Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Okay, Dave, I have a, uh, a real life situation, a not a problem, but a, a question in my business that we are gonna solve live in the episode today.
Speaker 2 00:00:19 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 1 00:00:31 Hello.
Speaker 0 00:00:32 Welcome
Speaker 3 00:00:32 Back to Rogue
Speaker 0 00:00:33 Startups. This is Craig Hewitt with Dave Roden Baugh. Dave, how's it going?
Speaker 3 00:00:37 Good, man. How are you?
Speaker 0 00:00:40 I am good. I'm good. You know, I, I'm all nervous because I never do the intro to, to the podcast, and I forgot to mention <laugh>. This is episode 2 78. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 00:00:51 Uh, you, yeah, I mean, you hit it with the announcer voice and everything. Welcome to Rogue Startups, episode 2 78, Monday, Monday, Monday at the Denver Coliseum Monster Truck Extravaganza. Yeah. No, Ugh,
Speaker 1 00:01:09 <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:01:10 After eight years, I feel like, you know, we need to, we need to have more of this in our podcast life.
Speaker 0 00:01:16 It's a work in progress. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:01:19 More, more work than progress, but yeah.
Speaker 0 00:01:22 Yep, yep. You know, I've been, um, this, this is like a, this is a bit of a tangent and not the main thing that I think we'll talk about today, but, um, I have been, uh, stretching my limits as a creator recently. Uh, so like, I've been writing a, uh, like a newsletter, like a, on my blog and an associated newsletter. Uh, I try very hard to do it every week, and I get about two out every month because I write a bunch, and then I'm like, Nope. Terrible. Throw it away, <laugh>. And it's, it's hard. Like, I, I, I feel for these folks who make a living as creators, like that's really emotionally challenging work, I think. Um, because like, you gotta put yourself out there all the time. Uh, and I think that, like, we all kind of like hide behind the, the company and the brand of the company and the product and stuff like that. But if you're, you know, you're Justin Welsh or something, who's just like, his entire living is him and his brand and his written content, basically, like, that's a lot of pressure to like, write really good words. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm just seeing like a very small glimpse of it. It's, it's not, it's not, um, a, a small feat.
Speaker 3 00:02:33 Uh, I would go so far as to say it's fucking brutal, man, because I, I remember when I was doing a blog back in 2011, 2012, and I tried to keep up a very regular list, regular schedule, just to put out content on a weekly basis. And I could do it for a little while, while, you know, I was churning through all of my good ideas, but then content started to run a little bit thin, and I was like, oh, shit. What am I gonna do now? And there was this beating myself up because I couldn't get it together and couldn't get out something. Or I would write something and I'd be like, oh, this sucks. This is terrible. And then I left a bunch of draft posts when I finally abandoned my blog mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative> years and years ago. And I was like, all right, I'm just done with this.
Speaker 3 00:03:17 And even now, like writing, you know, long form content articles, there is very much this, I'll call it the, the graph of writing where it kind of looks like a sine wave. And, you know, for those of you that are not familiar with your mathematical stuff here in sine waves, you go up the curve and then you come down the curve into a deep trough and then back up to sort of the beginning again. And, um, you know, I think our audience is probably nerdy enough for that. So that was a little bit of mansplaining today on rogue startups. That was awesome. <laugh>. Um, alright, cool. Anyway, um, so yeah, you know, the, the, the cycle of writing for me is very much the enthusiasm. Oh, I, I've got this great idea. Oh, cool, I'm just gonna dive right in. I'm gonna make the outline. Then I make the outline, and I'm like, all right, let's go. And I get super excited until they get about a third of the way through it, and I'm like, fuck, now I'm just in the slog. And then, yeah, it just gets worse.
Speaker 0 00:04:14 Doesn't make any sense with what I wanted to do originally, or the first three paragraphs I just wrote, like, <laugh>, how do I tie these things together? Yeah, it's
Speaker 3 00:04:23 Right there. There's a hundred things that could go wrong. Those are, those are two great examples. Oh, this thing doesn't fucking make sense. Oh, this outline is really two separate topics. And I didn't know that until I started writing these things here. Or I tried to go source some stuff and I'm like, I can't find the stuff I wanted. Yep. So, yeah, I mean this, all that stuff. So then you hit the bottom, right? You get the, like, if you're lucky, if you are absolutely lucky, you get to the bottom of that trough and the article is done. But a lot of the time you just give up and you're like, fuck it, I'm done. I'm outta here. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, <laugh>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But if you make it, oh, sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 0 00:04:56 No, no, go ahead.
