How To 10x Your SaaS Revenue in 15 months

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0:07[Music] we talking today about how to 10x in 15 months and this is based on my experience growing hip tail I've owned it about 20 months but there was there was a 15 month spread there where I attend x2 the revenue and I'm Rob walling on Twitter if you want to you know tweet out to me you can certainly tweet out questions or helps me know you know if you tweet out quotes or something what the part that was most impactful and I can later take that section and turn it into a blog post or a podcast episode so I'm gonna start with the good stuff which is what's in

0:40it for you you're gonna sit here for 45 minutes we're all kind of tired I know but why should you sit here and give me 45 minutes of your time and the first thing I'm going to talk about is the pretty nitty gritty details the inside story of this acquisition it's it was a small it's a small SAS app and I haven't revealed numbers and revenue and revenue where it was then revenue where it is today and I'm going to do all that here today the exact numbers the only thing I'm not gonna reveal is probably LTV and churn and some stuff like that but I

1:11don't know if I'm gonna publish this live on the Internet I don't know that I want all this stuff really that public but you came to micro Kampf and I want to give you something that you know maybe you've heard me talk about on the podcast or blog about it but to give you real numbers because I feel like that helps me when I see concrete things then so the first like 15 minutes is is the acquisition okay and then the next 20-30 minutes is the steps I did to take it from 1600 a month to it'll probably it'll do almost 25,000 and be about twenty four or five this

1:43month so I'm gonna talk about month by month what I did the impact it had some of them didn't work some of them did but it's pretty noticeable in the growth curve of which ones worked and of course as I like to do I'm not just gonna sit here and tell my story I'm gonna say here's what I did and here's how you can do this in a more general sense right here's how you can apply this to your app so I hopefully have some inspiration as well I'm done all this you know I'm one person and I have contractors and stuff who work for me but for the most part it's just

2:13it's just me doing this so the my product portfolio right now I've actually paired this down over the past year I've either shut down or sold a couple of the smaller apps because I just was getting overwhelmed and the more things I acquired I just hit the maximum of what I could do is as one person so I have five software products the first one is called drip it's get drip calm and it's an email marketing it's email marketing software but it flows it focuses on autoresponders and it actually focuses even deeper on SAS apps and software products and getting them to increase conversion rate through

2:43lead nurturing of email and that's gonna be launching here in about the next six weeks hit tail which is what I'm going to talk about today I acquired it 20 months ago and then the old faithfuls right the ones are tired of hearing about gotten a ten voice wedding toolbox apprentice linemen jobs they're still there they're still doing very well and I have people who support those I don't spend I mean between these three I may have spent five hours in the last year on them and they basically fund everything right they either fun this plus the learning side the teaching side of my stuff is what funds everything

3:16else my other side is not all of these are actual products these are more just projects that I work on but I have a book that generates a decent amount of money it was actually I self-published it and I just sold the eleven thousand copy of this so that said you know it's been a very surprising I was gonna do it for if I could sell six thousand dollars worth was my my number and that's who that was my list initially is what I what I had she was very happy when it sold more than that started for the rest of us not profitable right it doesn't make any

3:47money but I do that on a weekly basis and the blog which also doesn't make money but ties into this stuff and of course micro Kampf you're here and the microphone or Academy which there's I think fifty or so people here that are members of that Academy it's just online kind of an online version of this that we try to you know we keep it going year-round so that's what I work on now that's everything except for some stuff there right no we don't work on so that's it that's about it so now I'm going to talk about Hiep tail how I acquired it and why I

4:19acquired it but since acquisitions are very dramatic they almost always are they wind up being at some point there's a lot of drama I'm gonna hit this button and introduce more drama into the room [Music]

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5:50[Music] my favorite part is that I mean that is a town in Belgium and my favorite part is when the the big ambulance driver just rips off his shirt and starts to punch something it's like what is this alright so um hit tale 20 months ago I bought it hit tail when I bought it looked like this and had a $20,000 run rate for those not familiar run rate is you take the current month you multiply it by 12 what you project it it will probably do if it doesn't grow over the next 12 months so not doing that well I think it had peaked around the data is

6:40sketchy but it paid somewhere around 40 or 50 grand a year and now it looks like this and it's just over quarter million although by the end of April and about two days I'll have my month in numbers and it should do about two I think I'm not gonna be about 292 run rate so almost three hundred thousand and until you know I basically did this with a couple of contractors and now I have a guy working for me full-time as a few months ago so this has been a fun one I'll put it that way so hit tell in June of 2011 had approximately two hundred paying

7:13customers and I had used it for five years at this point and that's the service was dying it was having monthly or bimonthly outages and it was a SAS at that had 4,000 free users just hammering the site they'd been on it for years and they just hadn't done a good job with pricing right they had left they had this flat pricing plan and they couldn't make any money at it okay yeah and that the other issue is there was no solid date at a calculator in an LTV which is something I would really want to know before I buy an app right because that's can I grow this or if we're turning

