Now, the cost is higher because to build their requirements into more of a product you have to make it more flexible. You have to make it work for everyone. You have to put in more platforms, structure and everything like that so the product piece becomes more expensive to build as opposed to just customizing it for one customer, but it really does make the whole thing win.

Then the way you get them to pay for that is you go back to them and say, "right, we've got these features on our road map, they're down here next year sometime, whatever, this is what we plan to do and this is how we can provide a solution to your requirement but for us to move it forward, so that you get it much, much sooner we have this expedite process where basically we can charge you a fee for moving it towards the product road map, towards the beginning of the product road map".

That way they get the features early, which is when they actually want them and you get your development funded, which is what you want and also, you're able to stay aligned with your core SaaS product or whatever product it is you're building, but the point is you want to stay on one line of code, or one branch of code as we call it in the industry.

So to sum up, say no to customizations, productize any customization request or any feature request that you get. Build it into the core and make sure you charge the customer to move it forward, to move it up your road map so you get that cash, you get that revenue coming in which helps fund the rest of your road map and that makes that a win-win for everyone.

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

Al Bsharah’s Passion And Love For What He Does Translates Into A Big Win For Embarke

Al Bsharah is the founder of Embarke. A successful startup that specializes in email marketing. Embarke gathers data intelligence that tells their customers who they should be sending emails to and what type of emails. Essentially, giving consumers the type of content that they want which invariably impacts on open rates, click through rates, and revenue. But apart from his business Al is actively involved in the startup community in San Diego. He enjoys helping others and is passionate about making a difference in the world.

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Tweetables
I’m really bullish on the San Diego startup scene Tweet Buffertweetable text
We want to make a dent in the universe Tweet Buffertweetable text
I’m a pretty big fan of partnerships Tweet Buffertweetable text
We do it because we want to provide the consumer with something better Tweet Buffertweetable text

Today's Podcast Highlights

[2.25] Because the consumer is getting content they want to engage with, we’re increasing opens, clicks, and revenue by 5 to 20%.
[3.34] If you know exactly how much one click makes...and you can increase that number then you can clearly identify return on that investment.
[4.11] We do it because we want to provide the consumer with something better.
[5.25] We’re going to make sure that we deliver an email to each person when they’re most likely to engage.
[7.59] Different types of companies have people following them or receiving their emails for different reasons.
[8.25] Try different lengths, try different subject lines, try different things and figure out what works for your audience generally speaking.
[9.34] It is a big buzz right now, that personalization and engagement and all that stuff is, that segment of the marketing automation industry is growing pretty dramatically.
[10.32] TechStars is big on the founders and the team.
[12.02] I mean I made a ton of mistakes. Now that I look back it was like I did everything wrong.
[13.34] We realized that we had a good company, but we were going to struggle to make it a great company.
[14.20] I’m really bullish on the San Diego startup scene. There’s a lot of great things starting to happen here.
[15.34] There’s an incubator program here in town called EvoNexus.
[17.40] I’m looking for entrepreneurs that are coachable and looking for entrepreneurs that have proven some ability to execute in the past.
[19.17] We want to make a dent in the universe and we’re willing to take risks to do that and I think that’s something that you don’t necessarily grow out of.
[19.29] I think age is becoming less of a stereotype when it comes to the startup thing.
[22.01] When your older you can still make mistakes, you just got to make them faster.
[26.14] I’m a pretty big fan of partnerships.
[27.40] We are not trying to replace the marketing automation tools and service providers and things like that out there. We actually integrate with them.
[30.03] We’re all human, we want to be engaged with something.
[30.58] Grab me with something in 30 seconds that makes me excited about what you’re doing and then keep grabbing me every 30 seconds right.
[34.15] The purpose of that pitch or that elevator pitch or that on stage pitch or your deck or whatever it is, is to peak interest and that’s it.
[35.12] It’s really the possibility of making a difference and making an impact in a way that not just makes my life better, but other people’s lives better.
[36.21] I love working in this space. I love coming into the office because I’m surrounded by people that are just way smarter than me.