Speaker 3 00:04:57 Uh, I was gonna say, if you make it to the bottom and you finished it, then from there it gets better. Like, then there's the, okay, walk away from it, stop thinking about it for at least 24 hours. And then I come back and I'm like, all right, this is more salvageable than I thought. Uh, these things are kind of incoherent, but let's, now I know how to tie them together because I've had some distance from it. Yeah. And then I can kind of edit it, make it make sense, go through it. And, you know, having that, that third party perspective on it helps a lot. And it's the same thing that I talk to my kids when they're doing their high school papers or their college papers, you know, that they'll send me the draft and I'll be like, okay, here's the process. Like, I'm gonna go through 'em, gonna tear this stuff apart.
Speaker 3 00:05:39 I'm not gonna be, you know, I'm gonna be kind of brutal about it because you are too close to the work to see all the stuff where it's not pulling together. So they know that my first round of comments are gonna be pretty hard. And then after that it's just refinement. Like, okay, now you've fixed all the major problems with it. Let's just fix all the nitpicky stuff and then you're probably good. And, you know, knowing how to go through that editing process is really valuable, but it's also very tough. Just to even make it to the end is a huge victory. If you can get to the end of a written piece and not hate yourself and not, well, okay, just get to the end of the written piece and complete it. You can still hate yourself a little bit, cuz I think that still happens. But, you know, if you can do that much like that is already a major victory right there, just give yourself a break. Go celebrate with a, an ice cream or a cocktail, or you know, a kombucha, whatever you like to have to celebrate and then go back and fix it later because you just need a break from it. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:06:34 Yep. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's just challenging. Uh, it, it's the, it's the single biggest challenge for us as a business is all of our customers go through this every week <laugh> with their podcast episode. Oh God. Yeah. It's, it's just, it's super challenging. But, um, kudos to everyone who's a creator who ships stuff on a regular basis and bonus points, if you feel good about yourself, uh, in the process, <laugh>. Cause uh, you're a better person than me most of the time. Um, but I actually, I think this is the easiest format, uh, to do it, Dave. Right? We get on, we, we talk and it just is content and it's just, I think it's why podcasting is so, so easy and so good for a lot of people. It's just, it's easier than writing, it's easier than video and it's great content and it's a really good way to relay a message that we wanna share.
Speaker 0 00:07:22 So I've drank the Kool-Aid, I'm sharing it with everyone today, but yeah. Okay, Dave, here's the situation. We have been using HubSpot as our CRM for about two years. Um, it is a fantastic piece of software <laugh>. It really, it really, it is super powerful, uh, and really robust and does a ton of stuff. I can see, okay. So we use their sales professional and their marketing professional because you need both to really get a comprehensive view of the customer and do things like automations and stuff like that after the fact, right? It costs about $850 right now on the, we are in the second year of the startup discount. At the end of this, it will be about $1,500 a month.
Speaker 0 00:08:17 Ow. Shitting my pants. I said, that's not okay, <laugh>. Yeah. What else are we gonna do? So I looked at pipe drive and clothes, right? Both very good pieces of software have experience with both of them in the past. Um, all in, I think either of them would be about $150 a month for what I use HubSpot for a comparable set of functionality. Maybe a little bit of like, Hey, we gotta add a little, uh, savvy cow and we gotta add a little bit of like, uh, sign. Well, right? For, for electronic signature maybe, maybe not right? It, it might not be true apples to apples across the board, but like, suffice it to say like, I can continue selling stuff with either of those tools. The problem is, like any good digital marketing or sales tool, uh, HubSpot is incredibly intertwined in a ton of shit we do.
Speaker 0 00:09:06 Right? It has like CTA forms and opt-ins all over our website. It is how we collect like, electronic signatures for new deals. It is like the lead nurturing campaigns for when someone opts into like a sales thing on the site. Like how they nur how they get nurtured until they book a a call. It is most of my like non-personal, like booking calendar things. They have a Calendly kind of thing. It's all of our revenue reporting, like sales revenue reporting. And there's just a ton of fucking history there, right? There's years of, of deals and leads and all this kind of stuff. And so the question is, do you, uh, not even do you, but like maybe we talk through, how do you decide, okay, we're gonna move and we're gonna save, you know, right now, uh, you know, say 600 bucks a month. Uh, but, but over time, you know, probably like a thousand dollars a month to, to incur the cost of, I'll say, if all I did for three days was move us over, I think I could get it done.