7:43everything out of the bottom of the bucket then I shouldn't even buy the app or of LTVs 90 bucks it's like it's not even worth the time so I was really guessing at these numbers and that's why this was a risky it's kind of like doing the things that no one else will do it can tend to have a good payoff and in this case it did like no one else wanted to buy this because it was a friggin mess no both from code side written classic ASP to the side of numbers they just didn't have data on who really was paying and how much they were paying so

8:10it had been online for five years it had done thirty-two thousand in the previous 12 months and I was like all right so you know even if I pay twenty or thirty grand for this I'm still gonna make that back but it turns out that it the previous twelve months have been so many cancellations that that I couldn't detect because the data was bad that the next 12 months it was displayed it to do about twenty and I had about fifteen thousand a year in expenses hosting is very expensive for this site because it's a lot of real-time database inserts between five and thirty inserts per second

8:37now it's up over fifty but it's not a trivial you can't just slap this on a shared hosting thing or an Amazon ec2 instance it's pretty intense so with that in mind like I said I was looking at thirty two thousand a year in revenue and 15 and in spent expenses so about somewhere around fifteen seventeen net profit typical valuations for software products like this very rough numbers about one to five X annual and if we're failing apps I like to stick and wanted to X sure so I was looking at you know making an offer of between seventeen and thirty-four thousand bucks for this thing and what happened was I made an

9:15offer for twenty and since this this happen had been pretty big during kind of a late calm or the.com resurgence and at one point they had read tried to raise funding at one point they had an offer for like half a million or a million like a lot of money because things were just so overblown so when I have four twenty thousand she said well I need a hundred which just wasn't I mean that was out of the question right there's no chance and so I basically said I'm gonna walk away and the the code I can go build a very similar app for ten or twenty grand right but what I

9:44really wanted was the marketing side of it because she had links from all types of like the Wall Street Journal and mainstream press inc magazine and it just had a lot of it had history and so that that was way more important than the actual code so I offer twenty she came back with a hundred I came up to thirty and then she went to sixty and then we settled on thirty thousand bucks so that was the that was the price and and the night well I was I wasn't gonna pay more than that and I paid legal fees to was to Grandin and the night that I like to set the wire to go

10:18into escrow I came in sure and I were talking and I said what what have I done like this is not a non-trivial amount of money I've never had an exit like I don't have millions in the bank this was most of the money I had in the bank from these other micro businesses they have right I maybe had 40 grand at the time and so then my business account so this was gonna take me way way down and I said what have I done what if I've just wasted all of this money and I never turn this thing around and she said well what's what's your

10:45payback you know and it was three years and I said that's killing me but she also said you know this is what you do sir like you've signed up for to be an entrepreneur you've signed up to take these risks and if you didn't do this what would you let's say you'd cancelled the deal today what would you do tomorrow and I said well I'll be really disappointed and I'd be really bored and she said Touche there you go so go grow this thing you know so so that's what I did I set out a couple priorities I knew that this thing had to be stabilized because it was going down

11:15every couple months and I knew that I needed to redesign it cuz the funnel was very very leaky people would just come to the side and wander off and then I knew that I had to market it and to I had no idea what it would grow to I mean I was thinking could I get this is a 20 grand 30 grand 40 grand a month it didn't know and so that was I was just trying to take these priorities in line to get him going stability is not that interesting because it's nothing that you care about it took me six weeks I hired a DBA we FedEx to disc drive

11:43across several states and moved it to new you know cloud server and stuff cut the hosting costs but there's actually episode there's an episode of texting where I talk about this topic for 90 minutes and it's interesting story pulling a couple all-nighters and stuff like that if you're interested you search for texting and hit tail and we talked about it but there's nothing applicable here so let it just magically you know question mark question mark question mark and then it was stable the redesign is interesting and you could potentially take something away from this because there were a lot of things wrong and when I looked at the app I

12:14thought where the opportunities here so this is a home page and I know that the conversion rate is X percent and I don't remember what it was or I'd tell you but right away there's about a dozen things wrong here but let me just point out maybe two or three of them in case you know you're looking at your app and you're thinking how can I improve my app so here's something never to do this is the tagline real traffic real time real results does that give you any freaking idea what this app does or how it's gonna help you there's no benefit there this is the worst tagline

12:40maybe not be worse but it's a terrible tagline it doesn't help you this if anything this headline that says keyword tool to grab more longtail traffic at least it explains what it does right so I got rid of that second thing that was a big mistake and I've seen people do this with Web Apps now in in you know Patrick talked earlier about his iPhone apps and how he went to different languages and that's one thing it's a different scenario but they had spent hundreds maybe thousands of dollars on translations they spent hundreds of hours of developer time to take this app and and to localize it and to put it in

13:14the languages and I've just I've never understood that don't do that don't do that until you max out the the english-speaking market or whatever your native tongue it's like just please don't do that it's a terrible decision I get emails about this every few months someone will ask me about it and it I just don't know how to say it except for don't do that you can't mark it in that language you can't support in that language and it's it's really just a waste of resources at this point what was the other thing oh they had a 60 day free trial crazy all right let's say you

