# Building Your Own Community of Customers – Brennan Dunn – MicroConf 2013

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nMM3efuL_8
Duration: 14 min
Language: English
Words: 2551
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/5nMM3efuL_8

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[0:11] So, a lot of what I'm about to talk about is going to sound repetitive because it's a lot of what people like Mike and Erica and and Jason and a lot of other people have already said, but what I'd like to talk about is I don't know if anyone remembers, but last year at MicroConf, in Amy Hoy's talk, she kind of

[0:32] uh mentioned my my new SaaS PlanScope. And at that point, I just hit a thousand a month and I was really happy and I was just noticing that getting customers was a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. And I think a lot of us, anyone who's built products knows that um we all tend to think that you know, we're all really excited about what we're building and then we put it in the wild and um um until we get through that learning

[0:59] uh phase that Rob mentioned yesterday. It we don't really know that the perfect way to get a new customer. So, um so when I launched PlanScope, I kind of had I I wanted the immediate like I loved I'm one of those guys who when I launch something, I will tail the log file and I'll just be glued to Kissmetrics or my

[1:22] analytics. And I love being able to see kind of, you know, somebody comes to my site, they read the marketing site, they respond to call to action, they sign up their trial. And what I started finding though is that that's easier said than done. Um getting trying to win somebody over immediately is not always ideal and especially if we're throwing money at people or for paying to bring somebody

[1:47] over to our website. We can end up having um pretty low results, I think. So, what I'm going to be talking about today is how I've gone from this mindset of uh immediate gratification to taking weeks or even months before somebody who enters my ecosystem ever becomes a paying customer of mine. And I'd like to just talk about the story that led me from PlanScope to writing two books to having a workshop

[2:14] and ultimately newsletter. So, who here does acceptance testing? So, we know what happy path testing is, right? Which is the you know, how we imagine things work in a perfect world. So, my happy path of sales was somebody Googles for project management software. They hit my marketing site. They are convinced by they come to the sign-up form, they give me their credit card and kick off a trial and become a

[2:44] paying customer. Um that works sometimes, but it works uh conversion rates can be pretty low. I mean, you know, I spent so much time optimizing my marketing site and the call to action and everything else, but still there was when I got to uh starting to set up paid acquisition, I just realized I was it was it wasn't panning out to what I thought it would be. And this gets even more complicated when um when we start advertising. So, let's say I run you know, an AdWords campaign and I'm wouldn't it be great if I was paying two bucks a click and let's say I got a 3%

[3:23] conversion rate, I was then paying 67 bucks for trial. Say 10% convert. Uh shoot. Went through too quickly. Um anyway, I could be looking at three, maybe even four figures just getting a new customer. And until you've had your product up for a while, you might not know what your average lifetime value is. So, you could be losing money getting a new customer, which is not exactly where any of us

[3:46] want to be. So, what I was finding out was I had a pretty high cost per customer acq- or cost per acquisition, but my lifetime value, at least initially, was was low. My goal was to flip that. I wanted to I mean, this is how you become profitable, right? You have you you spend less money and make more

[4:06] money. So, what I'd like to do is just talk about what I've done um throughout or or really the the epiphanies that led me to build ultimately a flywheel that's now allowing me to have really a 10x ROI uh so far on what I'm spending to get somebody and what they're ending up paying me. So, the two things that I really started applying to my business are the ideas of by increasing trust and lowering friction, it it makes somebody more likely to become a customer of mine. And I'd like to just kind of overview these two themes and then go from there. So, trust, who are you

[4:42] and why do you want my money? This is something that there's a there's a certain percent there's an amount of risk anytime, you know, one of the things I teach consultants is the reason people like to pay us less than we might want to charge is that they there's a risk that we will not be able to to deliver what we're telling people we'll be able to deliver. So, we you know, we might have these grand ambitions of we have this great software and we're going to deliver an amazing outcome to the buyer, but you know, somebody who stumbles upon our site has never met us before,

[5:22] they they read what we say, they might I'm sure they'll see some testimonials and everything, but still the trust is probably relatively lower. It's better when people guest blog or you're mentioned on podcasts and and people know who you are and everything, but if you're just starting out, you probably don't have that yet. So, the counter to the way to establish

[5:40] trust is to over-deliver value. So, one of the things I started really doing is focusing on how can I really indebt people to me? And one way to indebt people is to give them a ton of really actual information that uh aligns itself with the end goal of your product. So, you know, if I'm building project management software for freelancers, I could teach people how to become better freelancers and really give them a lot of tips that have helped me and let them know that not only can I sympathize with I understand their pains. I I legitimately understand problem the problems they're going through and why they're looking

[6:21] for something like PlanScope. And over time, I can really prove to them that I know what I'm doing and it makes the barrier of entry and that risk coefficient lower. The second thing is friction. How hard will it be to start using this? When a lot of us think of product friction, we think of, okay, maybe we need to have stronger call to actions or

[6:41] our sign-up form it has too many fields. But in reality, there's a lot of internal friction. There's take case in point, my project management software. In order to get somebody to sign up or to to actually use my product, they need to internalize, yes, I'm going to fill out the sign-up form. I'm going to take the time to set up my account. I'm going to get I'm going to get familiar with this product. I'm going to invite my team and then I'm going to need to explain to my team why you know, what is this? Why are we why am I making them

