Prescriptions and Descriptions: Blind Spots of the Developer Entrepreneur – Ben Orenstein

0:02[Music]

0:13hello how's everybody doing I am pumped to be on the stage for real this is a goal of mine for a while and it's happening right now so if I'm smiling it's because I'm totally excited about it but first I need to make sure that we're all sort of a little bit on the same page so if you could actually take a second close your laptop's please for one moment let's all take a nice deep breath together and hold it so everyone breathe out and all the way in and out let's do one more all the air out and in and out all right now I just need to

0:59make sure that I have you for real so on three could you please all give one clap ready 1 2 3 so I'm gonna count to three and when I get to three we're all gonna clap and it's gonna happen at the exact same time it's gonna sound like one person ready 1 who's that on purpose ready 1 2 3 that's better you can still do better than that there ready 1 2 3 excellent this time snap on 3 1 2 3 not the best at following instructions so far I gotta say and like this is a lot of instructions in this talk so let's let's get this right last time snap on 3

1:46ready 1 2 3 alright last time we're gonna do this this time if you are capable please crack your knuckles on three yeah it's gonna be weird ready 1 2 3 I was a little grosser than I thought it'd be actually so let's go let's do this thing so a lot of speakers begin to talk by telling you about themselves I'm gonna tell you about you so I ended up throwing away the first couple of versions of this talk because I realized I wrote it in a vacuum and I didn't know who was gonna be showing up at this conference we've never had a micro comp

2:31started before I wasn't sure who was gonna show up and so I decided that I would do a little customer development and research and I sent out a survey and about half of you filled it out I got about 50 responses and so I think it's a pretty representative sample and I'm gonna show you the most important thing I learned I'm going to share a couple details throughout the talk of what I've learned from that but I think the most important and most relevant is this graph right here this is how much money you're currently earning from some sort of digital product like a plug-in or a

3:01SAS or a screencast or an e-book and you'll notice the biggest group is at zero dollars per month currently yeah there's no shame in that there's no shame in that almost everyone's in that group if you consider the globe in particular the next group is $1.00 to 99 999 dollars a month so we have about half of you in the zero dollars a month group we have about 25 percent in the next one under a thousand a month and it falls off pretty fast from there and so when I saw this I realized okay we've got about a 50/50 split in this audience half of you have started and half of you

3:37haven't and I thought this presented an interesting challenge as a speaker I've never talked to an audience that was kind of divided right down the middle and the reality is I have very different advice for those two groups and so here's the plan if you haven't started I'm gonna be giving you prescriptive advice I'm gonna be laying out a process that goes 1 2 3 4 5 because you're getting going and in the beginning I think it's really useful to have detailed prescriptive steps consider how you learn to cook for example in the beginning you want a recipe something that spells out every detail and you

4:09should follow really closely as you get experience you can pick and choose ingredients and combine them into interesting things so that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna start with prescriptive advice for those of you that have not begun and then I'm going to throw out a whole bunch of tactics that have worked for me I'm going to show you my greatest hits over the years so here's your pay if you pay attention clear process or best tactics and i'ma start with how I started that's interesting that's that text wrapped down my aspect ratio has changed who knows what's gonna happen in this now fascinating okay so here's how I started

4:47I was a programmer six years seven years ago I'm a professional developer I'm writing code for money and I'm using a text editor called vim yeah I'm with my people I knew it I knew it so vim it doesn't matter what vim is if you don't know what it is it's just a text editor it's a tool that programmers use it helps you write code faster and that's what I loved about it is that it made me more efficient but the thing about vim is that it's hard to learn it's got a bit of a learning curve and it's really really deep you can just keep learning more and more things about

5:19it but I was fascinated by it and every time I kept investing in I got better at writing code faster and so I kept learning and I started to become a vim aficionado I guess and I started helping my co-workers write better use it in better as well I would be pairing program with them and I'd like you know you can use this thing I'll be like oh cool and after a little while I became the vim guy and they started coming to me for advice and I love that because I love teaching that's why I'm here right now like teaching is my jam and so after

5:50I becoming the vim guy at work I was like how else can I teach this where can I teach a little bit more and so I emailed the organizer of the Boston Ruby group volunteer meetup for Ruby programmers I said hey can I give an eight-minute lightning talk just teaching the basics of vim and he said yeah and so I did that and it went really well and I was like that's interesting and so I decided at that point to apply to give my very first conference talk ever and my theory was maybe I can give a 40-minute talk about vim maybe I was a little I'll be honest I was a little bit