13:40have a 60 day free trial and I want to tweak some stuff in the trial and see how it changes conversions on the other end I can do six of those a year six of them I can only do six tests because the trial is so damn long so the first thing I did like the day I acquired it I changed that to 30 I went on with my really bad Photoshop skills and I like photoshopped a three over that thing I really did it was horrible you can go into Internet Archive and see it it's like what are you doing but I dropped it to 30 I later dropped it to 21 and both

14:06of those had an impact on like getting growth going cuz you're just iterating faster you can do more things faster the other thing look at this quote down here you probably can't even see it in the back what people are saying to become a click magnin to blog should study how I got if that's his past hits Business Week what are you doing bear hain Business Week down here this should be like potentially one of the larger blocks of text on the pages frequent quote from Business Week it was the app of the year or no it was top ten most innovative web apps in like 2006 or 2007

14:35this week that should be somewhere on this page right there's several other things wrong I don't have time to go into but that that's what I wanted to take and to improve and instantly when I went to this which is we have a big bold headline that says what it's gonna do we have the way it's gonna do that we have you know call to action we have another one down here and then we have some braggy stuff hey look at where we've been and here's all the keywords we've analyzed and here's who it can help and testimonials this there's a lot on this page but it's formatted better and it

15:05just there's more there's more clarity to what you should do you should either do one of these things or feasibly you can click through one of the top four top Navs whereas on this page you have six seven top navs and it's just kind of a mess so this right here increased like double the number of people who made it into the the pricing area the next thing was they did this flat pricing where they said if you have up to a hundred thousand visits a month you pay ten bucks a month so you have people paying who had five thousand visits a month and ten bucks you have people with a ninety

15:39five thousand visits a month those two websites are in very very different waters they make they should be making a lot different quite a bit different amount of money they should just there's a lot more value they're getting from a service and there's actually a lot more physical stress than putting on the server so I talked a little bit about it last year but you you should increase your pricing based on the value that your customer is receiving from you right so the value they receive your pricing should scale up and this pricing does not scale very well and that was the main thing that pricing guard was

16:13also very long and it was a mess but that's you know neither here nor there realistically I changed it in two tiers something that I hope you know it's fairly common practice today but instantly this doubled most people on the ten dollar plan and as soon as I did this most people are on the twenty dollar plan and this was a no-brainer and it actually it increased conversions of course and then it doubled the monthly average monthly revenue from everybody so this has worked out very well and you'll also notice there's just a lot less text on this page right look at this that's it you can start your

16:43free trial you or not but that's it I'm not going to explain a lot of stuff and then the last thing if you have a rigid this is brought perhaps the most common mistake I see registration forms that look like this are horrendous and this will just send everyone off your website I think there's maybe 12 I can't even count it's so painful how many things there are on this page but here's what I did you don't need a first name last name company or title they're optional get rid of them you don't need a username use the email address instead you do need a password but you don't need to

17:15confirm their password because if they enter it incorrectly you they will use forgot password you don't need to do it twice we happen to need a URL just the way the database is designed and it's too painful to change so I do have to ask for that so so far of those top seven I'm asking for an email and a URL then we have email which I'm already asking for re-enter which you should never why reenter your email and there it once promo code you should never have this in a registration form it sends people to Google sang hit tale promo code hit tale promo code and they either find one and

17:46get a nice discount or they never come back okay so what we do now is I do have promo codes but you have to have the URL with everything in the query string and then it makes that field appear and populates it's a little more code but that's how you do it and then timezone I detect it with JavaScript right instead of having a field and in terms of use so so this is what it came down to so I went from this form here I actually took that down to three fields email password in URL you can get it to two if you don't need that URL up

18:15front then what I did was I added credit card upfront if you're a web app and you're in doubt of whether to ask for credit card upfront or not and you haven't tested and you need to make a call ask for credit card upfront that's my rule I'm not saying it always works but eighty or ninety percent of the time the Sasse businesses i know that are successful you can go down the list to ask for credit card upfront there are exceptions there are also people who make money with freemium plans but there are exceptions so if you're in doubt ask for credit card upfront that's that's my

18:45role and doing all of this so typically when you start have some critical credit card upfront you're gonna drop your conversion rate right your initial upfront conversion rate you're gonna increase the number who go from trial to paid but you're not gonna get as many in the trial funnel doing all of this at one doubled the number of people who were entering the trial funnel just because it was such a dramatic redesign but there's so much into it so instantly I started you know making more money which is a good thing I paid eight grand for the design and CSS HTML I paid another four grand for the app

19:18design I had a tree design in HTML so all told I was in fifty two out of pocket and the only reason I got to 52 which I didn't have in a bank is like the next month came through and I remember I got a tax refund there was literally like I was on the edge I had three grand in the bank account and like something what was it maybe it was about my coffee table yeah there was like some like a few grand came in and it was like I got it so I was right on the edge and this was the 30 grand purchase price

19:44there was 20,000 in revamp cost designer DBA hosting moving some stuff and there was two thousand and illegal so that was a deal biggest deal I've ever I've never like spent that much money on an app ever so it was very scary at this point the monthly revenue had grown to 2,500 this is December I'd acquired it in August and just through you know couple things I'd gotten it up to 2,500 hosting was about a grand and then net profit this isn't quotes I'm not paying myself I'm not paying for support there's a lot of things that are not included in that number but for my purposes it was making