[7:12] join me in this? And then I'm going to need to decide am I going to invite an actual client to work with me on my project? Invite the client and then most importantly, oh my god, throw an actual real paying project at this and pray that I don't embarrass myself. And these are you know, we're always looking for escapes. When you when anyone's trying to sell you

[7:32] anything, we want any excuse to bail. And that's why you know, you read something by Sean D'Souza and he really emphasizes the need to overcome objections. We really need to uh get into the heads of our target customer and realize uh what are they struggling with as they read our sales copy and really uh you know, throw that back at them and let them know we understand and we want

[7:57] to help them. And that's also why long-form sales pages tend to work well, too, cuz we have the room to do that. So, with those two things in mind, and this kind of references what what Mike was just talking about, no one buys software. No one needs No one wants project management software. What they want is a kick-ass consulting company or they want to be more transparent with their clients or something that

[8:22] measurably impacts their business. You know, no one just says, I want to add software to my stack. Um So, what this what these three things, increasing trust, um reducing friction and uh really delivering on outcomes has allowed me to do is think, you know, instead of saying I'm going to I build and and sell project management software for freelancers, instead, what if I'm teaching freelancers how to make more money or how to get rid of problem clients or how to invoice better and collect money

[8:56] better? And instead of sending traffic to my marketing site, why not send traffic to a free email course squeeze page that promises to help somebody find better clients? Instead of convincing somebody to ditch their current PM software and switch to mine, why not sell them a book with actionable worksheets and teach them to make more money because of

[9:19] something that I've I've given them? And then I'll cross-sell later my project management software. So, this is kind of what I've started doing. And what's been surprisingly really cool about this is by the time they become a PlanScope like this is an actual real customer. The only thing that's different is the dates. Um you know, four four or five months go by, they actually sign up for PlanScope at that point, but by then I've already

[9:45] collected a few hundred bucks from them. So, it's kind of a almost like paid lead generation in a way, but what I've done by then is they've been on my newsletter, they've been getting I've been showing up in their inbox weekly. I've been giving them free value. I've been giving them paid content like Heath mentioned earlier. They've read my books. They've been in my mind. They understand my

[10:05] philosophy on consulting. And then the natural next step for a lot of them is, okay, well, I I I I tend to agree with what Brennan's saying about consulting and and how to work with clients. Maybe I'd be interested in the software. So this is a again, this is a actual profile of a customer. I also have a $1,200 workshop which is a really nice boost to

[10:27] customer real lifetime value. And this is kind of my funnel that I've set up. And you'll notice the end goal, Plan Scope, my SaaS, isn't, you know, it's kind of buried farther down. And granted, some people go directly to Plan Scope, but ultimately, where I'm sending traffic is this newsletter. Cuz with this newsletter, I'm getting ridiculously high opt-in rates, which

[10:49] I'll show you in a second. And then I'm able to introduce low friction or lower friction offerings, transactional products, impulse buys. You know, getting adopting new software versus getting a book that's going to teach you how to make more money as a freelancer, uh they're they're in no way equal. And the value comes much sooner when somebody gets that book. With with software, I mean, think of um think of signing up for HitTail. It might take you weeks to derive value from it. Um and that's just the nature

[11:21] of a lot of a lot of software. So you remember that Intuit ad I showed before as a as a sample of of an ad that sends traffic to a marketing site. This is a ad I'm running on LinkedIn and Facebook now. Think about two two ten a click. I'm getting a 40% conversion rate, which

[11:39] is awesome. And I'm spending about five and a quarter to get somebody on my newsletter. I now have a list of 4,500. It's actually I submitted this Wednesday, so it's like 4,600 now. Um I've had some churn, so ultimately I've had I think 5,100 total people on my list. Since August, it's generated 230,000. Um And this is just through email. You know, I I just have autoresponders that say if somebody buys this book, cross-sell this over time, cross-sell that over time. And this has allowed me to really have a and as Rob would put it, a flywheel that is consistently saying if I spend a five and a quarter to get somebody,

[12:24] I'll reliably get about 10x off of them. So the big takeaway and what I didn't really mention about the glue is everyone I have this mailing list that hears from me weekly. I know Joanna has a weekly newsletter. I know list. I know quite a few of us might. Because I'm a I'm a staple in a lot of people's inboxes and I'm giving them value. If they if they don't get value, they're going to unsubscribe. And that's fine. I mean, I can't I don't imagine that everyone on the planet who identifies as a consultant is going to be able to learn something from me. But if you if you can,

[12:56] um what I'm doing is I'm I'm building up this trust and I'm letting them know that I want to help them. And you know, if they're getting a let's say a one-to-one uh time to digest versus value output coefficient with my newsletter, I let them know they're going to get a 10x or 100x with my workshop. And this really does I mean, it's it's almost upwards of 60% of people who sign up for Plan Scope, I can find on my newsletter and they've

[13:26] been there for a while, a lot of them. So what I'm finding is by taking things slow, by over-delivering value over a long period of time and then collecting. Um the the results have been I mean, I could not have gotten the growth I'm getting now on Plan Scope could not have been done uh had I done what I was doing before, which is buying ads and sending them to my marketing site and um I know like like I I think Jason mentioned one of the benefits of upfront annual cost pricing is you can kind of recoup that uh customer acquisition cost early on. But this is uh for

[14:06] more cash flow sensitive people and uh if you're not able to get a lot of annual payments upfront, this is something you might want to consider. Take your time, over-deliver value, and um have intelligent cross-selling paths and upselling paths that capture uh monetary value over time. So thank you.

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