Speaker 0 00:10:07 But, but, but I definitely don't have three empty days, right? Unless I just did it over a weekend, which would be terrible. So three of my days to, to do this. Um, there are certainly services that can move over a lot of the data, right? That, that's like the easy part. Uh, and it costs about $1,500 it looks like, to move our data over. But the big one is like all of the shit on the website <laugh>, that I have to update. And, and there's no automated way to do that that I can see. Um, because it's, it's not a, the one-to-one swap out. So this is my question, do you stick with it and say, we're fucking married <laugh> for better or worse? Or do you say bite the bullet and you'll be happy You did in the end?
Speaker 3 00:10:45 Well, you kind of answered part of my question, but I'll just sort of go over this here because I think it's an important thing to evaluate. So knowing what I know about HubSpot, so, uh, you know, our mutual friend Charles Pesky also uses this, and I know that he's got this like deeply embedded to all aspects of his business. So, you know, he's got the website piece of it and he's got the email marketing piece of it, and he's got the, the CTAs and the form collections and all of those things that you just talked about as well, and the sales, the sales pipeline and, and things like that. So HubSpot is really taking the place of like five different tools here. Is that, is that fair to say? Because like, it's not just Pipedrive that you're gonna have to throw at this thing. You're gonna have to get Pipedrive, you're gonna have to get Savvy Cal, you're gonna have to get something to handle the website, whatever the hell that is. Ghoster, uh, static or, um, you know, WordPress or something, whatever. Uh, and then you're gonna have to add in a new email marketing tool, whether that's, you know, active campaign or Infusionsoft or Drip or something like that. And then, then you've also got Pipedrive in there to do your sales, but then you've gotta also maybe do something to do your revenue tracking and maybe something different to do your forms. Is that a fair assessment?
Speaker 0 00:12:00 Uh, partially, yeah. Yep. The, the forms definitely right. But we already have something in place on the website. So the website is, is has been an al will always be on WordPress. So we don't use the website functionality of HubSpot at all forms is a bit of a mixed bag right now. We have some lead forms that come through Gravity forms and some that come directly from like embedded HubSpot forms. I have a talent, a savvy Cal accounts anyhow, so why we could use part of that, but, but Pipedrive would have that, uh, instead, the interesting one that you brought up that I am, uh, quite definitely not ready <laugh> to, to make the move on, and maybe this is part of the calculus as I as I should, is we still use Drip for all of our marketing automation stuff. So like, uh, newsletters right? To customers and non-customers. All of our nurture sequences, all of our onboarding and customer lifestyle stuff all lives in Drip right now, if we're paying for HubSpot, we could do all of that with HubSpot. It would probably increase our bill at HubSpot because the number of peop like subscribers we have. But yeah, that's another variable.
Speaker 3 00:13:03 Okay. All right. So your, your uh, level of integration with HubSpot isn't quite the same as Charles as I understand it. Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. So if you were to blow up Hub HubSpot here, it sounds like you already have have a lot of those most sales. Yeah. So it's, it really is just your sales tracking tool right now and maybe modular some forms which you could knock out with gravity forms if you had to.
Speaker 0 00:13:28 Yep, yep. Okay. So yeah, the question really is like almost keep HubSpot and then go all in because that, that could make some good sense or blow it up and just replace it with pipe drive or close.
Speaker 3 00:13:41 Yeah, well I can tell you right now, that is not three days of fucking work at all. Uh, if you're gonna like, migrate all of that shit over to HubSpot, no way. If you're just gonna rip out HubSpot and replace it with pipe drive and maybe some gravity form stuff, yeah, I could conceivably, you know, I'd conservatively say five days to a week, but Sure. I mean, that's not, that's not terrible for saving a net of, so let you know, I'll just do rough numbers because, uh, it makes it a little bit easier to do the math. So you're paying eight for HubSpot right now, and you would get pipe drive for we'll round up and call it two. So the difference is about six. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So that's saving you 7,200 a year and that's only gonna go up when HubSpot's discount pricing goes down.
