Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the Rogue Startups Podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:19 All right, welcome back to Rogue Startups. The, we haven't been talking in a long time because we've been very busy podcast episode 2 71. Craig, it has been a while. How are you?
Speaker 3 00:00:33 Yeah, man, I'm good. Um, glad to be, glad to be back on the mic yet. It's definitely been a while, like months, which is kind of unprecedented for us. And sorry to everyone that we didn't give like a, an update episode to say, kind of hang in there with us. We're just like, yeah. Busy with shit. And I think today we'll, we'll catch up on what all that shit has been. Um, but I think, you know, we were just talking before we hit record, like all things considered, like mostly good stuff on the business front at least. So Yeah. A lot to be thankful for.
Speaker 2 00:01:06 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're just after Thanksgiving here in the US and, uh, I am definitely thankful for a lot of stuff in the business this year. Uh, there have been a lot of changes and net positive, you know, in this climate and this economy, in this sort of e-commerce environment. Uh, it's been, we've been able to grow positively. Uh, and you know, it's not been huge. It's not like it was in the covid years, but, you know, looking at all the things that have happened this year, I'm still very thankful that, you know, we're alive. We've got, you know, decent traction. Our customers are still successful. Not all of our customers are sticking around, but we're still attracting good new customers. So I'm like, okay, well we're still, we're still alive. We're still here. We're kicking. Yep. And, uh, you know, bootstrap is, is kind of turning back into the sexy thing again with the VC going in the shitter, so mm-hmm.
Speaker 3 00:02:03 <affirmative>,
Speaker 4 00:02:03 <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:02:06 Oh God, what a shit. Shit, we could do a whole episode on just that alone. But
Speaker 3 00:02:10 Yeah, I mean it's, um, I, I think, you know, as, as you were kind of talking about that, like, I think that's really it, right? Like with not the economy and like a publicly traded company perspective, but like in the startup world, like, I think that most of us that are, you know, mostly bootstrapped or entirely bootstrapped aren't really seeing that much difference other than like, businesses slowed down a little bit. Like, I don't know anyone who's bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped who's really suffering right now. You know, there's a lot of like, yeah, trials are down and churn is up and upgrades are down, that kind of stuff. But I don't hear anyone saying like, we're going out of business. You know, because we're pretty self-sustaining. You know, maybe some people are kind of running out of runway and they have to do some different things with, with financing or team size or something like that.
Speaker 3 00:03:02 But I think that the, the headlines we see of, you know, fucking Amazon laying off 10,000 people and don't even, let's not talk about Twitter, but like Facebook laying off a bunch of people and like these either public companies that have huge growth expectations or heavily funded VC company, you know, backed companies that have to grow to raise their next round are just like all the, the ones who have seen the most difference, I think for you and me in are moments of sanity. It, it really is not that different than it was a year ago for, for the things that affect our day to day business.
Speaker 2 00:03:41 No, no, not at all. And in fact, uh, so we're hiring right now, which is a whole other story Yeah. In and of itself. Um, uh, well sort of, uh, it was, remember that, uh, the dev that I hired back in July? Yeah. I ended up having to fire him in October because he just didn't show up to work for two weeks, wouldn't say anything. And this was after I'd already talked with him. Oh God. Yeah. It
Speaker 3 00:04:06 Was a nightmare. It so tough.
Speaker 2 00:04:08 Yeah. And I mean, there was personal reasons and family reasons. I won't go into the, the nitty gritty of that I, you know, outta respect for him. But, you know, the communication goes a long way. And the problem was, is that the communication and the actions didn't line up. And even after we had discussions about, hey, these things need to line up, they still didn't line up. And in fact it got farther apart and much worse. And I'm like, okay, we're done, <laugh>. Yeah. But anyway, so we're hiring right now. But a key question I'm getting in, you know, when I ask, Hey, do you have any questions for me? The ones that are smart, you know, ask about the company, the funding. And I'm like, yeah. So we're not funded at all. Uh, we are totally profitable and sustainable, and our customers fund a hundred percent of us. And I'm not dependent on anybody else coming in with another round of funding with a certain growth rate or any of this crap. Like, you sign up with me, you know, barring e-commerce itself, cratering next month, which seems highly, highly unlikely, you'll have a job <laugh>. Yeah. And you know, some, some of 'em are kind of shocked when I say that. Like, really, you're, you're not affected by Facebook or Meta or Amazon. I'm like, new, new, new, new, new. Not at all. <laugh>. So, yeah.