Disruptware is building the largest community of software entrepreneurs on the planet. Make sure you are on the list.

Full Transcript

Paul: Okay so on today’s show, I’m really excited to introduce someone called Al Bsharah who is the founder of a company called Embarke, which is all about email marketing and optimizing open rates and click throughs. But essentially I’m going to let Al explain everything about that to you. One thing’s great about Embarke is it’s really succeeded really well over the last couple of years. They raised 1.25 million in equity from VCs and Angels last year. They graduated both from the Founder Institute and TechStars Accelerated Program. I’m really excited to get Al on the show, talk about his startup and hopefully give us some strategies for growth and even some insights into email marketing as well. Al, welcome to the show.

Al: Thanks Paul, I appreciate it. That’s a great intro, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me and yeah, hopefully I can help somebody somewhere.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely and I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy day. I know what life in a startup is like. You have to do a bit of everything no matter what level you’re at. Let’s kick off by just like in your own words, just tell us a little bit about Embarke. What’s that all about?

Al: Yeah, so Embarke automates essentially the two main things that email marketers have to fight with everyday right? Who to send to and what to send them. So our data intelligence on each individual automates both of these items. Ultimately, giving the consumer content they actually want to engage with. Because their getting content they want to engage with, we’re increasing opens, clicks, and revenue by 5 to 20%, which is essentially more money for marketers and kind of less crap in your inbox for us as consumers. It’s a win for everybody.

Paul: That’s amazing because my experience in the internet marketing world is very much from email side of things. Obviously I have customer lists, but I also promote a lot of products as an affiliate as well. Everything comes down to the open rates, the click through rates, and everything like that. Even just a few percentages on your open rate can make a big difference. I mean a huge difference to your campaign. I guess with your sort of customers where you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of mails per day I guess. Those sorts of percentage points make unbelievable difference in revenue, right?

Al: Dramatic differences, yeah and in some cases it’s millions per day. A lot of the bigger companies especially the ones that kind of have that direct line from a click to revenue, which is usually in the commerce space. They know exactly how much one click makes them, right?

Paul: Right.

Al: If you can increase that number then they can clearly identify return on that investment.

Paul: Wow, cool. How do you that? How do you, obviously without giving away your secret sauce, how do you get increase this in open rates and click throughs in a nut shell if there’s a simplest way to frame it?

Al: Yeah, well essentially we pay attention to the consumer that you’re sending the emails to. We learn their behaviors, we learn their interests, we watch what they do and not for a creepy reason. We do it because we want to provide the consumer with something better. And the only way to do that is if you know more about them as an individual, right? The biggest problem with email marketing today is...email is a very personal channel, but marketers don’t have the tools to treat it as such. So they treat it like a public one and everybody gets the same messages or very nearly the same messages.

Really we watch when people are engaging, the devices they’re engaging from, geographically where they are, what their interests are, what types of emails they’re engaging with, things like that. We don’t hand all this to the customer, that means you still have to do something with it. We actually allow them to automatically take action on that. We would say, “Okay, here’s a group of people that are interested in this type of thing.” Now you know who you need to send to and you know the content you need to send them, so go do it, right?

Paul: Kind of like demographic, but on a larger scale?

Al: Yeah.

Paul: Like demographic breakdown of the customers and not only that, I guess working out when are their best times for opening mails and things?

Al: Absolutely, yeah. There is definitely a demographic piece to it. There’s also a very heavy behavior piece to it and time optimization is one of those things right? We’re going to make sure that we deliver an email to each person when they’re most likely to engage, because for some people that’s in the morning, for other people it’s in the evening when they put the kids to bed. Some folks it's on their mobile device at lunch time. It just really depends on each person and that’s really where all of our decisions are made are based on that individual.