6:21worried I was like can I get anyone to show up to 40 minute on about of in like that's not everyone's cup of tea to put it lightly and I was also a little concerned like can I hold attention for 40 minutes because attention is important to me so I applied and I got accepted and I gave the talk and this is me doing it and you can see in this photo two things one there are people so that worked and also I'm smiling and us money because it's working like people are paying attention they seem to be getting value from this and so I said okay people are willing to

6:56pay big bucks to come watch me talk about vim at a conference maybe they'd be willing to pay small bucks to watch me talk about vim in screencast maybe I can distill down what I've been teaching and sell it as a product and so I did it I bought a screencast about making screencasts which of course exists I bought a microphone and a pop filter and I started going to work on the weekends because it was the quietest place I had access to and I had a Mac in it and I could use that software and I spent a bunch of weekends in a row working on

7:23the screencast made it and released it I put it up on a Shopify for $9 it was about a 35 minute screencast and something interesting had happened along the way while I was becoming the vim guy was that people started following me on Twitter and they wanted more of him knowledge I had developed a reputation among these folks and also among the people at the Boston Ruby group and so when I launched I sent an email to the root Basit ruby group and said hey you may have seen my Vint ox I have a product now and five minutes later I got an email that changed my life and this

7:54is it this is the first time in my life that someone a stranger on the internet paid me money for something I had created and when I saw this email I had like a physical reaction like my heart started pounding I was having like wasn't quite having trouble breathing but I was just like this adrenaline blast went through me it was like a happy panic attack thank you and so everything changed a lot of things changed for me that day it changed my relationship to money it changed my relationship to time and work an effort and creation and so my goal for those of you that haven't started is

8:40to have this experience is to get this first email because that first email least for me was transformative and my guess is that for some of you it's gonna be transformative to so the screencast did well and went on to actually sell maybe ten thousand dollars worth of uh of those screencasts over time it kept just sort of trickling in money and I found ways to repurpose it but eventually it got a little bit long in the tooth a little bit old and so I sort of recording quote retired it we retired it to YouTube so it's actually freely available on YouTube right now you can check it out not right

9:09now please but you can if you want to see the very first thing I ever made you can it's still out there so my mission is to give you those of you that haven't started that experience so here is what I would do if I started over I have an audience now that affects how I launch things and what I do but I'm trying to put myself in your shoes and imagine you have no audience and start from scratch and it turns out that process that I took was kind of mostly right by accident I kind of accidentally worked my way into a good position but

9:39there's some things I would change today and to improve it even further so if I were starting over the first thing I would do is teach so what do you teach what should you teach what should your topic be here's a tip a couple prompts what is something that that you from six months ago would have found valuable like would have saved you what would have saved you some time and some agony especially it's like this is a great topic if it would have save you that time and agony at work that's really good one another question is what are people already asking you about that's a

10:12good sign for two reasons one because people already view you as an authority and two you have expertise in that thing and the final thing is what is something that you're really into that really catches your attention and you're willing to put work into that bores other people and I really like this one so I was having breakfast yesterday with one of the attendees here Jason and we were trying to come up with like a first info product type idea for him and we had kind of stalled and then the conversation moved on and at one point he sells me he's like yeah I always end

10:44up spending so much time doing billing and expense reporting when I'm freelancing because I just love that stuff and I was like you love that stuff he's like oh yeah I mean I just like love making systems and making like beautiful and like thinking about how to do it and I was like dude that is your first product it's billing and expense reporting for freelancers that hate building an expense reporting right like people distilling a topic down is great that makes it that's a really good topic so you've got your topic in hand how do you teach it well I would begin small intimate in-person and free so a nice

11:21way to get going is to go to your co-workers and say hey I want to do a Lunch and Learn let's all grab lunch on Friday bring it back to the conference room I'm gonna give you an eight minute talk on whatever whatever your topic is I'm gonna start using docker as an example it's just a programmer technology it's just a placeholder don't worry if you don't know what it does doesn't matter but I wanna give a talk on on docker basically everyone will say yes to that if you're like hey Ben I want to give a name and talk about basket weaving I'd be like