20:161,500 a month which means it was a three year payback on that fifty two grand which was not gonna be that's not where I wanted to be right so I have just a short video so I don't talk your ear off the whole time and this is one of my favorite pranks it's like 45 seconds long but this is one of my favorite computer pranks so when you get home play it on your spouse spouse or significant other alright today we're playing a prank on our housemate what we're gonna do is break up the volume and changes his windows logon sound as soon as he starts to sing back up again

20:53I'm in for quite a surprise crank that up house for last week gather all I'm fake - that's good so I like I'm a big fan of the OL windows startup scam alright so now we're in the homestretch I got about at about 20 minutes 25 minutes left and this is this is where it gets interesting though so this is the 10x in 15 months this is what the hip tale revenue curve has looked like since August of 2011 which is when I acquired it here and it did sixteen hundred a month and what you'll notice how cool came in so this is the end of

21:58March because I it's not and of April so I don't know exactly what this number I'm on pace to grow about 1900 so it should be around twenty four five twenty four four at the end of the month this is monthly an annual recurring revenue only there's some one time like I did an app sumo deal it made 11 grand I've actually done two of them that I made eleven grand it's not included in here because to me one time is just like I don't know that's not important at this point the recurring revenue his words at what you'll notice is that there's three sections of there's three phases if you

22:29will of this revenue curve early on I was building right I was this is when I acquired it too when I was able to relaunch it and it took me from August until December so it's about five months and this part was pretty painful that was when I worked I started working 60 hours a month and I slowly pared it down to 50 60 hours a week I'm sorry and then 50 and then 40 by the time it was November December I was down to a normal work week and this part is the struggle right this is where you're building and you just want to get the thing out there

23:00and you're not making money and this is the the long slog the second part which I learned especially with hit tail is perhaps even more painful is the learning because as soon as I launched man I wanted this thing to I wanted to double every month well I'm gonna make thousand thousand more two thousand more a month and that didn't happen is you can tell by this curve it was very flat and there was a little jump here of 500 and 500 and I didn't anticipate that this would take me six months but I think in the future I'm gonna plan for six months of learning what I mean by

23:32learning is I needed to learn who my customers were who are the ones that understood the tool who are the ones that signed up who are the ones that stuck around where could I find them how could I find them how much would it cost to find them how quickly they turned all the stuff you know that we talked about with marketing and it took me about six months if you give this out and once I figured it out it was like well unlocking is safe and that's when scaling comes in now my version of scaling is different than Jason Cohen's with 50 employees heatin with 30

23:58something put you don't mean it's different meat to me scaling is scaling revenue and that's what I did and once I figured that out this is a very sustainable curve at this point eventually this curve will top out because my churn just you can't acquire enough customers to hit you know get your churn at a certain point but that should be in the 30s I think around thirty thirty five thousand so now what I'm gonna do is talk about the building part I've already covered this is where I revamp it and such I realized this in January of 2012 so about 14 months ago ish and I'm gonna talk almost month by

24:35month there's a few that are like to double up on months I'm gonna tell you what I did how much traffic I got and the revenue that month and why that happened and what I hope is that I'm also going to say here and here's how you can do it here's how you can generalize it so January 2012 I've owned the app five months it's making twenty five hundred a month I launched this thing after investing 50 grand and I'm hoping I'm a 30-day trial keep in mind so no revenue growth in that month right because I launched January 9th I'm gonna get trials and I won't get any revenue

25:03uptick until February 9th or 10th at the earliest so I did the things that are easy for me these are my low-hanging fruit I blogged about it mentioned on the podcast I tweeted it it got picked up on Hacker News it went to the top this is the inside story of the acquisition of hip tail some of you probably saw it we've got a ton of traffic well a ton I got like 5,000 unique it wasn't that big of a deal but what I noticed was that not a lot of it converted this is like Jason talked about earlier he got two customers in the end I got handful of customers I

25:31don't know exactly how many but it wasn't enough to move the needle so at the end of January it was still 2,500 keep in mind the February numbers should be impacted by the actions here all that to say this is the social media stuff right it's cool it's fun to talk about it was really fun I'd do it because it's fun to talk about not because I thought it was actually gonna grow the business because this is not how I scaled that my audience has nothing to do with how I scale this business in February I did podcast or this is where I just went on

25:57every podcast I could find so totally not scalable you have to do things during this learning process that are not gonna scale up but this was where I went on the podcast and I started learning okay this audience internet marketing podcast very heavily SEO oriented these guys converted very well for me and I realized okay how this is my intuition was that but I had to test it some way each of these podcast took me between 30 and 60 minutes of my time no prep I'd go on and do an interview and it would go live Hansol minutes didn't convert at all right because it's developers that makes

26:29sense that was my conjecture but I wanted to test it it was a hypothesis others of these converted you know in varying fashion this didn't really move my needle it did keep the traffic up in 5600 traffic was about 2,000 units when I got it so it both of these month bumped up but not sustainable right each of these is it is one of these it's not a flywheel but I'm learning I'm learning I'm trying to forget how the hell am I gonna grow this thing revenue stayed the same this is what pissed me off my January all that work I did and I got nothing right