Paul: Right, so I guess if I’m framing this right. You kind of track let’s say your John Doe and you store against him like when he normally reads his email. So if I am a customer of yours and I want to send a campaign out, then you’ll make sure that John Doe only receives my mail at the time when he is normally reading his mail.

Al: Yeah, exactly and it goes back to listening to what the customer is telling you. When they open and click, that’s them telling you something, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Al: They’re telling you “Hey, this is when I engage with your stuff,” and overtime, we get much stronger signal and we can look through historical data and we can look through other things to really make sure that we’re hitting the mark for those people.

Paul: Fantastic.

Al: Yeah.

Paul: Okay, and I have a lot of internet marketers in my communities and we’re always talking about how to get increases in open rates and things like that. You’re obviously tackling it from the technology side, but is there any tips or advice that you can give people from the way they write? Is there a certain length of email that they should put together? Should they try and target certain types of subject lines or anything like that? Do you sort of recommend or help your customers along that side of things as well?

Al: Yeah, it’s interesting. We don’t necessarily help so much with that specifically today, but certainly we’re in the space so we pay attention to that stuff. The interesting thing that obviously we see, like take it back to time optimization right? You can look on the internet and pretty much find, if you want Saturdays at 3 PM to be the right time to send an email, you will find a study that says Saturdays at 3 PM is the right time to send an email. The problem is this data is based on aggregate information and it’s based on different types of customers and companies that are sending and all these different groups.

The same thing goes for content, the bottom line is you need to test. You need to try some things because your customer base is going to be very different than mine, right? Different types of companies have people following them or receiving their emails for different reasons. Some of it may be knowledge, some of it may be deals and discounts, some of it may be very important to their day to day, and some of it may be fluffy. Each individual is going to engage differently with those types of things. I would definitely say do heavy, heavy testing and see what works, try something. Be very rigorous about that.

Try different lengths, try different subject lines, try different things and figure out what works for your audience generally speaking. Then work your way towards trying to figure out how can I deliver what each person wants inside of that framework. Does that kind of makes sense? I mean I’m not really answering the question, but I really believe in the fact that personalization and testing, and doing what’s right for your customer base. Whoever they are is really the only true answer.

Paul: Yeah, I mean the whole topic is really fascinating to me. I was in deep discussion with the head of mail delivery for a company called Ontraport a couple of years ago and he was saying that the key thing now with ESP’s is it’s just looking for engagement. If you’re not engaging your customers within your first two or three emails, in other words, if they’re not opening and clicking then you’re far more likely to go into the spam box on your fourth and fifth etcetera. All their algorithms are geared around engagement now.

Al: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it is a big buzz right now, that personalization and engagement and all that stuff is, that segment of the marketing automation industry is growing pretty dramatically especially in email space today.

Paul: Yeah.

Al: It was big in social for a while, but the email channel wasn’t...it’s a little bit less sexy despite the fact that it knocks the pants off of pretty much every other channel from an ROI perspective. It’s starting to get a lot more attention now, so yeah, it’s hugely important.

Paul: Which is fantastic for your company because I think you’re ground breaking in terms of what you’re trying to do and certainly ahead of the curve. I guess that’s why the TechStars and all these people sort of jumped and were keen to get involved with your organization and really accelerate it.

Al: Yeah and you know it’s interesting. TechStars in general, well the funny thing is we actually went into TechStars with a different idea.

Paul: Right.

Al: Actually TechStars is big on the founders and the team. That’s really what they bet on. Because, it’s my belief and there’s a lot of people that will back me up on this, that people can’t pick good companies, but they can pick good people, right? That we'll probably figure it out in however, whatever manner they need to figure it out. So TechStars they’ve bet on the founders and hope that they’ll figure out the product. Ironically, this product came through going through the TechStars process. We were not doing this when we got into TechStars.