11:43yeah cool I'm going why not so lunch and learns great option another option is lightning talks so meetup organizers are constantly looking for speakers it's one of these things where it's really hard to constantly keep a flow of speakers at your meet-up and so if you offer to give a lightning talk to almost always say yes especially because it's low risk right like a lightning talk is only a handful of minutes long it's hard to be super bad and then the last option if you can't find people in person like even just a Google hangout you know pitch people on a 60-minute Google hangout where you're gonna teach

12:17the basics of docker and you're gonna get three wins in this face and by the way I think you should do those multiple times don't just like do one like try to be teaching a handful of times maybe three or four times but you're gonna get three major wins the first is that you're building an audience and you're building Authority or that people are starting to learn to trust you on this topic and when you do by the way this is a mistake I made make sure you get a way to stay in touch with them like get their email you want to be able to talk

12:43to these people later you want to be able to tell them when you actually have a product that's one big win the next is that you are going to get practice teaching it's a bit tough to teach teaching takes time it takes practice like any other skill so by running these things and getting feedback you're gonna learn how your teaching will naturally improve and the final thing is you can do crazy amounts of summer research on these people yes they haven't paid you yet they may not look exactly like your eventual customer but it's a really perfect testing and proving ground like ask them who they

13:14are where do they work what it got them excited about this thing afterwards what was the best thing they earned like what things in your pitch resonated with them what problems do they have like you're getting this crazy amount of like free information from these people so so make use of that that's phase one here's phase two but a pre sell and info product so by the way you'll notice I'm not saying like start SAS or start selling code or things like that I think there's a little harder I think a first thing a book is like a perfect first effort and remember that your goal

13:43here one copy to one stranger don't think about replacing your income just think about getting that first experience that's all you need to focus on for this first phase everything else comes later don't worry about that and by the way small is beautiful so a lot of people think if I'm gonna start if I'm gonna write an e-book I should write at 198 page ebook has anyone bought a long a book and read like 12% of it raise your hand if you have yeah exactly happens all the time has anyone bought an e-book and never read it yeah exactly that's the dirty secret of info products so don't read an enormous

14:22ebook because a people won't read it even if you did and then B some people won't even open it no matter what so what you should do instead to start something small remember that example before about docker hereis I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a couple titles it'll hopefully sort of inspire you a little bit you're at here I think it would be great titles for your first ebook a docker crash course surviving your first week with docker docker for total beginners docker Distilled docker for non-programmers what I wish I'd known about docker when I started why docker sucks and what you should use instead all perfect for his

14:59efforts I mean like I think if you made a 40-page thing plenty that's great alright so you've got your topic you've done your teaching you got your topic this is the next thing you need you need place to go so this is a mistake I made early on which was I built my first product over a series of weekends that had time in between them and the reality is I almost stopped because I didn't have any momentum I almost gave up on making that screencast and if I'd given up on making that screencast I wouldn't have gotten that first email and I wouldn't be here today and that'd be a total bummer

15:38because I'm really excited to be here today so what I recommend is you get an Airbnb and why Airbnb and not a hotel great question I'm glad you asked that Airbnb instead of a hotel because an Airbnb has a kitchen and what I think you should do is at the beginning your trip you should go to the grocery store and should buy enough food to last the whole time and I think you should do about four to five days that's about the right length you know do it over a weekend you can maybe take a couple days off work and it Gaucher it with your significant other before about four to

16:11five days is about right so girl gross go grocery shopping get all your food and that way you don't need to leave to cook or to leave to get your your meals that will interrupt your flow quite a bit there's nothing worse than being like this is going great but I'm getting pretty starving let me go pull up and Yelp I start looking at reviews around me and what's opening what's good and all that you don't want that so Airbnb so your goal over these four days is what it's really simple it's really focused write one chapter of your ebook and by the way don't write the

16:43introductory chapter don't write though why this is gonna be an awesome ebook chapter right the meat a meaty chapter like pick them something on the middle pick your best stuff chapter table of contents tell people where you're about to do or what you're going to do what the eventual book will look like and you need to have a way to get paid you need a sales page now developers I'm very sorry but you're not gonna be building the sales page manually there's gonna be no HTML or code if you are coding a credit card form on this thing or you've messed up that's a sidequest don't do it

