RS234 Election Predictions and Structuring A Black Friday Deal in SaaS

November 12, 2020 00:31:55
RS234 Election Predictions and Structuring A Black Friday Deal in SaaS
Rogue Startups
RS234 Election Predictions and Structuring A Black Friday Deal in SaaS

Nov 12 2020 | 00:31:55

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Show Notes

In this episode (recorded on Election Day), Dave and Craig are talking about the big topics: elections in the United States and Black Friday. This 2020 election has been about straddling lines: blue versus red, mail-in ballots versus in-person voting, etc. Craig talks about explaining the electorate voting system to adults and how difficult that is. Both Dave and Craig talk about their predictions, silent Trump supporters, and the potential for shenanigans.

On the business side of things, Dave and Craig brainstorm techniques and ideas for Black Friday. What role does loyalty play in Black Friday deals? And how do you do that with a SaaS? What about the quality of customers? What about retention? They also touch base on Dave’s search for a new marketing person and chat about autoscaling.

Send us an email at [email protected]. And as always, if you feel like our podcast has benefited you and it might benefit someone else, please share it with them. If you have a chance, give us a review on iTunes. We’ll see you next week!

Resources: 

Recapture.io

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're to startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig. Yeah. It's election day is election day. Speaker 1 00:00:26 And, uh, to say that anxiety is high today and that the stakes are off the charts is the understatement of the fucking century. Speaker 2 00:00:38 Yeah. Yeah. I have friends in the States that are, that like went to the store over the weekend or not leaving their house for a week and people aren't going to work and stuff like not because of COVID, but because of, you know, riots and protests and all this crazy stuff, it's just bizarre, like never would have thought that would happen. Speaker 1 00:00:57 Not in this country. No. I mean, uh, we've always had this great history of peaceful transfer of power and it's just like, it's an election. It's not a big deal. And you know, people rioting after elections. Well, that's what happens in new democracies or unstable democracies are tiny little countries where there's lots of ethnic strife. Well, congratulations, 2020. You managed to bring all of that here and expose it for what it really was. And it was all bubbling under the surface. It's just, it finally came to a head like a really bad pimple. Speaker 2 00:01:32 Yeah. We voted gosh, a few weeks ago we mailed, mailed our ballots in. I know you, you guys have mail-in voting in Colorado. It's pretty. Speaker 1 00:01:39 Oh yeah. Yeah. We're one of the four States that's had this since like 2005 or six or something like that. It's like us, Utah, Washington and Oregon. And you know, we, I mean, everybody's like, Oh my God, mail-in ballots fraud, blah, blah, blah, never zero incidents of fraud here in Colorado as a result of having statewide mail-in ballots. I mean, there've been zero shenanigans with it. Absolutely nothing. Speaker 2 00:02:07 That's great. That's super great. Yeah. Do folks go vote like in person still? Or is it just not an option at all? Speaker 1 00:02:13 An option anymore? Everybody is required to go by a male. Speaker 2 00:02:18 Okay. Well, there you go. I mean, that's like prioritization, right? Like they said, we're going to put all our eggs in this basket, figure out how to do it. Right. Instead of like, I feel bad for like I voted in Florida. And so there's a lot of both ways there. Right. There's a lot of mail-in ballots. There's a lot of people going and I think, yeah, they can't have a great system of either of those, you know, cause they're having to kind of straddle two lines Speaker 1 00:02:42 And I think you kinda kind of commit, like if there's one priority that should happen the next round, it's like, we should just do some Speaker 2 00:02:52 Very easy fixes to Speaker 1 00:02:55 Clean up the voting system and just say, you know what, election day is a holiday, it's a federal holiday. Boom. Everybody gets it off. That would make a big difference. Yeah. Number two, like mail-in voting becomes the law of the land. Everybody does mail in voting. It's just not a problem anymore. Like make it easy, make it simple, make it, you know, it's hard to tamper with mail-in ballots in the same way that it is with all this electronic. I mean, there's so much evidence of voter machine, um, shenanigans at this point, you know, I mean just think of your personal computer and how hard it is to keep that damn thing up to date. And you use it every fricking day here, we have a voting machine, which is the same thing, except it gets used a couple of times a year at most. Speaker 1 00:03:40 