Paul: Ah, that’s really interesting okay. That’s brilliant, so what did you...now, we talked a bit about Embarke and email marketing.

Al: Sure.

Paul: Let’s just take a step back a bit, so how did you get started and perhaps maybe take it a step further back. What did you do before this?

Al: Yeah, sure so I'll kind of give you a quick history of me. I grew up in Detroit and I got an electrical engineering degree, worked in the auto industry for Chryslers and GM for a little while and it just wasn’t my speed. It wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing and so I moved out to San Diego about 15 years ago. Kind of been doing startup stuff ever since. My first gig was I was a second employee at a startup that build and manage large scale corporate networks. We grew that company to 50 or so people. I left and started my own e-commerce company around, I guess this was 2003 or so, and had marginal levels of success.

I mean I made a ton of mistakes. Now that I look back it was like I did everything wrong. It was a great learning experience for me but I wasn’t surrounded by the startup ecosystem and mentorships and things like that that I am now. I learned a lot from that, made a bunch of mistakes. Actually went back to the original company that I started with. We ended up getting acquired. I had a small, a bit of equity there but after that, I kind of got the itch to do my own thing again. This is fast forwarded to about three years ago when I joined the Founder Institute, which is a really early stage program and it’s great for early stage founders and that’s where I met my co-founder.

That’s where Embarke was born. We were focused on communications in general. That’s kind of something that we were both very passionate about and we wanted to solve some problems there. So we iterated a number of different products, we tested, we built some small stuff and a number of MVP’s and iterated through a few different products over maybe a year and a half. Settling in on one where this is right before TechStars. We were actually helping developers communicate on multiple channels. We give them one API to use to communicate with say email or Twitter or Facebook or any of these other communication channels.

It was good, like we had some customers and partners and we’re doing okay, but then we get into TechStars and everything changed. We realized that we had a good company, but we were going to struggle to make it a great company. We spent you know TechStars is a three month program and we spent a good month and a half of that figuring out where we’re going to land and it was grueling. It was brutal and there were days where I wondered if we’re ever going to figure it out but we did. Fast forward to a year and a half later, here we are.

Paul: Wow.

Al: Yeah.

Paul: That’s brilliant and not only do you have a really, really successful startup but you really got involved in the startup community as well, haven’t you? I think you mentioned that...you created this startup poker, mentor hours, EvoStart, just tell us a bit about that, what else are you doing there?

Al: Yeah, so I’m really bullish on the San Diego startup scene. There’s a lot of great things starting to happen here and bottom line is I mean I want a good community for startups and I got a lot of help over the past three years once I really dug into the community from mentors and programs and things like that. I want to make it better, for the people that are coming up behind us, right? See how the startup poker one is great.

We actually founded in Seattle when we were going through TechStars and we brought it to San Diego. My co-founder Brian started it up and essentially it’s a curated list of investors and a curated list of really good founders playing poker and we get together, it's very casual, it's fun. And it’s a great way to just get to know different people, different founders and network. The mentor hours is kind of a similar concept, but it’s more really curated mentors.

Some of the best in town and founders and giving them 30 minute windows to get to know each other, help each other out and things like that. We do that probably once every two weeks in small form and then every quarter we have a big massive blowout one where there is 25 mentors and probably I don’t know how many founders...a lot. Been involved in those programs and then EvoStart. There’s an incubator program here in town called EvoNexus and we’re in the middle of...we’re MVPing this incubator program and there’s five companies going through it right now. It’s a four month kind of cohort based program inside of EvoNexus.

The goal is to get these companies to product market fit, right. And there's specific things that they focus on each month to get them down that direction. Yeah, it’s our first run at it and so far we think it’s going pretty well, but I love doing this kind of stuff and it’s a lot of fun.