Speaker 3 00:05:25 Weird. Yeah. And I think that like, yeah, not at all probably is not fair, but like directly No, but, but inversely with, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:05:33 I'm not impacted in the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:05:35 I'm not, indirectly I should say. Yeah. I mean, you know, fucking ad rates on Facebook going up cuz they laid a bunch of people off or people are weird on social media cuz the Twitter sphere thing right now, like, I think there's a lot of that and I think that's maybe what's scaring a lot of people is there's all these secondary and tertiary effects of things that are going on that you don't even know about maybe and can't control surely, um, that that might be affecting your business. And I think that's like, I think that's probably like what we see, you know, is like podcasting well during the pandemic crazy, right? Just like kind of everybody great, you know, great for business, unfortunately, uh, that slowed down and the economy slowed down at the same time and the economy slowing down is just like, like an ice cube in your coffee, right?
Speaker 3 00:06:18 Like it doesn't ruin it, it's just like tempered, uh, a lot. And I think that's just generally what we're seeing. But, um, enough about us kind of waxing, let's like talk about actual business stuff. Um, I figure we'll give a couple of updates on stuff we've been up to. I'm happy to start if you'd like or go for it. If you wanna to go for Yeah, go. Yeah. So, um, yeah, so like the biggest new thing we've been working on is a set of free tools. Um, so if you think back to like HubSpot's website greater or, uh, like email subject line tester or things like that, right? These free tools, uh, Alex from Jet Bit is like really big on these. Engineering is marketing. And so a couple of months I set off on an initiative for us to build a set of tools.
Speaker 3 00:07:04 So folks wanna check it out, casto.com/tools. We created like three or four of 'em and it's so cool, right? Cause like they're tools that podcasters can use if they are customers are not, and this is the cool thing. We're integrating most of these into the product itself. So our customers get like direct benefit from it. So like an example of one is something we call Dynamo. It's like an image generator. So like you're starting a podcast, you gotta create a cover image for people like you and me. It's like, oh, I'll just go to Canva and whip this up, or I'll, you know, hire a guy on fiber for 40 bucks or whatever. But for most people this is like a monumental challenge. And so like we built a little tiny Canva type tool and it's free, it's entirely free. And then today we released a, like a different application of it to create quote cards.
Speaker 3 00:07:56 So it's a big thing for like social media promotion of your podcast is like, I have this cool thing I wanna say and I wanna pop Dave's face on there and you know, use this on social media instead of just like sending out a link, uh, to the article. So anyways, dynamo is, is like this thing that does all this stuff and you can imagine the applications of this in the product like down the road, right? Like, ooh, what if we could like AI our way to like pulling out the context an episode, creating quote cards automatically maybe from a transcript or something and then posting those to Twitter, right? So like, this is like the, the very beginning of this. And we have some other tools that we're doing that have like a similar path, right? That like there are things that podcasters can use entirely free, good lead gen maybe. And our customers can get a lot of value because we can just embed this tool right. In the product. So that's been like super fun to work on as just like a project and like it's definitely like moving the needle in terms of like new trials and stuff.
Speaker 2 00:08:59 Nice, nice engineer. I've always loved the engineering as marketing initiatives because it is, it's the intersection of like some really interesting creativity. So you have to like understand your customers really well. Yep. To know, hey, they're really suffering from this thing over here and wouldn't it be cool if, and then you f you know, create the tool to do the if right? Yep. And then at the same time, like that thing turns into lead gen for your service. And you know, I've noodled around about that on recapture a couple of times, but hadn't really when I never really landed on something that I was like super happy with. But you know, now that you bring it up again, I'm like, oh maybe I, maybe I should revive that idea for 2023 here. Cuz you know, we haven't talked about our looking ahead stuff and I've got other things on there and in 2022 I exhausted a list of a bunch of other things, but the engineering is marketing is not something I've touched in a very long time. And that sounds like, uh, a really fantastic idea for Casto. So yeah. I'm hoping that works well for you man. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:10:04 Yeah. Thanks. And I'll just give like a little more background on like why I thought it was a good idea is like we've done an enormous amount of content marketing, right? And SEO and feel like we're at some level of like local maximum or like diminishing returns with conventional like blogging content. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 00:10:25 <affirmative> okay.
Speaker 3 00:10:26 Not, not, we still publish content at least once a week. Right. But like I think it's probably a little less effective than it used to be. And so like wanted to do a form of content, which a tool is a form of content that's not blogging. So yeah, I think that that's like maybe for you or other folks like how to think about like, is this the right thing for me? Is like if you have low hanging fruit that is like just content and you think content could work for you, that's cool. If you don't think that content is right for you or you don't wanna write it or whatever, then I think something else like alternative content marketing that's not blogging, uh, could be Right.