Speaker 3 00:14:29 So that's gonna be an additional 2,400. So you'll save, you know, later 10,000 a year being off of HubSpot. I mean, if you are more deeply integrated into HubSpot, I would probably say go all in and stay with HubSpot because, you know, there's a lot of good stuff that comes outta HubSpot. I've seen the dashboards, I've seen the tooling, I've seen the lead generation tracking stuff and you know, like if you're doing everything on there, it's pretty goddamn powerful. And I, I can totally see why you, you would actually wanna centralize all of that stuff, even if it's not a hundred percent perfect, because it adds a lot of value to know, Hey, my website does this and that feeds into my email tracking and I can do my attribution across those two things here evenly and find out how my sales leads are tracking across the forms. And like all of that turns into a really beautiful well-run system, even if your website may not look like a beautiful designed 2023 website with the fancy graphics and all of that stuff. Right? But I, I'm not hearing that that's where you're at right now. It just sounds like, hey, we're doing lead tracking on it and maybe a few forms, and if that's all you're doing going the other direction back to pipe drive seems to make a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 0 00:15:51 Yeah, I mean, I think just to, to give context to to that point, um, the, the second choice I had for this was what, and this is cuz truth be told, I had not even considered moving all of our shit from Drip into HubSpot until this conversation. But the other option I had was to use active campaign for both, right? So just like you would go all in on HubSpot, you could go all in on active campaign and it has a crm, it's not nearly as powerful as even even Pipedrive, but it could do all the marketing automation campaigns, newsletters, blah, blah, blah, uh, and then the talks just seamlessly to to the sales side of things. Yeah, I mean, I think that, um, I think you, you can make those two talk, you can make disparate systems like, uh, right now we, we, we use, uh, like Zapier and some other stuff to have Drip and HubSpot connect and, and sync data.
Speaker 0 00:16:51 So it's not impossible. I think we couldn't do the same with, with a different system. It's always just the like, oh, fucking Zapier blows up one day and we have a bunch of stuff sitting there like failing and we don't even know it maybe. But, um, yeah, I mean I think that as a side note, like the, the intentionality and kind of future proofing of this is not trivial. Like for those of you making these decisions right now, um, the, the thing I would say is like, uh, try to go all in on a tool if, if, if you can, because you won't have to make this decision later. Uh, because it's, it's, I mean, it's costing me a bunch of time and mental energy and is super unproductive and I would much rather do a lot of other stuff with my time. Um, but it's not a trivial amount of money and I don't see Pipedrive or HubSpot, I'm sorry. And I don't see HubSpot ever getting cheaper. Uh, so I think that like, like you're saying, the, the cost savings, uh, will only increase over time if we make this move.
Speaker 3 00:17:48 Yeah. Yeah. Now in the same vein of what you're talking about of reevaluating stuff, I have, you know, since Rob and Derek have left Drip, I've been mostly just sort of hanging with Drip because I had already set everything up on Drip <laugh>. Yep. And that was it. Like that's the main reason I'm like, there wasn't a whole lot of motivation to undo that cuz when I tied it all together, it just worked and it was good enough and I'm like, fine, I'll just leave it alone. But now I'm sitting here looking at my bill and I'm also looking at alternatives, and I'm looking at the complexity that I have to do in order to make automations work and drip these days. And I'm looking at the level of innovation that happens in Drip these days as well, which by the way, the answer is zero.
Speaker 3 00:18:41 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, they, I mean, all they've done is they fucked around with the interface. They went in on an e-commerce and then they just keep bolting shit onto the interface right now. So there's my little drip rant for the day, and, you know, I'm tired of it, like, it, it isn't working substantially better than it did four to five years ago. And I, you know, I'm, I'm done with it. So I'm actually looking to move to Bento and I'm, you know, I'm not gonna save anywhere what near what you're gonna save with Pipedrive to HubSpot, but it's enough for me to go, oh, that's good. Because we also made some changes on AWS that bumped up our costs over there. So I can sort of balance the two of those and keep our net spend about the same on our infrastructure stuff. And I think I'll get a net better experience out of it because, uh, I'm looking at Bento with Jesse Hanley and like he's all over it, man.