Paul: That’s really good. Do you like...looking at EvoStart you know when someone comes to you with an idea. How do you sort of, I guess vet them, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but you don’t want to take anyone in right. You want to make sure that you got the right person coming in because you want them to be successful and it takes a certain type of individual to be an entrepreneur. To get through all the bumps and the troughs as you move through developing a business. How do you actually qualify the right sort of person to get into EvoStart?

Al: Yeah, it’s a good question and it’s a really tough problem to solve. EvoNexus has had an application process for a while and we have used that and made some tweaks and streamlined it a little bit better and we’ve taken some notes from other accelerated programs. Obviously, we’ve been through TechStars and I’ve seen that. One of the guys who is helping with EvoStart has been through Y Combinator so we’ve seen that. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but really it boils down to just ... you have your questionnaire and then you can weed out a bunch of people from that and we ask for short videos so you can kind of get to know the people in person.

We have a review committee that goes through some of the stuff and we start ranking and scoring. Everybody in the committee has their own things that they’re looking for which I think is good because you get a bunch of different viewpoints on the teams. Ultimately for me I’m looking for entrepreneurs that are coachable and looking for entrepreneurs that have proven some ability to execute in the past. That really kind of get it, they have a good team, they may have an idea, they may have traction. It may or may not be right, that’s a little less important because if they’re the right team, they’re going to figure out what’s right.

They’re going to go talk to their customers, they’re going to learn from them, they’re going to pay attention, they’re going to keep their eyes open and they’re going to go after the right market or they’re going to fill that gap that’s this huge gaping hole that the market needs. They’re going to figure out where that is. That help answer your question a little bit?

Paul: Is it any sort of age or anything like that. Do you get people who have sort of come out of the corporate world, who want to do things as well as the student type who has just got this crazy idea and happy to live on Ramen Noodles for the next six months?

Al: Yeah, for sure. It’s all over the map and that’s something I think is really cool. There’s this painted picture of what a startup company is and it’s all super young guys, fresh out of college crammed in sharing living quarters and sleeping on couches and stuff. That happens, but age is less important right? I think sure younger guys are willing to take more risk and things like that, but I know a ton of folks who are older. Myself included who this is what we thrive on, this is what we live for. We want to make a dent in the universe and we’re willing to take risks to do that and I think that’s something that you don’t necessarily grow out of.

If you got it in you, you’re going to have it in you for a long time. I think age is becoming less of a stereotype when it comes to the startup thing. We see it all over the place. I’m not exactly the Spring chicken myself.

Paul: Me too right? I took a big risk coming here. Literally, we just left the UK last year. I thought we'd just come over here for a few years and try it out. What I always find interesting is that there’s a lot of amazing talent and very young talent with amazing ideas and they can work all hours under the sun and get stuff done at a great pace. I think what gets harder is the older you get and I’m not talking about age per se. I’m just talking about when people get more established in their lives. When they get married and have kids and they’re in the corporate job which pays pretty well, but they’ve got this burning idea and they want to do something with it.

The longer you’re in the corporate world you have an established life. It makes it a lot harder I think for someone to actually leave that and start a startup. I think those kind of people who can actually do that. I think they’re the bravest to a certain extent. They’re probably the ones most likely...there’s no stats behind this. This is just speculation, but I see that in a way someone who is prepared to take a risk, leave their job, build a startup and they’ve still got a family to feed and all the commitments and everything around that. They’ve got grit, they’re going to succeed, because it’s not like they can just give up.

Al: Go ahead.

Paul: No, go on.

Al: Yeah, I agree, I think it’s a different kind of motivation right? For success for us to figure it out. Because like you said, the older you are, you have likely more responsibility, you have family, you might have kids, husband and wife, whatever. You’ve got a mortgage and car payments and things like that that you might not have had 10, 20 years earlier right? The risk is different.

Your motivations for getting to the success that you need to get to are very different. I agree, you’re young, you can make mistakes and you can be like yeah, whatever, I’m young, I can keep at it and figure it out later. When your older you can still make mistakes, you just got to make them faster, right? More efficiently and get to the point quickly and not drag it out because if you drag it out odds are your runway’s going to run out quicker.