Speaker 2 00:11:01 Right. And the thing that I've struggled with about the content marketing piece in my own space is that there's so much of it. Like e-commerce was one of the original places where it just got saturated Yeah. Heavily. And there are so many people that can outspend the shit outta me. Yep. Doing it. You know, they could publish three articles a week and they could be 5,000 word articles each and you know, blow me out of the water in terms of quality and volume. So it's really hard to compete with that. But with engineering is marketing, well that's kind of a different game. Like I don't really see a lot of e-commerce tools doing stuff like that, so Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:11:41 Yeah. Yeah. It's been cool. It's been cool. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, how about you man? What's uh, what's new?
Speaker 2 00:11:47 Oh man. So, you know, I've had a long list of things that we've kind of been been churning through in Q2 or Q3 in Q4 here. So the first thing that, you know, I, I had started actually all the way back in Q2 embarrassingly, was to port the website from being embedded in part of the app to being a separate WordPress thing. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and after Mocho effort, mocho more effort than I ever thought was actually necessary for what I consider to be a very simple site. We finally got the damn thing off in September. So that was huge for me. Uh, it was a bit late, uh, in terms of like, I had some other things I kind of wanted to do for Black Friday and promotions. And so some of those things I, yeah, I wasn't able to start on as early as I wanted to, but I still had the ability to do them, which was huge.
Speaker 2 00:12:40 And I no longer had to involve my developer. So like that's been a huge bottleneck in my marketing for so long. You know, everything I had to like pass through my tech lead to get it done and that just sucked and it was dumb, like, I mean yeah, I've been talking about that for a long time. Anyway, we got it done, it's done. Awesome. It's out there. Awesome. It got into the world and the new site is pretty well received at this point. And so, you know, that took me a while to also like reset up analytics and I switched to Fathom at the same time and I added in some clarity heat mapping so that I could see which pages are being well received, what are people doing, what's the heat map, what's the clicking? Cuz I hadn't been doing any of that stuff on our old site.
Speaker 2 00:13:23 So, you know, I'm gathering data now and trying to figure out are these pages working? Am I converting people? Do they care? Are they reading them? Et cetera, et cetera. So that, you know, that was like a major, major thing that I'm so happy is done. Uh, and it's definitely making a big difference now that I can just go out there and be like, all right, I'm slapping out a landing page for this. Oh I'm gonna make this offer. Oh I got this form, I'm gonna collect email addresses over here for this webinar or whatever. Like, it's just so much easier to do that now. And then along with that I had this strategy of going and reaching out to a bunch of partners and doing outreach and webinars and other stuff like that. And you and I were talking a little bit earlier, the other thing that I started doing earlier this year was a marketing change log.
Speaker 2 00:14:10 So that I picked that up when we went to Microcom this year. And I shouldn't say I picked it up cuz I've heard it before. It's not new. Uh, but this year it was the year I finally decided, ah, I'm just gonna do this because I have no concrete measure of what my marketing things have been and when they launched and what happened afterwards and how many times did I do that and was it really effective? And like I just, I had my vague memories and some bad notes and a couple of, you know, post-its on my monitor that just all combined together to a whole lot of nothing. So the marketing change log has been, uh, updated pretty regularly this year and it's given me a lot more insights into, you know, all of these outreach things that I've been doing and the webinars and what's causing trials to sign to increase in signups and which things are more effective than others and like, which do I wanna do more of in 2023. So, you know, having all of that recorded in one place has been kind of a, a game changer for me here. But yeah. I have a question spent
Speaker 3 00:15:17 Of time like, um, sure. Like, no, I know that you're doing a lot of marketing. Um, is it difficult to like clearly attribute things like even with the change log cuz you do something today and then a couple days later do something else and then you go look at it and you're like, oh, over the last two weeks trials are up a lot <laugh>. Like how do you, how do you go back to like a thing that like had a, a positive impact or, or do you
Speaker 2 00:15:43 Oh, well I mean there's 100% no doubt that attribution still sucks even with this. Yeah. Um, attribution is just hard in general, but what I can tell you is that when I do certain things and then I see bumps in trials, there's usually a pretty tight correlation between those two. Like if I do a webinar and then suddenly I see 20 more trials than I used to do, like Hmm. You know, even though I don't have little UTM parameters that say these all people came from the, the webinar, like I could see that that thing did something and, you know, I, I can definitely look back at, you know, it helps me with my bad memories first of all cuz whatever you maybe in having in your attribution, your UTM parameters or whatever, like, there's been so much imperfection when I go and do like partner articles or something like that. I had one of my partners that came back to me after the launch three or four days later and said, yeah, sorry, we forgot to put the UTM parameters in all your links. Nice. And I'm like,
Speaker 3 00:16:43 <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:16:43 Shit. Well, alright, I guess I'm not gonna know that then, but like now I could look back and say, here's when I did the launch of that article and I can look at my Google Analytics and say, oh look, 48 hours after that I saw this bump in web traffic. Yeah. Like, I don't, I don't have to have the UTM parameters to know there was some impact there. Right. Yeah. And then I can sort of vaguely measure it and say, oh look, you know, that was a 10% bump in traffic. Did I see a 10% bump in signups? No. Okay. Maybe that wasn't so effective. You know, it's more about forensic tracking trackability than it is about direct attribution because I still struggle to this day with direct attribution. Um, you know, I I I've turned on Shopify ads, I've turned off Shopify ads, I've turned them back on again here for a while in the fall on, um, low cost keywords.