Speaker 3 00:19:31 He is mm-hmm. <affirmative>, he's fantastic. He is, yeah, he is absolutely fantastic. Very customer-centric, very, you know, responsive to things. I mean, he, he very much has the same spirit that Derek and Rob did when they built the original Drip. And so, you know, in my opinion, I think Bento is going to be the next drip. So, you know, I'm ready to totally make a, a bet and go all in on Jesse right now because I feel like it's about a year ago. It wasn't quite there now, today, from what I've seen, like it's not only there, but it's actually actively better than Drip as well. So I see that this is gonna be a net win because I wanted to add some more automations and kind of, we have stuff that's an intercom, we have stuff that's in Drip. I'm not happy with it being split across that. It's just kind of the way it evolved. And now that I'm looking at the onboarding and stuff like that, I really wanna centralize it and make the triggers more uniform. But I can't do that across three systems, so I'm gonna have to standardize on one and, and I'm like, all right, bento seems like the one that I can do, because if there's not an integration there, I feel like Jesse's willing to build it. But I'm using all standard stuff that Jesse already supports. I'm like, fuck it, we're going in on Bento. So,
Speaker 0 00:20:39 And, and it's a relatively like e-commerce specific tool, or is it a kind of SaaS universal kind of tool,
Speaker 3 00:20:48 Much more SaaS oriented. Like, I was having a conversation with Jesse the other day, and you know, he's kind of looking at the market of Drip SaaS customers who have like, like me feeling kind of abandoned now, right? Because they're all trying to go this direction of e-commerce and Drip, which is funny because if I talk to other merchants and I'm like, so who are you looking at? Or who are you thinking about? Or who are you switching to? Drip never enters that conversation, so I have no idea who it is they're selling to. Um, they must be selling to like the very, very, very large brands because the mid and, uh, small size brands aren't touching them. They're not even thinking about 'em, they're not even in the conversation. So I have no idea how Drip considers themselves this e-commerce tool. It's very bizarre. Yeah. So anyway, you know, all of us SAS folks that are on Drip right now are kind of feeling like, okay, we're just second class citizens. They don't care about us. I'll move and go somewhere where they do care. Jesse cares. Like he's, he's totally ready to capture that market right now, and I'm ready to go all in on Jesse. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:21:53 That's awesome. I think that, um, that the two other names I hear a lot in the SAS space are, uh, customer io and user list, right? So our friends at User list and, and I think that those are, those are kind of different companies in terms of like their, their, their life cycle and stage and stuff like that. Um, but, but I think both also approaching this like SAS email CRM type world in a, in a kind of similar way. So yeah, that's awesome that, that they're, that they're good alternatives to, to these tools. Um, but it's painful, man. I think that's, that's the thing that just, it kills me, right? It's just like, this is, this is such a bad use of my time, <laugh>, you know, <laugh>, and it's such a bad use of your time, but it's not, it's not, um, like hands down the worst use of my time because like, fucking, there's nothing more important than sales, right? Like, selling shit is revenue. Like it's a straight line, you know, I can, I think you can, you can argue like, oh, is my 18 point nurture sequence with 37 different customer signals? Like, is that any different than like just sending three emails two days apart? Like, I, I don't know. You know, like I think that, I think that's arguable, but like is collecting leads and getting people on the phone and closing deals, like absolutely optimized. Like that's super, that's super important, you know?
Speaker 3 00:23:14 Totally. Yeah. If
Speaker 0 00:23:16 You're, if you're in that kind of like, business, so,
Speaker 3 00:23:18 Right. But I mean, we're single founder companies and who the hell else is gonna think about this except us. Yeah. Like, right. It doesn't, you know, the marketing, the marketing department, quote unquote, you know, you're always going to be doling out some marketing activities and say, all right, here you're focusing on this. You're gonna do lead gener, you're gonna do this kind of social media promotion, you're doing this kind of email stuff. But they're not thinking about the tooling. They're not thinking about how it all connects together necessarily. I mean, mean, that's a, that's a much higher level position. So, you know, I don't know who I, I certainly don't have anybody else to think about it. I agree that I feel like of all the things that I could be working on right now, this is not the best strategy level thing, but I, I have no choice to other than to deal with this myself. And, and, you know, my costs with Drip are just gonna continue to go up. In fact, I, I know that there's a, an impending price increase on my account coming. So this is definitely something that's gonna save me that cost over the year, which I'm already spending on another infrastructure. So, you know, just trying to stay lean and mean going into, uh, the whole recession thing here, did you see that, uh, thread from Patrick Campbell about he was talking about profit well and how to prepare your company for the impending recession and stuff like that?
Speaker 0 00:24:34 Mm, uh, no.
Speaker 3 00:24:37 All right. So if you're not following Patrick on Twitter, he's at Ticus. And I highly recommend that you do that cuz he's got very interesting nuggets of SAS pricing wisdom and data about our particular economy. But this, this thread that he was going over here was talking about, you know, how, how do you want to think about your business during a recession? And so, you know, he first talks about making sure that you get lean, so like go through your expenses with a fine tooth comb. And you know, then he's like having sort of this imaginary conversation with himself and he is like, but Patrick, I'm, I'm totally lean right now. And he's like, no, you're not. You've been spending like a drunken sailor for the past two years. Cut, cut, cut. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> <laugh>. And I'm like, well, you're not wrong on that one.