And you know, there's hundreds of them to deal with. It's like a 19 nightmare. So, and they're ancient operating systems and patch problems and duh, forget it. I love the idea. It's just a terrible implementation and it's clearly had all sorts of problems. So let's go to just the simplest thing that works. And I think after four States have shown that this works including, you know, on both sides, like Utah's a red state, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon blue States nobody's, you know, commit this crime. Nobody's complaining, nobody's, you know, crying, foul in Utah because there's been election shenanigans. Nope. None of that. Just make it the law of the land, let everybody vote. But you know, there's definitely some resistance to that. Shall I say? Speaker 2 00:04:30 Yeah. I mean, I think if they do that, they can't, they can't turn off entirely. I guess it's not electronic kind of vote distance voting. It's like they actually mail you a ballot and you stick it in an envelope and it goes back to them in the mail. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So then it's available to everyone. Cause what I was thinking is like, you can't say like go on the computer and print this thing out and all this kind of stuff. That's like not an option. Speaker 1 00:04:56 There's uh, there's official ballots. They have to be sent back and then there are ballot drop boxes and we always go and take ours to one of the local drop boxes instead of putting it in the mail because we know that those get picked up at a reasonable period of time and we did ours way in advance. You know? I mean, it just seems like there are such obvious fixes, but there is one party that is doing its damnedest right now to disenfranchise a huge chunk of the electorate. And that is, that's just wrong. It's fundamentally wrong to suppress people's voice. Speaker 2 00:05:28 Yep. Yep. I tell you, it's really interesting being here and like this is our second election here. Right? We were just a few months into living here when, when Trump won the first time. I shouldn't say that when Trump won, Oh, please don't say that. Uh, and like to explain the U S electoral system to, you know, foreigners, even though like they're educated about it in school, even like our kids are learning about it at this point in like second and fourth grade, like to explain it to an adult is like crazy. Like how can this person get the majority of the votes and not win? And you're like, well, you know, it's the States and that's based on population. And it's just like that, that just doesn't make sense. Speaker 1 00:06:08 Let me take you back to the 17 and 18 hundreds when we still had slavery. Speaker 2 00:06:12 Yeah. And people didn't think that the population was smart enough to elect the right person because that's basically what it is. And you know, Speaker 1 00:06:19 And there was the whole three-fifths compromise because the South had more population than the North because of the plantations and the slave owners and the North didn't want the South to have too much power. And the South didn't want the North to get too much of a say, Oh God, what a mess? Speaker 2 00:06:36 What a mess, what a mess. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that like, what might be interesting is like talking about how, how this might affect us. Right. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know if that's interesting. I don't know. I don't know which way it will go. Obviously I do think that Biden will win. I do think the one, the one caveat could be, and I think this is something that is maybe like worth talking about is like in the micro comfy kind of community, is there a fair number of conservative people that feel like they can't speak their mind? Because you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurial type folks come from a conservative background or like, you know, are capitalists at heart. And I think that in the tech community, the liberal voices, so strong that those folks feel like they can't, you know, be heard or shouldn't speak out and really kind of voice their opinion. And I think that's the one wild card with the election is that there are these like silent Trump supporters that aren't in the polls. Uh, aren't really loud because they're embarrassed or shy about kind of saying they're going to support Trump. I think that's the one wild card that the polls aren't showing right now. That could be interesting. Speaker 1 00:07:51 Uh, I'm going to call bullshit on that one and here's why, okay. So I agree that in 2016, that was a problem. And then in 26, Speaker 2 00:07:59 I don't think it's more of a problem now. I think it's more of a problem now. Speaker 1 00:08:03 No I don't. And here's why, because the polls were not accounting for education level. In addition to ethnicity at the time that they were doing all their 2016 models and they basically were under