17:12instead use this use lean Pub anybody use lean pub no puedo one yeah so lean pub is great so lean pub is as you can see in there nicely done H one you can write publish in sell in progress and completed ebooks so they're built around this idea that you want to pre-sell your thing you want to start selling right away that's gonna get you excited is gonna get you validation this is what I want for you so don't mess around just just use Liam pub that's great it's even like you can push updates to it really easily so that those get sent out to the people at have

17:46bottle already highly recommended so I want to share another bit of that survey which is a really common phrase that showed up I asked a free-form question which was what are you hoping to get out of the talks on my kerkhof and a lot of people said inspiration or motivation and that's a reasonable answer but I noticed something really interesting which is that the people that said they want an inspiration or motivation hadn't started it didn't come from almost anyone that had already gotten going and I think this this exposes a really interesting paradox which is that a lot of people and it's natural to assume

18:30that you get started or sorry you feel inspired and motivated you get started and then you have success I think the reality is you get started you have success if you'll inspired that's why I'm focusing so much around that first email I don't want you to wait for inspiration I know it's scary I know you have a little analysis paralysis I know you're not sure if it's gonna work I know it feels intimidating but you don't wait until you're in the perfect mindset and then get to work there was once this author who was well-known in prolific and they asked someone asked him do you write on a schedule or only when you're

19:11inspired and he says I only write when I'm inspired fortunately inspiration strikes every morning at 9:00 a.m. sharp that's you okay by the way this is the best book ever written on the subject it's amazing it's about what happens in your mind and your brain when you get close to doing the thing you know you should be doing all right I've been talking for a little bit let's get weird let's do another weird thing some kind of obsessed with weird things I'm a count in rhythm and I'm going to ask you to count and rhythm - it sounds like this 1 1 2 1 1 2 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 3 2

19:541 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 got it try it ready and 1 1 2 1 1 2 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 I need more participation than that I'll go I'll slow down a little bit here we go 1 1 2 1 1 2 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 excellent now I'm gonna give you a slight challenge when we get to 5 don't say five clap instead so 1 2 3 4 4 3 2 1

20:30everybody ready ready and 1 1 2 1 1 2 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 well done excellent excellent alright I have a harder one but I don't think you ready for it I'm sorry you haven't earned it if you come to my workshop I'll show to you all right part 2 these are my greatest hits all right it's taken me years to come up with this to learn the knowledge that's on this list I'm gonna share with you now this is for the people that have started this is a lot of a grab bag of tactics because I don't

21:04know where your business is at if you haven't started I have a pretty good idea of where you are and why might hold you back but once you get going people head off in a lot of different directions and so I'm going to give you a little smorgasbord and you can pick and choose and say Val I'm gonna steal that I'm gonna steal that please steal these ideas number one create a recurring reminder to run a pricing test okay Jordan just told us that he tripled his prices and threw up an impediment to signups and nothing changed right in fact it probably even got better because now

21:37suddenly I was like whoa this product is seriously legit this happens all the time and you need to be running these experiments often and that's why I asked him about when his next one was is because I think this is the thing that you should get on a cadence I would throw it on your calendar chances are if you've launched you set your pricing at launch you probably haven't looked at it since but I can tell you I have not found a better lever than this nothing I have done has been quite as effective as changes to pricing nothing okay there had been times where it's like the best thing I did in the

22:12last year was that one pricing test we ran and so since I know you might procrastinate on this I'm gonna give your first test I want you to hide the cheapest tear you've got if you have a single price point I want you to try doubling it and I know that feels like totally insane like double are you crazy there's no way that would work except the Jordan triple didn't it worked and I've done this too recently so I ran this test not too long ago so I run a product and I noticed someone had signed up and their email address was at uber calm like the uber and uber as of

22:48recently is burning three billion dollars a year the losing three billion which is $95 a second which means they've lost about two thousand dollars since I started telling you this story okay and I looked at what plan they were on and I was charging them $29 a month and I was like this offends me morally at the deepest level and so I didn't change their plan but I went and I just hid that lowest tier from our pricing site so then now that our cheapest plan was $59 a month here are our new trials over time during that period can you tell when I changed the price no you