Speaker 3 00:25:20 Uh, so, you know, that was one of the suggestions. But the other one that he was talking about was specifically make sure that you are optimizing for retention. And he had some very good suggestions in there about, you know, make sure that your onboarding is really targeting the customers and showing great value. And now is a great time. And, you know, this was kind of one of the controversial things about the thread saying now is a great time to acquire customers as cheaply as possible. So if that means offering substantial discounts or even using a freemium strategy to pick up customers that feel like other things are too expensive, if you get them now, then later you can convert them to paid or raise the prices on them when times get better. So you basically are growing your revenue that way in sort of a long-term thinking kind of way.
Speaker 3 00:26:10 Uh, anyway, it was very interesting. But, you know, it, it was definitely one of those things that I was thinking about like, all right, well what are the strategies that we can use right now to try to capture other customers that are kind of thinking about that the same way? It doesn't really matter whether we are in a recession or not. The problem is, is that a lot of our customers kind of think that they, that we are. And so you have to, yeah, you have to adjust your behavior accordingly. That was sort of the, the bottom line of Patrick's thread right there, which I think is a great bit of advice to take right this time anyway, so,
Speaker 0 00:26:41 Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think that, um, the, the point about expenses, like, yeah, we're, we all have come off of a, you know, zero interest rate economy's growing kind of mode. Like, but, but this is not new, right? Like, I mean, we have seen this, uh, on the, the, the writing on the wall for the last six or 10 months, right? So hopefully folks have been, uh, kind of keen on this already. I don't know, do we even want to get into talking about SVB and like the, the entire disaster that this could be like really easily? I, I don't think we want to, I don't think we want to get into that. Cause I don't want to be like a, a bear about this, but, but I have some serious, I I'll just say concerns. Like I'm aware that I'm concerned about that this piece is a much bigger thing than just one bank.
Speaker 0 00:27:27 Um, but yeah, I mean I think that, um, I think that it's, yeah, I, I'll, I'll hold off on my <laugh> my further pontifications about the economy, uh, premiere. But yeah, Patrick Campbell, super smart dude. Anything about pricing and, and like sass financials, uh, I would listen to him over most other folks. So yeah, I, I agree. Follow him. I'm not huge on Twitter these days, but, uh, definitely follow him there cuz he's a smart dude and he has access to an enormous amount of data and, and they do a lot of really cool like internal data reporting stuff now e even before they join Paddle, uh, they did so super cool,
Speaker 3 00:28:02 Right? Yeah, I follow them for two reasons. One, he's got SaaS benchmarks and he also has, uh, subscription benchmarks. So it's more of an e-commerce e kind of thing. So I kind of get to see two sides of, uh, the economy that I participate in, which is pretty cool. Um, and he does have a pretty, uh, amazing data set in there and he talks about like SaaS companies at all different levels of arpu, all different levels of churn, you know, how long did you take to get to these levels here? So, you know, you very much can compare yourself and see how am I doing relative to all other people that are in my cohort, you know, either in age or revenue or churn or whatever. So yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:28:42 So, you know, Dave, where where I'm kind of taking this is, um, this, this conversation around tooling is, um, you know, probably worth making a move just for the savings. Um, and or, but <laugh>, uh, should go all in on one tool because the better kind of data user experience, user being me, right? Like my user experience and the experience we can give customers probably is better with all of our disparate tools talking to each other or being in one place. So yeah. But, but I mean I think that the price difference just between anything else and HubSpot is, is to where it makes it worth, uh, worth moving away, um, undecided, but that, that's kinda where I'm leaning. So thank you for talking through that with me and sorry for monopolizing <laugh> our time today. I'd love to hear, I'd love to hear how things are going, uh, in, in your world and with Recapture.
Speaker 3 00:29:31 Yeah, sure. And that was not a problem, that was a fun discussion. But yeah, so recapture, it's interesting, probably about a week and a half ago we, I was going through a bunch of analytics reports cuz I, you know, I <laugh> embarrassing admission. Uh, I have not done anything about GA four yet, <laugh>. And now I'm looking at the calendar going, oh fuck, that's a gun that's gonna end here pretty soon. Maybe I had to think about it, maybe I should do something. I still haven't done anything about it, by the way, been been weeks still. But, uh, you know, while I was thinking about that, I did start digging into my analytics and I was looking at stuff and you know, I came across a couple of really interesting things. So, interesting thing number one was we had a majority of users that are mobile based that are using the app now.