26:58so I had enough cancellations and there was yeah this is where I started becoming frustrated and when I started thinking oh I'm 2 months you know how 60 days in really like you're that upset but I started realizing I dropped fifty two grand am I gonna make this back or what so March and April I looked at my retention and I was looking at it the whole time but my retention was atrocious and I took two months off of marketing and I did what I call operation of attention and since I'm one person I couldn't market and you know look at my funnel I'd do one or the other and so I took

27:33sixty days off and I said my trial two paid conversion after asking for credit-card number should be Jason said it should be more than 50% my rule of thumb is forty to sixty percent is a great is a good sweet spot now I say forty if you have to get someone to install some type of tracking code or do some action there's more friction for them to use your service you're gonna be lower between forty and fifty percent I know businesses where it's 80 percent that's not hit tail so it was eighteen percent and I knew that one in five people giving me a credit card is is

28:07converting to pay this is a catastrophe like that's a disaster this Apple never scale well that you'll never scale an applic this that my turn was fifteen percent a month now I only had 60 days of metrics so it's real and I'm on a 30 day trial so you know you're kind of loosing it's a loose and fastened lose here but I knew that again you can't lose 15 percent of your customers a month and grow business so I emailed every cancellation I've made a virtual assistant email every cancellation that we had for 30 days and we said even though we asked in the forum like hey

28:36why'd you cancel no one was answering so from this I got some real answers people said I don't I feel guilty because I'm gonna pay for the thing and I don't have time to write articles or you're the same as google analytics or you know I'm not getting different information from Google Analytics or I didn't really know how to use the tool so I got frustrated and I started saying yeah it's not same as Google Analytics don't these people know but it's not their fault whose fault is it like right here I'm the only guy can't even blame my you know an employee because I don't have any so so

29:08I set up ten tasks in a in hello I think it was mud event fog woods anyways ten tasks addressing their the cancellation reasons and I'm gonna go into them and I think in the next slide and okay I'll give the numbers first traffic during these two months was fifty four hundred and four thousand uniques member I stopped marketing so those things that are not flywheels kind of cater off and it just kind of drops down now that cool part is a revenue during this 60-day period since I started plugging in the funnel I started converting some of the traffic that had already shown up and I also got an annual payment in here

29:44about five hundred bucks so it's kind of cheating but revenue went up to almost four grand and then I was like alright now I have enough to justify I can really pay my support guy I had a VI doing support paying for the DBA paying for hosting there was there was a little bit of money left over for me so here are I think there's six things on here this is how I fix the funnel is exact things that I did first thing is a stop marketing you don't have to do that but to me sending people into a funnel we're only 18% of them convert and then 15% of

30:11them turn out is like suicide right you're pissing money away you just you can't do that so stop marketing if your funnel looks that bad the next thing I did is I did enforce the trial length which they weren't doing they would just let people be on trials forever so I just wrote a cron job that actually blocked him from the app after 30 days and I emailed them three days before which they weren't doing we have to yep this all little snippet of JavaScript to make hit tale work it's an SEO keyword tool that analyzes your incoming traffic and it gives you keywords you shouldn't

30:40be targeting but aren't that's what it does so you have to install a little snippet of JavaScript when I acquired it less than 20% of the people signing up for trials were installing the JavaScript well that's gonna hurt your trial two paid conversion right because no one's gonna convert so we encouraged code installation first I said we'll install it for 19 bucks and then I said screw it we'll install it for free so I taught my VA how to install drag tracking code and if you know people give us FTP access or whatever we'll install the tracking code on their site we've even done like 200 page static

31:10HTML sites and I had him go in and paste it at the bottom of everyone said be really careful we could break their pages but he did and we tested it into work and yeah it took him 30 minutes but we have a customer now so those are the two things the last thing I did is email like it hasn't been said enough today but trial emails were huge so during this 30-day trial I went from sending zero emails to sending between four and seven depending on what you do and I built a little engine to say if you haven't installed the tracking code you get an email every

31:41day for five days it's like hey seen you have installed it can we help you hey you seen you haven't it's all that can we help you different ways of saying it but we try to offer different options we try to help them see the value they're gonna get hey you many keywords yet we can provide some value you know that's help so the installation of code now of the tracking code is between 70 and 80 percent so is it it was obviously it worked right I didn't do much else than I mean it was really just a series of emails and offering to do it for free I have a down

32:10cell that was trying to help reduce churn stuff someone goes to cancel it says hey you're on the twenty dollar plan I see that your numbers are under the ten dollar plan you know under than the top the tier of the ten dollar plan we can downgrade you and if you're under the ten dollar plan I could just let them cancel but we have an unpublished five dollar plan that you know five dollar can't make money at five bucks but they're already a customer they're gonna go away anyways maybe if they grow like if we help them grow their site which is what we're supposed to do

32:36perhaps they'll bump back up so that down sell helped went you could argue that's artificially lowering churn but I would argue that it keeps customers around so that's kind of a cool one that I would I would suggest if you're not doing it and one-click articles here's the lesson from this there were so many people canceling saying I don't have time to use hit tail because I don't want to write articles right I get the the keyword and then I what do I do with this keyword and we'd say well you create a blog post about it and you'll rank in the top five you know in the