counting, non-college educated whites, which mostly went for Trump. And so they've, they claimed that they've corrected for that this time. So, you know, we'll see, I mean, I could be fundamentally wrong about this, but you know, I'd like to think of two things. Number one, Nate, silver is a pretty damn smart guy. And when he finds that there's a major mistake in something he's gonna make reasonable attempts to correct it. And number two, I can't imagine that anybody, like if you voted for Trump in 2016 and you weren't really loud about it and Nate figured out how you had voted in what group you belonged in and what was being under counted there, it seems like that compensation would make up for it this time around. Speaker 1 00:09:07 But you know, it's funny cause I'm seeing a lot of stuff on Twitter where people are like, Oh, you know, people don't understand probabilities and Oh, Nate silver so wrong and Oh, here's where he fundamentally, you know, isn't doing this right. But the truth of the matter is Nate, you know, I've seen this in every single election that Nate silver has made bold predictions on. And Nate Silver's usually right in 2016 being the major exception there. But most of the time, you know, he's got it and he found out what his error was and he made his correction. So I don't think that's the case this time. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:09:44 I hope not. I mean, I think that the country needs someone less divisive. Uh, certainly like I think that's the one thing that everyone can say is that like someone needs somebody in power that is not inciting riots. I think that's like a given that that a leader should not do. Um, so I certainly hope that we don't have four more years of this. Yeah. I just, I don't know. I, I just, I don't have a lot of confidence. Like I have a lot of hope, but I don't have a lot of confidence, so hopefully, hopefully you're right and I'm wrong. Um, but, but I definitely think like it's almost noon Eastern time today. I think it could go either way and that's amazing Speaker 1 00:10:22 The wrong I'm biting my nails until tomorrow morning for sure. And you know, I'm whatever, whatever it says tonight when I go to sleep, it's not, I know it's not the final result. And I know that there, there are going to be shenanigans. Like I, I just know that the lawyers are coming out and they're going to try to do some contesting. But so far the attempts that have been made in North Carolina and Texas, I mean even conservative judges have gone give me a fucking break. No. Yeah. So like, you know, if that, if that shit continues, then we're just going to basically see, you know, the same sort of thing where the, the courts basically say, no, this is not what the constitution says. You can't just make this stuff up. Like we don't stop counting votes. At the end of election day, we count all the votes per our standard election laws. Like this is always been the case. The difference is, is that the margins are usually big enough on election day. You can call it one way or the other, but if you can't call it, then you keep counting. Like this is not new. This is not novel. This is not fraud. This is not one side making the rules up for the other to kick them out. It's just, that's the way it's always been. So yeah, I don't know. Anyway, let's, let's move on and talk to some business Speaker 3 00:11:46 And politics here. Cause you know, Speaker 1 00:11:48 This is just not going to be productive otherwise. So I, I wanted Speaker 2 00:11:51 To get your opinion on something that we are, uh, looking at running a black Friday sale for the first time, uh, black Friday cyber Monday. And I know you see a lot of this from the e-commerce perspective, but kind of generally for SAS, I don't see nearly as much of this, like for SAS as for e-commerce I know like WordPress, it's huge, like one time purchase or annual annual license purchase. But for SAS, like we, as a team, we're kind of trying to kick around what, uh, what like a good incentive or deal would be that aligns well with both like what we're looking for out of our best customers and for them to say like, wow, this is a scream of a deal. Like I got to sign up. So I dunno if you've kind of seen a lot of this that you think is done really well and like what, what we can learn and selfishly what I can take away and implement from it. Well, Speaker 1 00:12:42 So putting on my e-commerce hat for a second here, this is hard. So when you're doing this, so let me talk about it from a retail perspective for a second, when you offer a black Friday sale, ideally the whole point of doing this is so that you can engender some kind of loyalty with your customer so that you can get them to do another purchase because ultimately you want the LTV of that customer to be super, super high. The only way you get that is to have them do repeat purchases through your store, unless you just