Speaker 2 00:17:34 And I put in these like absolutely ridiculous low cost bids. And it's funny, I still don't see any of them attributing to customers, but when I looked at my old one, like, you know, my return on ad spend after 18 months or whatever was like 50% higher than what I, it was like 150% or 148% or something like that. And I'm like, oh shit. So the attribution can be very late and, you know, it, it definitely is something you have to be kind of patient on and paying really close attention to, to make that work at that level. Like, I'm not that anal about my attribution. So the, the marketing change log helps me with my, we'll call it, uh, more directionality
Speaker 3 00:18:17 Almost a Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:18:18 Yeah. My ad hoc directionality here. So I, I can at least get, instead of just going with straight up gut feelings, now I can go back and say, all right, marketing change logs at X, if I correlate that in Google Analytics or Fathom or, you know, trial signups in my dashboard, what happened on those dates or those events? Like, I can look at those now and, and get some better sense of did that move the needle or not? Yeah. You know?
Speaker 3 00:18:44 Yeah. It's interesting. We also, uh, are what, I don't know, switching from Google Analytics, but but layered on top, uh, plausible. So it's a fathom kind of tool.
Speaker 2 00:18:54 Right. That was the other one I was looking at. I just happened to pick Fathom.
Speaker 3 00:18:57 Yeah. Yeah. No, super interesting. Shall we talk about AI at all? Like, is that too, uh, is that too much of a, not an update, but I I, okay, I'll say this. Um, the AI stuff, super interesting. You know, I see Ben from Maker Pad, Ben toss it, right? Like the guy from Maker Pad talking about AI all the time and I'm like, ah, this guy is so smart. He's always like going where the puck, you know, he is always headed where the puck is going, right? He was the first, you know, one in our world at least to be talking about no code a lot. And now he's talking about AI a lot. Um, here Ki Flanigan talking about it a lot. Uh, I, I think it's super interesting. I think at the same time I'm super scared about what it will mean for SEO and content marketing because although I don't believe the tools are ready right now to do like a ton of content, I think they'll get there to where they will cut out like the bottom third of content marketers probably, you know, and this is more like writers. Like, I think writers should be really scared because the AI tools could replace them like today, literally.
Speaker 2 00:20:06 Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 00:20:07 I think what it really means is like brand is like much, much more important than it's ever been. And that really, really good content will stand out. You know, that like a machine just can't do it, can't have perspective, it can't have humor, it can't be compelling anytime soon. At least. Um, that, that's like the, this in my sane moments that that's what I think. I, I think Google will ultimately do a good job being able to tell the difference between the two. But it is definitely like one of the biggest just change like paradigm changing things in marketing in a long time. I think
Speaker 2 00:20:46 It is. But I mean, do you see, in the next 12 months, do you see a major impact at Casto based on ai?
Speaker 3 00:20:53 Um, no. No, but, but just exactly because of what I said that like, I think we have good enough content to where AI tools won't outran us consistently across the board. I think there will be things that AI tools could outran us for on like longer term stuff, uh, longer tail stuff. And I think that's probably the danger is like, if you can publish 30 articles a month for the same price as what we pay our writer, you know, um, then like you'll just pick up long tail stuff. But for, for articles that really need in-depth knowledge, um, no, I don't think it'll affect
Speaker 2 00:21:31 Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I mean the, I can see some direct impacts on recapture, but they're not like, you know, I, I'm not using it for content and you know, we've not done a ton of content marketing, so that's not the aspect I was actually thinking of. But like for example, if I had like a subject line generator for people mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that would be something you could do with G P T three AI based. Yep. Put it in there, you know, subject line suggester. And I know like some of our competitors have this as well and it seems like, you know, I hear people talk about it, it seems like it's popular with them. I don't know if it's really, I don't have customers specifically asking me for it, but I could see that we could go that direction, put in a subject line generator, put in an email authoring tool or helper or something like that, you know, where it could help.