Paul: Yeah. You’ve got to look at the core motivation as well. When you’re younger you want to change the world right? When you’re older you want to feed your kids.

Al: Right.

Paul: I was listening to a podcast the other day and it was Jamie Tardy who is the founder of something called Eventual Millionaire and essentially her whole program is about interviewing millionaires, really pulling out their success stories and sort of mapping that into her mastermind. What was interesting is she found out with a lot people who wanted to do great things and just never did it as soon as they had babies, they went and did it. It was like the clear category of people. As soon as they get a family, all of a sudden their motivation changes and they just go and do stuff.

Al: That’s interesting. I wonder if...it feels like there’s something that is very subtle but very important and that’s a work life balance, right? I think it’s very important for you to step outside your business every once in a while, get your mind out of your business. You can either consciously or subconsciously think about it and not dwell in the details and I think having a family or something along those lines kind of forces that.

It makes you get out of your business, because you have a family now. Go spend time with them, right? It’s an interesting thing and I hadn’t actually heard that before, but that was the first correlation that popped into my head and maybe why that’s a real thing. Because I know whenever I force myself to either go on vacation which is relatively rare or take a long weekend or even just take a day in the middle of the week and focus higher level on business stuff. That’s when the epiphanies kind of come.

Paul: Yeah, exactly because you’re giving yourself space to think right?

Al: Yes.

Paul: Even in a small way when I was doing my corporate job, I was an exec for a startup but we’re under massive pressure and every day you’re just there in the trenches firefighting or whatever. I found that all my planning, I was doing on the plane from one place to another, because it was the only place no one could call me. No emails or anything and all of a sudden you start thinking, I should do it this way, that way...it’s not the right way but it certainly proved to me that getting out of the work environment and everything and doing something a bit different really did make a difference.

Al: Yup. It’s funny I crack this joke every once in awhile. You weren’t here when this happened but San Diego county, the entire county lost power...a couple of years ago and it was pretty much an entire day. I think it was somebody in Arizona flipped the wrong switch or something and the whole thing shut down. The funny part was everybody came out of their house, everybody...I met neighbors that I didn’t even know existed. It’s like something like that that kind of is a forcing function that makes you get out of your routine. Opens up doors to different ways of thinking, different people, different whatever right?

My joke is we need to shut the power off once a day every month just to get people to do that because it was fun. Everybody's like well let’s barbeque and drink whatever beer’s left in our fridge, right?

Paul: Yeah, it’s amazing. Some sort of common thread in the community that gets everyone together and they will have one thing in common and that’s what brings them out. Tell me, let’s just go back a little bit to how you got started, well not so much how you got started, but with Embarke how did you get your first customers on board? How does that work?

Al: I’m a pretty big fan of partnerships. For us we have a really good partnership with a company called SendGrid. We provide value to their customers and they feed introductions to some of their biggest customers. We’ve been working on this partnership for a year and a half and it’s been spectacular. They’re great for us, we’re great for them, it’s a really good symbiotic fit and that’s really how we kicked things off right?

We do get some inbound and we’re spending more time generating inbounds. We’ve just recently hired a marketing guy, so that's going to be one of our pushes over the next few months, but that was a great way for us to get started and so if you can find a partner that’s got great customers and see's that you can add substantial value to them. You’d be amazed at what that can actually turn in to. That’s really how we kicked things off.

Paul: Right, okay, brilliant. If I’m a customer and email marketing’s a big part of my business. Do I need to be using SendGrid or do I need to be using any particular sort of email marketing provider or software or anything like that to get involved with your company?

Al: Right. That’s a good question. We are not trying to replace the marketing automation tools and service providers and things like that out there. We actually integrate with them. SendGrid is a perfect example of that. They do spectacular email delivery. They have some newsletter products and stuff as well and our integration literally takes 15 minutes.