Speaker 3 00:30:25 And I don't know exactly when we crossed that threshold. I know that a few years ago we hadn't crossed that threshold, but now we're at like 60 40, 60% mobile, 40% desktop and they're using interesting the app. And so of course I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I went and I pulled up our app on my iPhone. Oh my god, it does not work well, <laugh>, I mean I, I started looking at the top three Earls that they visit and all of them are subpar experiences. So I mean to any recapture customers that are out there listening, oh my god, I am so sorry. And <laugh>, we are now looking at that right now. Like I, it's funny, I, you know, I've been telling our QA engineer for the past year, hey focus on desktop because that's where everybody does all their setup. That's where they do all their configuration, that's where they spend most of their time.
Speaker 3 00:31:18 Don't worry about the mobile, just ignore this. It's not a good experience on mobile, don't worry about it. Now I'm here finding they're spending the majority of time on mobile. I'm like, God damn it. So now we gotta do something about that. Oh it's very interesting. And so now you know, we're trying to figure out like what's the extent of the damage? Where do we focus our efforts? Where are, you know, what do we work on first? How bad is it? What do we need to fix? Like we're still just wrapping our heads around all of that stuff. And I'm embarrassed to say that, you know, as the product owner here, I should have been more on top of that, but I wasn't so <laugh> and uh, you know, as part of that I'm also trying to think about, you know, well, alright, so in addition to that, what about our onboarding experience?
Speaker 3 00:32:05 Because now, now that I discovered this thing about mobile, we started having these discussions internally and then I was asking myself, well is this why we see same day Uninstalls? Like, do they try this thing out on mobile, go, this thing's a piece of shit and I'm outta here. So we started tracking some stuff on our own dashboards to find out who's doing what on what kind of device, what browser, what platform, desktop, mobile, uh, what operating system and so on and so forth. So I, you know, I don't have enough data yet to make any conclusions, but so far I was a little bit surprised that I haven't really seen any mobile users come in here and try to set things up on mobile. So that's kind of thrown my theory out the window and it makes me think that maybe what we see is they configure things on desktop and then they just monitor things on mobile, which kind of fits the narrative of the Earls they visit too. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. But it's also possible that the Earls that they tried to visit otherwise are all shit and they're so broken that they can't do anything so they just stop visiting them. Right, right. They try it once and then they just go to the stuff that sorta works and <laugh>,
Speaker 3 00:33:13 I don't know, we're just, it's a whole shit show. We're trying to untangle it now. But as part of that I'm also looking at trying to figure out, all right, if I went in on this, do I wanna go for GA four, do I wanna do something else? And I already integrated Fathom in and Fathom is nice and it's simple, it's easy to read, it's easy to use, but I feel like it's definitely missing some of the power of Universal analytics that I get from Google now. And I'm like, do I really wanna go all of GA four? I mean I'm probably gonna end up doing GA four. It's just a question of how deep you go cuz it apparently you have to configure fucking everything. Um mm-hmm <affirmative> and I haven't done it yet. And I know you have, and I'm sure you can offer me some sob stories slash wisdom here, but, um, the thing that we are looking at right now this week is, um, we had Mix Panel originally and then sometime in 2021 it got disabled or shut off or ripped out or I don't know, but the data's long gone and the account is empty.
Speaker 3 00:34:12 And I'm looking at this going, all right, I could track this thing all the way through the funnel in a way that's more meaningful. And I feel like I'm ready to do that now. So I'm thinking I may just go in on Mix Panel and ASU GA four for the moment and maybe do it later. I, I don't fucking know. Anyway, yeah, that's, that's kind of where we're sitting at right now. So it's onboarding hassles, this whole mobile user experience thing and trying to wrap our heads around that. Plus I'm still trying to hire, so, you know, good times all around
Speaker 0 00:34:43 Good times, good times. Uh, and the thing I'll say about, about uh, GA four is, yeah, I like, it's super easy to set it up and then it gets complicated, right? <laugh> like to, to install the snippet or connect it to your universal analytics is super easy. And then it's like all of the forms and all of the events on the site, uh, need to be configured once that happens. I actually quite like it because yeah, it works. We use Amplitude, which is similar to Mix Panel and it looks and feels a lot like that. So I am, I am quite hopeful actually that we'll get like really consistent like behavioral and activity metrics across like the, the marketing site and into the app for, for people, you know, the, the difference between like a Amplitude can then like put it down to a user, right?