Speaker 2 00:22:23 Cuz the one thing that I see a lot with our customers, uh, and this happened like the day before Thanksgiving, where this poor woman had to like migrate over from Shopify email cuz they totally messed up her automations and she's like, I have to write all my, rewrite all of my emails and bring 'em all over here to your platform. And I'm like, okay, great, let's sit down and do that. And she's like, really? And you know, I sat down and, and wrote some okay abandoned card emails cuz you know, that's my bread and butter and I am used to that, but I could easily see using a tool to do that. Like mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, somebody who, somebody who stuck with that part, she's like, oh, I never would've thought of that. I'm like, yeah, but I'll bet if you had had some prompts you probably could have gotten that like, you know, it was me just asking her questions. That's something an AI tool can prompt on. Right. That's not that hard. Yeah. Yeah. So it could, it could be interesting. It could get there. I don't know what the quality of the output looks like right now for that kind of content, cuz I've not researched it, but yeah, I could see that. I could see us going that direction. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:23:27 Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I, I don't wanna devolve into like where, where all this is going, but yeah, I think just from a marketing and, and like a content marketing perspective, yeah, I think it kinda like a lot of the Google updates right. Just makes us up our game and I think generally that's good, right? Google, uh, and like just the content marketing sphere continually reward good stuff and it makes us gonna stay honest there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:23:52 Yeah. I mean you have to, you just have to. Yeah. And that's the great thing about emails and subject lines. You know, I'm sure that at some point the Gmail filters and the Microsoft filters, they're all gonna be watching for the AI generated content because the spammers, if they're not using it now, they probably will be. Yeah. And my guess is they're already probably using it, so. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:24:10 Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2 00:24:11 Yeah. So some other updates that we've had, uh, include things like, uh, I did, uh, some tracking of our customers and I found some customers that were on like, some really low price legacy plans. Like they were <laugh>, it was embarrassingly low, they were paying like 19 bucks a month and they were recovering like 60,000 a month. Nice.
Speaker 3 00:24:33 They're
Speaker 2 00:24:33 Loving it like that. Well, you would think that they were loving me. Um, you know, I, I went in and I said, and I did the Nick Francis Help Scout email template. You know, I, I warmed them up on that. I gave them lots of time and I didn't have that many of them thankfully, but I did this price increase on them and, you know, most of them kind of flipped me the middle finger cuz I was like trying to move them up quite a bit, you know, not, it wasn't a little increase, it was pretty substantial increase, but, you know, it was still more fair than if I just moved them up to current pricing. And they were, they were not impressed. They weren't having of No, no, I, uh, you know, I only had like a handful of customers, five customers that I did that on, but, um, only one of 'em stuck around.
Speaker 3 00:25:18 Okay.
Speaker 2 00:25:19 Uh, interestingly, the, the net of MRR is about the same. Like, I didn't, I didn't actually lose any MRI doing that <laugh>, I just lost four customers, uh, you know, that were doing high volume stuff, not pain. Yeah. Yeah. So that was kind of funny. Um, and, and I can do some other ones, but, you know, it was interesting that I learned in that experiment, like price jumps, big price jumps, don't impress customers, so mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. So price jumps
Speaker 3 00:25:48 Aren't worth doing if they're not big because you're gonna piss people off anyhow. And if you do it for 5% change, then it, like you're saying, just people will cancel, so make it worth it.
Speaker 2 00:25:58 Right. And I probably would've pissed a lot of 'em off anyway, no matter what kind of a change. Like, one of them came back to me and said, oh, I thought this was, uh, $19 for life. And I'm like, <laugh>, I went back and looked at all the emails ever sent in the account to this person, and I'm like, nobody ever said that to you. Yeah. Uh, and you know, I'm sure and this guy like sells prints, you know, like wall prints hanging art on the walls. And I'm thinking to myself, there's no way in the last seven years you haven't raised your prices on your customers. So like, where, where's this entitlement coming from? Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm, yeah, I, it was just sort of like, okay, I'm just not even gonna argue with you. We're done <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. So that, you know, there was that.
Speaker 2 00:26:44 So I, I was fine. Um, and then, um, you know, we had, one of the other ideas that I had, and I got started on this one unfortunately kind of late, was doing a done for you email service. Oh, all right. Yeah. So it was a productized service, right? Yep. And the productized service. And I, you know, I just, I wrestled with this so long in my head that by the time I finally got it outta my head and into, you know, vetting and masterminds and groups or whatever that like, it didn't leave me a lot of time to pull it together and implement it properly. Uh, and then I ended up trying to do it with a partner, one of my hosting partners, and they were super excited about it. Like this was the, the big thing that they really wanted to do. And then they sat on it for six weeks.