happen to have like a really insanely high LTV product, like, you know, your, your car da and you're selling necklaces, right? And maybe your average LTV is like $50,000 or something. I don't know a car TA's LTV as I'm sure it's very high, but if you're something like that, then one purchase is enough, but maybe you're looking for like lifetime loyalty there. Speaker 1 00:13:40 And maybe you get two or three purchases out of that customer over the lifetime. I don't know how a Cartier measures it, but that's what they're thinking of. That's what any big luxury brand is thinking of. They want you're there, you want, they want your loyalty and they want your head space to be thinking about them for gift purchases, for family members, whatever, all of that is what they're ultimately going for. So because, you know, in theory what your LTV is, then your cost to go out and acquire them means that on the first purchase, you can often take a hit. So let's say let's take a lower end example here. So let's say you are doing, um, electronics. Okay. And you're selling things like headphones and headphones, as you probably will know. And certainly we go through them pretty fast in this damn house. Speaker 1 00:14:33 Cause all my kids have had phones and I can't get a pair of headphones to last longer than a fucking year. Yup, yup, yup. At least with my kids and it drives me crazy. Like my AirPods, you know, I've had them for a year and a half or whatever, but you know, they have different problems, the battery life and such anyway. So headphones, you know, I generally the headphones that we buy, so we go and buy them. They don't last that long, but the kids like the quality, they generally work pretty well with the hardware. So we'll spend money on that and then go buy them again. But the very first time that we purchased those, those headphones, they were on a black Friday sale. And I think they were like $39 instead of $59. And I would imagine that the black Friday sale was probably like right at cost or slightly above for the retail store so that they could move them off the shelf quickly. Speaker 1 00:15:28 And that basically allows the retailer and the, the brand itself to get that space in your mind. Okay. I bought those Sony headphones. I really liked those Sony headphones. So the next time we had to go buy them, it was like 59 bucks because when they wore out it wasn't around black Friday. Right. So we had to go and buy another pair. Right. And then we bought them for, for 59, the second time around. And then when they died a second time, then we went and looked for something else. But that's the kind of the thing that you're going for here is that you, you offer a discount on the first purchase to try to get them to come back. And then on the second time, when they come back, you don't offer the discount. And then that's where you start to make up your lifetime value. So the question becomes, how do you, Speaker 4 00:16:12 That is a SAS? So there are Speaker 1 00:16:15 Several ways, right? One is you could offer an extended free trial. Maybe that's not super compelling. Maybe you Speaker 4 00:16:22 Could offer a highly Speaker 1 00:16:25 Discounted first month. So let's say maybe you normally offer the first month of $99. You could offer it for $9 black, Friday special only. So the second month you're going to be making it up, right? Because then it's going to be regular $99. Or you could, you know, there's lots of ways you could slice and dice that offer, right? You could say the first three months is $99 instead of $99 a month. So that's like discounting 66% for the first three months. So there's lots of ways to do that. The question is what is the greatest objection that people have to signing up to your service? Because if it's price, then you can do something like this and pull them in. And then once you've got them in, you're likely to keep them going. But if it isn't price, offering them a cheap price might get them in, but it's not going to keep them around so that this is where the, the quandary comes in about the whole discounting thing, right? Speaker 1 00:17:23 If, if your main objection is price, then getting them in at a lower price might keep them around. If it isn't, then you you've got two problems to solve, you can discount. You're going to get a shit ton of customers, but then you have to turn around and figure out, well, how do I deal with the retention on this? What's the thing that I'm going to fix to make sure that they stick around, or are you going to offer a concierge onboarding with all these new customers, which is going to be super painful for you for the next two months? Right. I don't know what that looks like. So you tell me, what are you kind of thinking of here? And, um, the, you know, those are my initial thoughts on it. Speaker 2 00:17:56 Yeah, no, I like it a lot. I like, I like trying to take, uh, the kind of, what are the