Speaker 0 00:35:32 Because then we, we, we sync like Stripe information to Amplitude, right? So we, we know like this person did this thing, not just a person or people did this thing, which is where GA four even, uh, still kind of quits. So yeah man, I mean we, we worked with someone to help us kind of fine tune our GA four stuff because we're, we're running Edwards, right? And Edwards is gonna have to talk to GA four in the future and like if your shit is not tuned up, you're gonna be running, you know, ads to, to bad conversion events and stuff. And so we, we paid somebody a little bit to help us with that and it was pretty enlightening. Um, but yeah man, I, so I feel you on the mobile stuff. Um, and, and in a similar kind of vein, we, something we learned is like we were running ads to people on mobile and desktop and the conversions on mobile were horrendous <laugh>.
Speaker 0 00:36:22 And so we, we turned them off. Um, and so that's just like a lesson is like, yeah, I think you gotta, I think you're spot on the, like you optimize the site for like the initial signup, right? And then just know that like they're gonna finish at another time. Like for, for the most part, especially in like a, a b to prosumer B2B kind of setting, right? Like nobody's gonna go on their phone and sign up for, you know, whatever kind of business tool and actually start using it there. I, I think that it's just, it's so hard to, it's so hard to, to make that user experience good and people get value out of a tool on, on a device, on a mobile device. So Tough one. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:36:58 It's tough one, it, it's hard. It's absolutely hard to, you know, and we've, we've looked at other pages and trying to do things like our email editor in a mobile phone. Like that's, there's no way. Yeah, I know there's no way. So, you know, we are trying to look to other apps. Like Shopify has a mobile app where you can literally manage the entire store from your phone, which sounds kind of crazy, but they've actually done a fairly decent job at that. And so I feel like there are probably some experiences to borrow. I they definitely give you a downgraded experience, but you can still access most of things. So after we fix the, the major broken stuff, the obvious stuff, then the next step is gonna be, well, what else are they trying to do on mobile? And then we'll take a look at that and see, you know, if we fix these other things, do they even care about the rest of it?
Speaker 3 00:37:50 Because if they don't visit anything else and they just are monitoring on mobile, cool, we fix the problem, we're good. But if they're like, oh no, I wanna go in and tweak this campaign, or I wanna update this subject line, or maybe I wanna start an AB test, like, whoa, crazy person, what are you trying to do that on an iPhone for? But okay, maybe we can make it better. So we definitely have a lot of learning to do and you know, adding things like Mix Panel I think will help us understand that quite a bit better because it looks like the, the event tracking and being able to track it all the way back to a user and, and me be able to say, all right, this user came in on mobile and they went through all of these pages cuz we're gonna do like individual page view events so we can, can see exactly what they tried to do and when, and you know, we've tried to track all this stuff manually and it's very half-assed by comparison. So we have a long ways to go on that.
Speaker 0 00:38:44 I mean, I just had one other thing is like, I would probably have GA four running in the background just because like if you ever decide to go sell or when, because I'm sure at some point you will decide to sell recapture. Like I, I think that anyone would want like GA four data to benchmark against, you know, um, so Oh sure. Like I think it's so ubiquitous, uh, if you're running ads, you need it anyhow, so like, or you should have it. I think so yeah, I think it, it is worthwhile having something set up there, uh, so it doesn't just totally fall over later on.
Speaker 3 00:39:15 Yeah, makes sense. Totally. Yeah. And you know, I mean, I'm gonna get there. It's just, you know, <laugh>, I have all these other priorities, not <laugh>, right? Yeah. Is it gonna happen this week? Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not. Yeah, that's where we're at. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Nice. Nice. Yeah. So, uh, before we head out here, I wanna say one last thing and that is I want to give a shout out to Colin in the land down under, uh, for his, um, reaching out to me on Twitter to chat a little bit. And, uh, Colin, I'm looking forward to meeting you at MicroCon this year and thanks for listening. Appreciate it.
Speaker 0 00:39:51 Awesome. And thanks to everyone else, uh, for hanging in with us on this episode. And as always, for tuning in, if you're enjoying the show, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. You can always reach out to Dave and I on Twitter. And until next week,
Speaker 2 00:40:06 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, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