33:05search engine I don't want to write an article so the point is not to implement one-click articles in your app the point is if you're adding stuff to people's to-do list stop figure out a way to not add items to your customers to-do list analytics packages are great as long as you don't add items to their customer to the customers to-do list if you do add items figure out a way to upsell or to offer that service to provide more value and provide a higher tier okay we do we have a $20 tier for this and if you don't want to do any of it then we have

33:35a $99 tier and we'll do it for you or a $200 tiers something that gives people the chance because there are people that want the value but don't have the time there's a lot of us in here who want the value don't at the time so one click articles I integrated with an API it's a big marketplace of writers and you can click on your keyword and an article comes back in a few days so that's these things made the business able to scale basically without this slide without what I did on this slide that the business would be flatlined and so the results were that the trial to pay

34:09conversion doubled to 36% over 60 days and the churn went from 15 to 8% now these are still not stellar numbers I told you I want my range here to be 40 to 60 since then I've gotten it up into where I want it to be churn we tied they wanted it under 4 under 5 I've never gotten it under 5 and I'm still able to grow but I know that's why I'm in a plateau at a certain point the the smaller SAS apps that I know of I've seen churn in between 6 and 8 percent that's the most common number I see I know that if you're a web host you

34:45can get down to 2% I know that places like Salesforce HubSpot larger SAS apps can get down into that 1.5 to 2 percent a month I don't know of any small SAS apps that do I'm sure they're people here but so I have gotten down since here but not a heck of a lot so those were the results that was with that spark that's when things started kicking in because I wasn't leaking stuff at the bottom of the bucket anymore so in May I did a couple things one I started retargeting and I really recommend you do this I like perfect audiences what they're called I've tried three different

35:18services and they these guys were by farther away I see company and I by far the best it's hackers I mean I'll email him at midnight and like there's like three of them a reply like these dudes are working all the time they hustle and they got they have some really good stuff they were target but we're targeting is basically someone visited your website and then as they surf around the internet you can serve them ads either on the web or via via Facebook and I dial it down pretty much I don't like stalking people you certainly can if you want but this definitely added an incremental

35:50conversion I write and more people were then coming back to the site I tried Facebook ads and AdWords this month it didn't work out for me it did later on and I did a lot of guest posts and this is kind of a buffer method right you know buffer did a bunch of guest posts and got a lot of traffic to their site and yeah I've tried to think of what to say about guest posts you know what I did forget post so that it didn't take me forever because I went to that writers market place that I integrated with and I hired him to do I would I

36:17would pitch an article and say all right I'm gonna do ten keyword tools that are really good and then I would go to the writers marketplace and I'd are there five star writers which were quite good it cost 50 bucks for a thousand word article ten keyword tools blah blah blah I'd get it back and I did get me about 80% of the way there and then I put my voice on it right so I was essentially having a ghostwriter get me an outline and then I would fill it in and then submit it and hey Rob blowing a pintail so I would never submit someone's you

36:45know work as my own but I they they were well aware that they were ghost writing for me because writing ten fifteen guest posts in a month is it's one completely not scalable but it's also just takes a lot of work and you have to be a good writer so I put through a little money at the problem and then and then iterate it on that so this is it remember March and April I did all the conversion rate stuff and now traffic is flat revenue still flat alright this is when things started to take off the next couple of months is when I learned who my

37:22customers were I did two things one I didn't appSumo deal and two I figured out paid acquisition and so in june/july traffic spiked up I bought some traffic through Facebook ads and it's on the next slide reddit I'm sorry right it was the other one that converted and I also did this this epsiode deal now appSumo is a trip because you have to really discount the crap out of stuff not not only you know an annual plan cost twenty two hundred forty bucks and they just count it down to ninety and then you get like twenty or thirty percent of that so it's not a lot of money I made eleven grand on the

38:00deal which is fine that was kind of irrelevant what it did though is when appSumo stomps their foot or their marketing foot there's this ripple through the internet and I got so I got like seven trials in that month which is more you know I'd had one or two hundred a month up till then so just a lot of people don't either don't want to buy through appSumo they forget to buy through EPS whatever they wind up at your site and they're looking through it and they buy that was what I wanted I wanted the recurring revenue to me recurring revenue was gold and that's what I

38:27wanted and I didn't know going to that sumideal was kind of nervous like him I just killing off the rest of my getting like everyone who's ever gonna buy and I buy through Epsom oh and I'm done you know but that didn't happen so this is where things started to change if your call anime was like 4 grand 3,900 3,800 it jumped 47 that right yeah 4700 here three things did that one was the appszoom Odile which is about 1500 in recurring revenue the second was was the second let's articles I started making some money from the articles actually the one-click articles were both a retention source but also a revenue

39:04source and the third thing is I started converting more of the traffic that was coming because the robber raishin retention had finally kicked in so it's a three pronged thing that's that's kind of a lesson here is like no one source is gonna grow your business it's all of this stuff you just have to keep hammering away and figuring out which work that is best in double down then in August here's when I did the paid acquisition and this is where I said all right now I have this eleven dozen bucks in cash ago from appSumo I'm gonna grow faster I want to go faster this is a