You can be up and running and using our stuff on top of your SendGrid platform that you already know and love right? When we were in TechStars and we’re doing interviews, we probably did a 120 interviews in the first month alone and a lot of what we heard was, "hey I actually kind of like the tools that I use." I just want to do more with them. And you need to make it easy for them. So we kind of based the company on that because we kept hearing those three things over and over.

Paul: Interesting. So SendGrid obviously is a good option and do SendGrid have the... obviously I know they’ve got the infrastructure for delivery. Do they have the front end software like the autoresponder type software and stuff built in?

Al: They’re really kind of building out their marketing side of their infrastructure. They have the newsletter product, they have some AB testing. I think we can do some trigger stuff or at least it’s early, it’s getting close. They’re starting to come out with some of the more standard things that are required.

Paul: Right, okay.

Al: And then we layer on the intelligence on top of all that.

Paul: Brilliant. Cool so one other thing that I know that you do and maybe we should just talk a bit about that. When someone has a new startup or a new idea. They need to tell that story, they need to put together the elevator pitch and I know you talk on that don't you...quite a bit. How to pitch, how to tell a story to investors or on stage or something like that. Can you just give us a few tips or strategies on how you should do that?

Al: Yeah, it’s a great topic, I love talking about it. There’s a number of things that when people are trying to tell their story, they don’t do a good job of. I could go on and on, but really it boils down to telling a good story. We’re all human, we want to be engaged with something. We want...when we're talking, I want to be paying attention to you because you’re teaching me something. You’re educating me. It’s exciting, it’s a space that I can get excited about. It’s a problem that I can actually relate to. A lot of times people go through and they’ll look at Guy Kawasaki’s 10, 20, 30 templates, right? Which by the way is great, but it’s not something that you should cut and paste and plug your own stuff into, right?

Okay here’s the problem, here’s the solution, here’s the team, here’s the blah, blah, blah...that’s not a story that's boring. If I’m an investor I’ve seen hundreds of those last week. You need to take those points which are really valuable and weave them into your story. Whatever your story is, right? Grab me with something in 30 seconds that makes me excited about what you’re doing and then keep grabbing me every 30 seconds right.

One of the first things I do when I’m crafting a pitch of any kind is I will sit down with a huge sheet of paper on a big table and I start drawing story arts, right? Okay I could tell the story this way. I don’t care about what I put in it. I’m telling the story of Embarke or what we do or why we do it or whatever and I’ll draw three or four of them out. Then I’ll take all the content that I know I need to provide and figure out how to weave it into that story. Now when you’re presenting or you’re handing a deck over and that story is in there or it’s in your voice. It’s a conversation. It’s not you barking information for a lack of a better term right.

Paul: Sure, it's engaging.

Right, exactly. If you’re by the campfire and you’re telling a story, you’re actually telling a story and people are interested in hearing you right? You’re not just throwing bullet points at them. Because nobody is going to listen to that. It’s really about figuring out how to tell that story well and it’s hard. Don’t get me wrong. A lot of people fail at it because, one, they don’t try - they don’t know to do that, but, two, it’s really hard to do. It takes a long time. It took me forever to get my story right. Even while I was pitching VC’s and Angels. My story and my pitch changed every day, right? It’s something that just kind of morphs and grows with you. Hopefully that helps.

Paul: Yeah, it really, really does. Funny enough, even with Disruptware, I’m still evolving my elevator pitch on what that is. I started it, it’s just for software entrepreneurs, but that’s meaningless. So then it was for people who want to start a software business or people who want to scale because it’s both kind of audiences. Now I’m kind of thinking well, the message is you don’t have to be in San Francisco to be a startup. Join a virtual community where you still have a benefit of sharing strategies and everything in one forum based community. That’s what Disruptware is all about.

Al: Right.

Paul: You know what I mean?

Al: Absolutely.