Speaker 2 00:27:34 I'm like, oh shit, all right. But during that time, like after a week of them sitting on it, I realized they were probably just gonna keep sitting on it. So I went and did it myself. But still, even then with all of that in place, it was still really late. And, you know, I got it out to customers and there was definitely some misunderstanding about what it was I was offering and what I could do for them. And some of 'em came to me and said, Hey, would you manage our other random external email accounts? Like, we got a MailChimp over here and an active campaign over here, <laugh>, this is exactly, and they won't even recapture customers. And I'm like, dude, no, no, no. You have to be a recapture customer and you gotta migrate all that crap to recapture. Like, I'm not doing it anywhere else.
Speaker 2 00:28:14 Yeah. So, you know, there was definite learning in all of that. But, um, and, and there's also another price point issue. Like, I had people come back and be like, and I was offering this for an introductory price of a thousand dollars a month mm-hmm. <affirmative>, which, you know, I was trying to make it a very valuable thing and do all of these things and you didn't have to commit long term. You did have to commit for one month and you had to pay up front and, you know, not refundable, blah, blah blah. But uh, you know, even with that, like there was still hesitance getting onboarded with that. Yeah. And so, you know, I have, I clearly have more learning to do. I haven't abandoned this idea yet. I still think there's something there. Um, after I didn't get my own customers to really commit to that, I decided to go for a very, very light version just to try to engage other customers.
Speaker 2 00:29:04 So I said, Hey, I'll do, I got a week before Black Friday, I'm gonna do free reviews of your account and tell you what I think you should change. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, like, I'm not gonna do it for you, but I'll give you a list of all the shit that I would change right before Black Friday. And I actually had five people that came back and enjoyed that and, and got a lot out of it. But, you know, it, it, again, it was a data point. It was learning more about what I could do, how I could do it. And so maybe it's somewhere in between those two offerings that I do in Q1 of next year. You know, it's dead from now until the end of the year. Like, nobody's gonna be wanting me to do their email marketing at this point. Yeah. That I just know from, from history. So, you know, I got that. But
Speaker 3 00:29:45 Interesting.
Speaker 2 00:29:45 Yeah. That was a big thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:29:47 Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I, I would say like it, these are hard to just get started if you have other stuff going on. You know, like I love the product size service model. We're still doing it Casto Productions, which coincidentally we have a new site for, so folks wanna check it out, productions dot cast us.com. Matt has been working on this side of the business for a while and has really kinda like solidified our, you know, positioning and stuff. But, um, I I would just say like it's literally starting another business <laugh>, you know, inside of your software business. And so like if you're not getting people banging down the door to sign up and it is really easy for you to fulfill, I would be hesitant to put a lot more effort into it. Is my, you didn't ask my advice, but, but that would be my advice. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:30:35 Well, I mean, you, you have way more experience than a product I service than I do, but, uh, you know, I do appreciate that input because you're, you're absolutely right. I mean, it, when I was going through this, I felt like I was creating a second business out of this cuz I was like, oh, I need to define a process for that. Oh, I've gotta set up a site for that. Oh, how am I gonna charge for this over here? I gotta set up a way to do that. Like, all of the things that you do to build a business. Yeah. I was doing, again that were separate from everything in recapture. So, you know, that, that insight is, is certainly not lost on me at this point. I I definitely think that I don't, I haven't learned enough to really say this is gonna work or it's not gonna work.
Speaker 2 00:31:19 I definitely have more learning to do and more customer conversations. One of the best parts of this whole thing here was I gotta have, you know, 15 customer conversations. Most of customers I'd never had conversations with before. Yeah. And some of 'em were like hour long interviews that were in depth and like, so I, I got some really great insights out of it and it didn't necessarily, like the insights weren't necessarily Oh yeah, productized service we're done for you email. That's the great idea. Like, I learned other things about them and about the business and things that I could do better. So it wasn't like, it wasn't wasted energy and, you know, I still have more to kind of figure out on that before I say know we're cutting it off here, we're done. Yeah. But, um, it definitely was one of the more interesting ideas I had, uh, during the year. And it probably had, I'll, I'll say it, it generated some of the most energy compared to other ideas that I had. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean it was definitely cool. But you're, you're not kidding about that second business thing. Yeah. I'll tell you that.