first principles, right? Pull in Elon Musk, uh, from retail and like direct to consumer, because I think that, I mean, those folks have studied a lot of the psychology and I think that's worth applying to what we're doing. I don't feel like for, for most of our customers and certainly what I would consider, like our best customer segments, that price is an issue. And so I don't think that like offering instead of $19 a month offering a $5 a month first, you know, first month there for several months plan would get us a bunch of customers of like the best type of customer. Um, Speaker 1 00:18:38 That's the other thing about discounting? It tends to bring in a lower quality customer. Speaker 2 00:18:42 Yeah. Yeah. I don't, uh, we do a fair amount of like onboarding and we have a lot of migration tools and services kind of built in already. I don't think that that's something we're looking at doing. What I was looking at doing was offering annual plans from our middle tier, basically at our lower tier price, because for us, like for us, the cost of the middle tier, uh, in terms of like infrastructure and services and stuff like that is not zero, but not huge. But I think the perceived value to the customer of having these additional kind of services and repurposing of your podcast content is significant. And I think offering it only for an annual plan is an interesting thing, like from a value and like customer alignment perspective, because it brings in people that will be around for a long time, but it also says like, Hey, it's still basically the base price. Speaker 2 00:19:42 You're just getting a lot more for your dollar. And so maybe we'll, we'll not bring in thousands of new customers, but, but the ones that we do I think will be more serious. And then when they renew next year, it will be at that higher price. So that's what we're thinking about doing and just kind of thinking back of the boxes that you laid out, it seems to check most of those boxes. I think because price is not an objection. People wanting to really get a lot out of their podcast is a lot of the reason that they come to us and us giving that to them essentially for free is I think a pretty compelling offer. Cause we kind of like feature gate in, in like our tiers. And so like they're getting quite a few features in our middle tier that they don't get in the, in the starter tier. Okay. Speaker 1 00:20:29 All right. Um, I like that. And here's, there's two things I like about it specifically. You're rewarding existing customers. So those are the easiest segment to sell to because you've already sold them on your solution. They've already started paying you, they already understand your value proposition. So getting them to upgrade that's, that's pretty significant. And then you also get all that money on the table. So you're taking an annual plan, you're offering them a good deal on it, but you still get all that cash up front. So you're going to get kind of a little injection of cash into the business right now, which is nice. The other question that I have on this one here as to whether it's good or bad, do you know what the lifetime of your customer is in months in months? Is it more than 12? Yes. Like significantly more than 12, like 24. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:21:19 Yeah. It's more than 12. Yeah. Uh, and, and it's yeah. It's it's yeah. More than right at 24. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:21:26 Right at 24. Okay. So the reason I ask that is if you did this and then their lifetime is 13 months, then will they just turn around and churn right at the next time? So basically you've lost them and you've not captured as much of the value as you could out of there. Um, but if you can give them some sticky features and you think that these things are compelling and the customers are telling you, Hey, these things are compelling. I'd really like to take advantage of this. I see that. That could be a pretty good window. Speaker 2 00:21:54 Yeah. I also just like, I also really like that just pushing people to annual because I mean, it just, you know, getting that money up front is huge, you know, for the business and for the customer in their mindset. I think Speaker 1 00:22:08 What is the, what's the difference between the annual low tier and the annual middle tier in terms of price difference? Speaker 2 00:22:16 $300. So it's 190 versus four 90. That's the total cost or that's the, that's the total annual cost. Yep. Speaker 1 00:22:25 190 versus four 90. Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering if maybe you want to go somewhere in between because 190, I mean, that's pretty low, right. So they're going to be basically getting the middle tier stuff at a pretty significant discount. Cause that's normally 49 a month. Right. Speaker 2 00:22:44 I take that back. I think we were talking about doing it half off. So two, two 52 feet. Speaker 1 00:22:51 Okay. All right. I was going to say 300 was like the number of sticking in my mind, two 50 feels better. Um, it's better than the one 90, you know, I was thinking it might've been over discounted there. Like I think you might be taking too much off the table. Yeah. There. So yeah, two 50, 300 somewhere in there. I mean, that's a, that's a definite significant chunk off, you know, you're basically making it half of the, yeah. I would say that if you're doing $49 a year, that's like 600 bucks a year. If you may get a total of $300, that's like buy six months, get six months. Speaker 2 00:23:25 Yeah, yeah. That kind of a thing. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:23:27 So, and you might even couch it like that. Like, Hey, you know what, we'll upgrade you to this tier. It'll be half the normal cost annual one-time deal only break black Friday week or two weeks. And that gives them an opportunity to upgrade to that middle tier. So the next time around get the higher price. But at this round they get a pretty significant boost out of what they're looking to get. And it's still more costs to them and more revenue to you. Yup. Yup. Yeah. So that's what I would do. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:24:03 I like it. I like it. Yeah. I mean, this is the first time we've done anything like this. We on like the podcast motor side have had offered annual deals at the end of the year. Um, because those are all like businesses. And so it's like a tax saving thing, um, or, you know, texts, whatever cost thing. Uh, but this is the first time we're doing it to kind of the masses of, of like the Casta hosting user base. So yeah, it'll be interesting. I think we're going to get those together and put them out, you know, we're talking on the third, I think, or the fourth, whatever the day is the third. So it'll go out in a couple of weeks. So yeah, it'll be, it'll be interesting to see, see how it goes. I'm yeah, I hope it goes well. I hope, you know, some people get, get to take advantage of it and get some, some cool features for, you know, a good deal. Um, and I hope for us, it works out well, too. So it should be a win-win Speaker 1 00:24:46 Yeah. Something else. I was just thinking about, you know, the one thing about discounts that can really sort of backfire on you in general, is that somebody who bought it at a higher price earlier then suddenly feels like they got short changed, but I'm guessing that you don't sell tons of annual plans right now. Is that right? Speaker 2 00:25:03 Um, no. I mean, we don't sell a lot of annual plans for our higher tiers, for sure. Like, there's definitely a difference of annual plans with the lowest tier versus the middle and the highest one. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:25:16 Yeah. So this, I think the thing, I think this has another advantage and that is, you're not going to piss anybody off by offering this deal because it's not a deal that's currently that people are taking advantage of. So, and maybe if there are then will be a handful at most. So, you know, it feels very, it feels very much like a win-win here. Yup, yup. Yup. I think so. That's a solid black Friday deal. You get Dave stamp over. Speaker 2 00:25:40 All right. All right. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Speaker 1 00:25:44 I don't know that it's worth much, but yes. Okay. Speaker 2 00:25:46 Um, how about you? Everything else going good. I know our last episode was kind of after your retreat, everything kind of shaken out good since then. Speaker 1 00:25:54 Yeah. Um, I am a little bit behind on my recapture rocks right now. So my, one of my goals was to basically get a marketing person, get them in place and start writing some content to have four pieces by the end of the year. And I'm struggling to get that marketing person right now. I had a lead and then he told me that he was too busy. So then he gave me another lead that lead got a little bit flaky on me. And then he gave me a third lead and I am, um, trying to connect with them and get them on the schedule. Now the second lead, I'm still trying to connect with them because I think it might've been just a, you know, genuine, Oh, I'm sorry I missed this. But you know, it's already a yellow flag at this point. Right. Because they didn't get on my email. Speaker 1 00:26:44 They weren't super responsive. They didn't follow up. They weren't diligent. So yeah. I mean, they're not, they're not blowing me away. Maybe they've got, I'm given another opportunity here, but you know, I know life happens. So anyway, uh, you know, we're still working on that. And the other thing is, uh, we just did our infrastructure locked down for black Friday, cyber Monday. Cool. So we Institute that, that beginning of November and this year, our infrastructure has a couple of new features on it that we didn't have before. So it used to be that I, the, that