Paul: It’s kind of getting that messaging right, but also how it appeals to your target audience to make sure that they go, "yeah, that’s for me" or I can understand that in 10 seconds or whatever.

Al: Yeah, that’s a really good point is knowing your audience. I have different conversations that I have with my mom and her friends versus the VC versus a customer, versus whoever, right? Because they see things differently and they understand things differently and they care about different things. So you have to figure out how to relate those guys. That’s another big issue especially for guys who build great technology and they’re really excited about their technology and they want to talk about their technology or they want to put too many details into their presentation or their deck or whatever. That stuff's not important.

It’s important for the conversation you have after the pitch. The purpose of that pitch or that elevator pitch or that on stage pitch or your deck or whatever it is, is to peak interest and that’s it. Keep it simple. Get me interested to the point where I’m flipping through these pages quickly and I'm like wow, I really want to learn more about these guys, I’m going to pick up the phone. That’s what you want right? You want that interest so now you can sit down with that investor or partner or whoever it is and have a conversation and then you can share the crazy details when they ask you, right?

Paul: Right. That’s brilliant yeah. Tell me, where do you get your inspiration from as entrepreneurs you really need to wake up in the morning and sort of fire yourself up because there’s no one else to do that. What do you do to sort of get yourself motivated and keep driving your company forward?

Al: That’s a good question. It’s interesting because for me, it’s really the possibility of making a difference and making an impact in a way that not just makes my life better, but other people’s lives better. We were always focused on communications because we see a number of aspects of it are just broken.

And in particular the email marketing system is broken. There’s a lot of room for improvement. That improvement will directly help my inbox. It will directly help your inbox. It will help marketers with their businesses and for me, it’s a little bit of that but it’s also the fact that I get to wake up, I get to come to an 11 story building or 11 story office in San Diego with seven other startups that are all doing amazing things.

My team is now a team of eight and we’re all amazing and this is...I love working with these people. I love working in this space. I love coming into the office because I’m surrounded by people that are just way smarter than me, right? For me I get ridiculous value out of that as opposed to maybe going to a company and not being able to make an impact. Not have a difference even within that company let alone the world, right? That to me is kind of the nutshell of every morning I wake up and I’m not a morning person, but I wake up because it’s awesome and I want to get at it again.

Paul: That’s brilliant and that’s really great to hear. Surrounding yourself by intelligent or people smarter than you is one of the key philosophies I think. Who mentioned that, Richard Branson actually mentioned that...that someone asked him like, “What is the one thing that you could do or what is the one thing that you could attribute to your success,” and he said that.

Al: Yeah.

Paul: All I did was focus on hiring people smarter than me to run my businesses.

Al: Yup and I got that from the first company I worked for here. The CEO, that was one of his things, he’s like I’m bringing on people that are smarter than me because we’re not going to be successful if I'm the only one with answers, right?

Paul: Yeah. Fantastic. Well listen, we’re just at the end of the show Al. I know you got a massively busy day. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed today’s conversation. If anyone wants to get a hold of you, how can they reach you?

Al: Yeah just email at al@ is easy enough or go to the Embarke.com website. Yeah, happy to chat with founders, get you plugged into the system if you’re here in San Diego or whatever, I’m all about that.

Paul: Brilliant. Thanks again Al, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Al: Yeah, no, thank you so much. This was awesome.

Paul: If you enjoyed the show, you can get the show notes from disruptware.com and if you are not a subscriber and you’re listening to this in the iTunes store then please visit disruptware.com and sign up. That’s it for this episode, look out for next week’s show. I’m Paul Clifford and thanks for listening.

Recommended Resources:

1. Embarke - click here

2. EvoNexus - click here

3. SendGrid - click here

4. Founder Institute - click here

5. TechStars - click here

6. Ontraport - click here

7. Y Combinator - click here

8. Eventual Millionaire - click here

9. Guy Kawasaki's Templates - click here