Speaker 3 00:32:24 Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> the one, so one question I have, uh, or kind of thing to talk through is we, so, like, you know, folks listening will maybe remember fucking eons ago we <laugh> we went from requiring a credit card upfront to not, and in the last couple of months the concept has come up again like, Hey, should we require credit card upfront? And it's because of a couple of things. Uh, one is we've, we've had spammers cuz currently today, no credit card, just name and email address, password, whatever. Um, spammers coming in originally, and this is about a year ago, uh, spamming, uh, Spotify. So we have a direct integration with Spotify. You can go fucking upload a bunch of stuff and submit it to Spotify. And Spotify is different than everywhere else because it kind of just sticks there even if we delete it or whatever.
Speaker 3 00:33:23 And so some people were like uploading Bootlegged or Bootstrapped or whatever versions of the new Kanye album, you know, and then putting it on Spotify, we were kind of getting in trouble with Spotify. And so we like locked that down to where it's only available after you have a paid account. You know, so that's cool. Um, yeah. But then now we're seeing that people are, I don't wanna say what they're doing cuz I don't want other people to do it, but like using our system in a not so cool way. Um, <laugh> and the other part,
Speaker 2 00:33:56 Fucking spammers.
Speaker 3 00:33:57 Yeah. I mean it's just like, come on. You know? Um, and then the other, the other kind of obvious ones are like, um, like the support load, you know, and like I ask our, our support team, like, Hey, how much are you spending on new trials that haven't converted yet? Or existing customers haven't really gotten like a straight answer and we don't like track that in our ticket, you know, in help Scout. But like, you know, say it's 50 50, right? Like we have hundreds and hundreds, almost a thousand trials a month. Uh, you know, some number of those are people who like would never convert, right? So like, how much time is our support team spending on people who wouldn't be customers in any world? You know? Um, right. Yeah. And so like, um, and then the other one is just like fucking infrastructure and like supporting, you know, literally hundreds of additional user accounts every month that, you know, maybe they're totally benign and just don't never do anything and we can market to them and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 00:34:55 But I don't know, we're thinking about moving back to credit card up front. Um, and you know, I've asked around, nobody seems to have any really solid data on it, which to me makes, like, makes me think that it and our own data, like when we did it before, we didn't really see any huge end of the dayr growth changes. It was, it was kind of neutral. So yeah. That, that's just something that we're thinking about. And I don't know if you have done it both ways or have thoughts on it or anything like that.
Speaker 2 00:35:29 No. So we don't require a credit card up front. Um, but ours is a little bit different. So I do have, basically here's, I've gated certain features just like you did and said, look, you can't do this unless you're paid. Yeah. And the reason is like, we are incurring hard costs for some of these things. Exactly. Like sms, you wanna do sms, you gotta have paid. Yeah. Now it turns out that like people, we found a whole where people would sign up, switch to paid, do this feature, and then cancel their accounts mm-hmm. <affirmative> and then never pay us. And I was like, fuck, okay, we can't do that <laugh>. So we, we we're changing that. That's in the process of being changed right now. But, um, you know, by gating certain things and saying they have to be paid, even though I did get spammers for a while, like I had all these yex dot areu and mail dot areu accounts from Russia.
Speaker 2 00:36:25 But the great thing with our service is you have to connect to a store. Like you can't send emails, you can't spam. We, we kind of locked it down to where you, you aren't gonna do something really stupid unless you are a paid account. You know, you've gotten, you've been fully onboarded, you've got a store connected. When you get to those things, like we start unlocking pieces of it so that you can do more things on the platform. And that model I found has worked pretty well. Yeah. The last thing that we found we have to gate was, uh, the broadcasts, uh, because we ran into a problem back in October where, um, we let a guy on and then he started, like he had a really huge contact list and we didn't scrub it as well as we should have. And when he started sending, he sent at a volume that was way higher than we were normally sending.
Speaker 2 00:37:19 So it got us flagged to spam, uh, almost immediately within, within a few days. And then we shut it down. But it took us like, took us a month to recover from that. Like it was bad. One, one of our sending servers basically was like, Nope, nope, nope. You know, just was getting marked to spam. You know, 50% of the email that was coming out of it marked to spam was bad. So, um, you know, we got that all solved and and arranged and we figured out how to deal with that. But like just gating the features and kind of slowly adding that on, I felt like that, you know, improved things because not only does that improve engagement, but you also, you know, you weed out the spammers and you got a path to expansion revenue. I've never gone and just done the straight up test of we require you to put in a credit card up front because that doesn't totally work with us on Shopify.