39:32place where I wanted to start growing by two grand a month three grand a month so I started buying ads everywhere I knew I looked at twelve different ad networks these ad networks are the only ones that I know of that a business a b2b app should use I tried katika and like clicks or and I liked all these other ones and they're all b2c and it's really hard to it was junk traffic for me so reddit Facebook Ads Google AdWords LinkedIn and buy sell ads the only so here's the thing if I had a higher lifetime value LinkedIn would convert like gold I can print my own money but

40:07minimum that minimum $2 clicks and I don't have that I don't have the lifetime to support it AdWords is around four or five bucks a click so I can't definitely can't do it Facebook Ads is the one that really started working for me because you can get facebook clicks between fifty fifty cents in a dollar that's that's where started porn money and and I started I think I did a couple grand this month and then 3 grand 4 grand 5 grand 6 queen you know you can really scale it up as long as you get the positive ROI but this is where you you've created a flywheel reddit also is

40:38a weird system because you can't split test and you like puts posting out a week in advance but it converted at at break-even ROI and so I did it several times and then it slowly died off but I've heard of people who are able to make read at work as an ongoing thing so this is where I started it and traffic spiked up because I was buying traffic right and revenue grew a little bit more another 1,600 and this is again because my funnel is tight and I'm just sending qualified traffic through it in October I had a very good month because I lowered that trial which I recommend if

41:13you can do a seven-day trial was Jason said if you can do no trial I haven't pay in advance do that with hit tail I have a little bit of a problem because you get zero value out of hit tail until you've installed tracking code and typically waited a week or two to see any results I haven't tested it but I find it hard to believe that someone would pay me upfront for enough they get no value it's not like a hosting plan we're like it but I do get value the first day right there's a little bit of a difference I would like to test it but

41:39I haven't if you'd newest if you can do a paid upfront that's great if you can do a seven-day trial do that you can just iterate faster you know what you're doing so much sooner the shortest I can do with it tails 21 days I did I looked into my analytics but this caused me to have an excellent month and then every month I just I get the customers converting faster and short of timeframe we also did an integration with Basecamp so this move me into the next kind of phase of marketing we did which I call integration marketing and it's just integrating with anyone and everyone

42:08that you think you could have customer synergy with right to use a buzz word this one didn't work out we spent about third this is where I brought someone on to help me by the way a contractor about 20 hours a week and the Basecamp one didn't work out at all I think we got a handful of trials now it's an interesting flywheel because it kind of sends one or two trials a month but that doesn't move the needle base camps just not a good like how many SEO people are using Basecamp it's just such a small number what did move our needle and the reason

42:41that I'm now building drip is that this is a little seven part email course we give away and we have this widget that kind of pops up if you're on the site for more than ten seconds it appears on every page of the site and it's just a little JavaScript widget we installed but my my product manager Derek had to code 15 hours and write all the email and do all this time and it was like 20 hours to do this and I thought shouldn't this be easier and so it is easier once we launch trip that's exactly this this is actually drip installed on hit tail

43:11we got it installed last week and I took a screenshot this moved our needle this added on every app that I've done this with dotnet invoice hid tail print assignment jobs and one other that I sold and it moves the needle between 10 and about 10 and 30 percent over the course of like 30 days 30 to 60 days it will increase the number of people who come back and sign up any given traffic source you're just trying to get people to come back right you have retargeting to do this and then you have this kind of building relationship via email and traffic was about what it was the month

43:46before and it jumped up was I attend something the month before yeah so I was at thirteen four so I got another three grand this month so you see there's things are starting to click here and I've learned several tactics that are snowballing in November in December like I said I brought Derek the product manager on and he I think we kicked him up that full-time at this point cuz I was like dude stuff you're doings work and like let's just drive as much traffic as we can and so we built a wordpress plugin which is awesome awesome flywheel there are search engines everyone when I say all right

44:20SEO everyone says Google right Google is the biggest and it gives you a lot of traffic it's really competitive so let me list five other search engines that you're probably not targeting that you should think about targeting Bing YouTube third largest second or third largest search engine in the world put out some YouTube videos answering questions answering your FAQ questions even if it's a 60 minute screen or a 60 second screencast people are searching for things wordpress.org very there's a lot of people search this thing and I can guarantee I can tell you that because a lot of people are clicking through from there and converting into hip tell

44:54customers now and we don't do anything I mean we support the plug-in but we haven't done anything since November we launched it another one is that obviously the Apple iOS app stores and had a great search engine and Amazon is another good one I mean there's a lot of search engines they're kind of hidden within these other ecosystems that if you're not if you have anyway if you have people installing it on WordPress get in there not just for the the ease of them installing it but look at what keywords someone might search for in wordpress.org and rank for it and we do it's actually so that's a kind of cool