all the scaling happened by me going and clicking buttons and adding servers to it over time, which is a terrible way to do this, by the way. Um, it was one of those things that I just never felt comfortable with, how Amazon was going to do the auto scaling. Speaker 1 00:27:36 And it was all me. It was totally my bad on this one. Well, this year one of my developers was like, you know, here's all the great things about auto scaling. You should be really doing this. And then we sh if we're going to do this, we need to move this stuff to Docker, which we hadn't fully done. So over the summer, he convinced me to get this all done. And we did all the auto scaling stuff before then, and now it all auto scales. So like we get a huge boost of traffic coming in and the web hook use go through the roof. It just automatically brings servers online. And when those things drain out, it takes those servers offline and there's a min and there's a Mac. So it never goes too high. It never drops too low. I feel like this is pretty good. So this is the first year that, you know, I'm going to be able to just sort of sit back and watch things instead of having to like throw a shit ton of hardware at it and hope for the best. Yeah. Which has been the way we've done it in the past. So I feel like this year, our infrastructure is pretty solid. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:28:34 Yeah. I think the, the auto scaling and when you see it actually work is amazing. Like we, we, we have auto scaling rules on, we very rarely need them, um, to, to scale up our instances. But, but when we do, and you know, it's great to see that, uh, happened and they skipped back down. The other good thing is if you have an instance that goes bad, um, it fixes that automatically to that. That's the thing that we've seen most often is like an instance will, you know, take a shit for whatever reason. And like it, the health check sees that it shuts it down and spins up a new one and the traffic goes over to it. And so there's never like a single point of failure cause we always run two instances and there's never, like one of those two instances just goes away and you don't know about it. Um, so yeah, that's the, that's the kind of redundant benefit of auto-scaling for us. Speaker 1 00:29:24 Yeah. So Dave got to join the 21st century. Nice, nice. Yeah. So that's good. I'm, I'm happy about that. Um, and yeah, still working on this marketing person, hopefully I make some headway on that here this week. Cool. Speaker 2 00:29:38 Yeah, I think the other, the only other thing from our end to get things, one is we're hiring, uh, another customer support specialist role. Uh, so job applications out for that. Now I've been done like first round interview there and doing video calls with final candidates in the next couple of days. So that's cool. Yeah. We've been one support rep for two years, I think, and have grown quite a bit and just have more customers. And so it's time to time to get Eileen some help. Um, and so looking forward to that, that'll be the new person should be coming online. I dunno, around the 1st of December, I would guess. And then we're launching an integration with Elementor maybe tomorrow by the time this episode goes out. For sure. So you'll be able to like have build all of the kind of podcasting components, the player and the list of episodes and all this kind of stuff that, uh, that serious and well podcasting does within Elementor, which is really cool. Speaker 2 00:30:28 And we've kind of redesigned our player and element or folks will get kind of first crack at it, uh, for a couple of weeks, which is really cool. So that's been a cool project for the developers to do. Nice. Nice. Yeah. So folks, by the time this episode goes out, if they go to rogue startups.com, they'll see our fancy new elements or page templates, we're building out like entire page templates, just click a button and import this whole thing in there. So you don't have to design it or anything. So, yeah, w we'll we'll be redesigning our website because it has a stock Genesis theme on it from, I don't know, four years ago or something, uh, with a really cool looking element or design template. So check it out. Cool, man. All right, well, I'm going to go, uh, get the popcorn going and turn the news on and see, uh, see what happens here in the next few hours. Um, good luck to everybody with the election and the results and whatever may come. Yeah. Good luck to everybody. Speaker 1 00:31:20 Yes, indeed. And if you are finding our podcast valuable, our one ask as always, please share it with a friend that you think might benefit from us. And we would always appreciate a review in iTunes from you. We'll talk to you next week. Speaker 0 00:31:36 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, that over to rogue startups.com to learn more.

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