Speaker 2 00:38:11 Yeah. Shopify doesn't require that we could force them to go through an authorization immediately. Um, but I, I don't know what kind of an effect that would have on our trials and our rates. You know, maybe it would get rid of all the looky-loos and stuff like that. But I don't know. Um, I was actually thinking about going the other way next year in trying to come up with like a freemium strategy where we started to acquire customers for a long term period at a discount in order to just sort of land and expand. You know, we're going for a land grab, just try to get customers, keep 'em in the door and then after a while if you're at least doing okay with them, it doesn't matter that the revenue jumps up to them because you, you've already established yourself as their email marketing provider and they just aren't gonna move cuz the inertia is already there, it's too much for them to wanna move. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:39:05 And, and I think you could do that with, you know, a cheap plan or something like that. Maybe, you know, a, a very feature limited or usage limited plan. Um, I don't think you have to do that with credit card or no credit card. Um, yeah. Is how I would look at it. There's, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:39:19 Sure. There's several ways you could slice and dice it. The one I, the reason I like the freemium one is that, you know, after however long you offer the discount, then at that point you get a revenue jump. Right. Automatically. So there's, there's built in expansion, expansion X days down the road, right.
Speaker 3 00:39:35 So. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean I, you know, again, I like, I don't know, it would be some amount of engineering work, so I'm not sure how much of that we will do. Like, I don't know how big of a problem it is and how big of a problem that, you know, I and the team are making it. I think it is a problem, but is it our biggest problem? I, I don't know. So yeah, just kind of, uh, something we're thinking through and I think just generally, like it talks to, kinda talks about like at the beginning is like, you know, the economy is in the dumps and I don't know why people are saying if the recession comes right. Cuz it's definitely a recession and it's been here for a while. I don't know, like why we can't just call it what it is, but like, I think a lot of us are, or should be in like, rather be in a critical mode of the things that we spend time and money on right now. And like, to me this is like, one of those things is like, is it so broke that we need to fix it? Or, or like, is this something we can do to make all of our lives easier and us spend less money on AWS and all that kind of stuff. So like I think these kinds of things are important considerations like considering the environment.
Speaker 2 00:40:41 Absolutely. Yeah. If you, if you have a SaaS right now and you have not done a, a, an auditing of your spend on what you have to do on that platform and determining whether it is mission critical, essential, but, you know, not necessarily like, oh, if I got rid of this, it wouldn't cause the whole thing to go down. Or if it is very much a nice to have, like, you should be doing that and you should probably like trim out the things that aren't really in the first two categories that they're in the third category because you will, your profitability will thank you later and you can always add 'em back if you really, you know, made a mistake. But it's cash flow is gonna be king right now. And if you have that in your bank and that's gonna improve your survivability and you know, when there are things like marketing opportunities or customer acquisition opportunities that you, uh, can suddenly spend some money on, like having that war chest sitting around is nice. Yep. It's really nice. Yep. Um, I'm, I'm glad that we had ours. You know, ours dipped down a little bit during the year and uh, you know, I've managed to, uh, preserve some of our cash flow here, um, and bring it back up a little bit, but it's nowhere near what it used to be. So, um, you know, we're definitely back into the survivable mode, uh, for a couple of months there. I was in the oh shit mode, uh, <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:42:07 But yeah, I mean, you gotta do that right now. If you haven't done that, go do that. That's your, that's your takeaway from today's episode. Go, go audit all your SAS expenditures and make sure that you, uh, are spending on stuff that you need to, not what you want to.
Speaker 3 00:42:21 Yep. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. And I think it's that, it's that difficult balance of like, is it product or is it marketing? You know, those are the two things that we all spend money on. And I think that's a, that's always just a difficult question and I think it's just more difficult now because when everything is going up, the answer is different than when things are not going up <laugh>. You know, and I think that's like none of us have have done this in, in a recession before. So I think it's just like uncharted waters kind of for all of us right now.
Speaker 2 00:42:53 Uh, unfortunately, yes. But, uh, I think we're gonna have an easier time charting them, uh, than most when you, you know, don't have to worry about are we gonna survive in six months? Like yeah, yeah, we're gonna survive. How much are we gonna grow in the next six months? That's a totally different question. Yeah. A hundred
Speaker 3 00:43:07 Percent. Yep. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 00:43:09 <affirmative>. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:43:10 Awesome. Well, Dave, it's good to catch up, man. I'm glad we got through a couple of updates. I, I imagine we'll have another episode out here in the next couple of weeks before the holidays
Speaker 2 00:43:19 To Yes. I think we definitely need
Speaker 3 00:43:21 To, what's going on these days.
Speaker 2 00:43:23 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And for all of you listening out there, if you had any questions for us or comments about all of the crazy updates that we've had over the last three months, send us a question
[email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, our one ask is, if there was something valuable in this episode that you feel like somebody would benefit from, please share us and let 'em know. Until next time,
Speaker 1 00:43:49 Thanks for listening to another episode of Rogue Startups. If you haven't already, hit 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, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