45:26thing about WordPress that oregon's it's not a sophisticated search engine so we targeted I don't even Derek to remember it's like SEO keywords suggestions I think that maybe what we're targeting and we're ranked number one for that let the first day and I was like oh this is easier than Google you know and you and it's not about gaming I mean you're not trying to appear for some term you don't relate to but it's very easy to rank well for it so this started it was just one more thing that just kind of keeps keeps that graph going up instead it's being flatter and the other thing we did

45:57is I got listed you see it down here on SEO Moz Pro perks page if you have any SC if you're an SEO tool or anything like that you need to get on this page like this is an amazing conversion machine for us again not a ton of traffic but it converts like gangbusters and every person who comes from these sources now a lot of them 10 to 15% give me their email in the little email box so then we can close you know help educate them and close them later some of them are retargeted like the funnel is just increasing the the value of every visitor to my website so oh and

46:35SEO Moz I was going to say if you're not an SEO tool then yeah you don't want to get listed an SEO mods probably not have a lot of affinity for that but what web site has something like this there are in your niche there has to be someone who has these marketplaces you're not gonna build a business on getting listed on this page you're gonna get two or three hundred uniques a month woohoo but in it just increments all of these things together is how you build the flywheel and then let's see traffic was around the same revenue continue to was it 13 something last month so you

47:05know it's against twenty to twenty three hundred this is the last month I'm gonna look at January this is the luck surface area thing for our Jason Roberts go whoo just Roberts there you are all right look surface area is like the more you get out there the more things just happen to you so by this time I'm buying a lot of ads because I can afford to and I have a positive ROI so I'm just I'm people feel like I'm everywhere and we started getting written up in blogs you start getting written up in the press I'm quoted in that was it the New York

47:34Times or The Wall Street Journal I always forget which one and this guy from search engine watch which is I mean this is like talk I don't want to get quoted in the Wall Street Journal I wanna go quoted here and they're like the lead editor saw an ad and he's like I felt like you guys are everywhere and I remember hit tail from like 2007 here at this huge piece and sent an enormous amount of traffic to it was comparable to the appszoom Odile it was insane and the conversion rate was off the charts so this January me just meandering around oh I just kind of lucked into it

48:02but it's that like I have a quote on the mug the harder I work the luckier I get alright the harder you work the luckier you're getting to more places you are the more likely people are to find you and write a damn article about you you know it's it's pretty crazy and the last thing I'll talk about is this is another it wasn't an integration per se but it was a joint venture and chase is here chase where where are you there yeah so chase runs authority labs he's a SEO ranked tracking tool and we also this was a story 9 SEO companies SEO like SAS apps email and I said hey

48:35I'm hit tell you know I'm running this thing and I'd love to tell you these are fans if your service and I'd love to tell my customers about your service if you're willing to try out hit tail take it for a test drive and then if you like it recommended to yours and I expected to get like one reply right I got 9 replies everybody wanted to do it and I was like uh-oh so I couldn't I couldn't do all of that then - both of them have been very very successful for me simple joint venture no you need to be ethical about this you need to try out the tool

49:03you need to make sure you like it you're recommending it to your customers you put your rep on the line and so are they but when you do it if you have you know a customer affinity where their audience is the highly likely to use hit tail this moved the period and it wasn't sending a few emails and working with you know with Chase to do it so traffic spiked up big-time because of these and I think I actually stopped ads for a few weeks and still had good traffic so again that was another three grand it jumped from there on the other I mean everything else I've

49:33done is basically either been a joint venture which works paid acquisition which works I did another app sumo deal which worked again and I've done that integration marketing those are the big things that have worked for me I've left out SEO I've done zero SEO and hit tail and I did it for a couple reasons one because I had struggled moving the blog and had a big hassle with Google for about a year and so I just was doing these other things making the money now that my blog hit 200 blogs in place I'm gonna do more SEO but I also wanted to figure out you know I'm kind of

50:01sometimes known as I rob makes his money from SEO I want to see if I could do without it it was a challenge right I'm not doing this I really wasn't doing it for the money like I have the other apps that that pay my salary this was the challenge of like can I do this both at SEO on it I really we get a couple trials I'm home from SEO right now but I plan to focus on it moving forward so to recap this is the this is the story there it is alright three phases there's the building phase which is where I know there's some of you in that phase right

50:33now realize that if you're a builder if you're in the building phase there's still the learning that's gonna happen I've seen this in smaller scale on my other apps but I haven't seen it to the extent this six-month learning period the cool part about this and this curve and everything I've just told you is that I've done this for my other apps and they've never scaled up as big but it's always the same thing you build you learn your scale build your learn your scale and I'm gonna do the exactly the same thing like this is drip that I kept talking about get drip calm and it's the

51:07idea is it creates a double-digit jump in your conversion rate which it's done for my apps that I've installed it on but I'm gonna do these pretty much everything I just laid out so for all my competitors out there I'm pretty much gonna do what I just told you but I'm gonna do it for drip I'm not gonna go to a SEOmoz to find a thing but I'm gonna go to some maybe Constant Contact if they have a you know integrations page or MailChimp or you know there's there's this world that will make sense to integrate with with drip and I'm gonna do the exact same stuff and I know there's gonna be

51:34unprepared for there to be six months of life until I figure out my stuff out