23:25can't because nothing changed new trials stayed the same how I I just did maybe we seemed like more of a premium product so we're appealing to a higher end of the market it just kept working eventually trials dipped a little bit but our like conversion from trial to paid went way up our average revenue per user of course went way up it was just like and by the way it took me 30 minutes to just like comment out date or delete the HTML that had that like lowest pricing grid and push it to production I didn't like change anything on the back end it was like this like

23:54the ROI on this is just like ridiculous I haven't found anything that's quite as good so if you ignore all the other tips please do that one and I'm running a workshop on this by the way so if you want to talk more and want to raise your prices while you're still at micro Comp which I will help you do let me know just the way is like my goal in life right now used to be I measured my success by the number of people I converted to vim now I'm measuring my success by the number of people I convince to raise their prices alright number two create

24:22an email course this has printed money for us so I run a education site and a lot of people that sign up for it are hoping to get a better job on in Ruby on Rails they they want their first one or they want to improve the one they have and so I wrote an email course called land your dream Rails job a free five day crash course and we and we drip it out over a using drip and people sign up for it and it's a good way I put a lot of work into this by the way like this is this is a solid course this was not

24:52something I dashed off it took a while and I got a lot of feedback from people in the company and so it took some work but once it was up it started converting about ten percent of the people that went into it ten percent is kind of ridiculous like people are probably crushing that bread and probably is laughing at me right now but ten percent like that's an amazing Channel like you don't need a lot of those to make an awesome business I think and so this thing was just nuts for us and it runs totally autonomously automatically it's like marketing automation is a thing and you should use it somebody

25:24talked about flywheels like this this is for us I think the fly was those things like start keep spinning faster but this lease for us was just like free money it's like two weeks of setup and then just now it just goes number three integrate and partner this I sort of slept on this one for a while I didn't I didn't think about this so much and I saw other successful software people doing this and I was like I don't get it not really into it I don't understand why they're doing it turns out this is like an awesome lever you can pull so two quick stories in this one one is I

25:54have a product that is for taking data doesn't matter what's for it never mind we integrated with zapier it was useful to take our data and let people pipe it out through zapier into other apps and so we integrate with zapier and zapier writes a blog post about us and they say this from Apprentice called forum keep it like a forum keep review and they posted on the zapier blog which has ridiculous domain authority and so we get new customers all the time that go see that blog post zapier says nice things about us and they come sign up for us it's just like another free

26:24effectively for each that's gonna continually throw customers at us all the time and it's a win-win for us like zapier wins and we win this is an easy thing to to pitch to people another example with that learning problem the education product I was telling you about I went to a it's like supposed competitor he also ran a ruby education site I said look man our audiences are probably different enough we have different enough customer bases that we should do a deal together we should take a year of our stuff and a year of your stuff and we should knock like 30 or 40 percent off of it and then

26:54we should sell it to people and we'll cross market it and we made a hundred thousand dollars in like four days yeah and as their annual plans like when those things renew they're gonna and that we gave him a discount those things renew at the full annual price so a year from now who knows you might make another hundred and fifty thousand we won't keep all of them of course but like those people gonna renew on annual plans and a bunch of those things were teams which leads for my business has like way higher LTV so this have been huge for us speaking of annual plans you

27:21should have one you should have some you should probably you should consider having it talking about in a few places one is on your checkout page your pricing page this is a great pricing test to run by the way like what if we default to annual plans how much of people will pick will take you up on that and they'll just give you a bunch of cash up front you need to give them a discount like really very common like ten months or twelve months for the price of ten but like all that cash upfront is wonderful another couple great places to try this is I'm

27:47currently I have an app where we send an email on day 86 and say hey looks like you've been having some success with the product that's great glad to have you with us are you interested in switching to annual billing it's good because it makes your accounting stuff easier fewer receipts to deal with and plus you can save some money and by the way we're gonna be billing you in four days on your 90th day anniversary so if you want to do that just let me know soon and I can switch you before we bill you next and then I follow up two days later like

28:14hey just so you know two days later and we're gonna bill you again and this works pretty well also a great time to send an email oh there's a there's an email that prints money which is at the end of the year right around like early December you send an annual offer to like everybody that's on a monthly plan and say hey if you have a bunch of money left in the budget that you need to spend we'll take it if you want to simplify your building buddy yeah this happens if you wanted to like show a loss by spending a bunch of money all of

28:38a sudden we can help you with that that's one of those things where like takes 45 minutes to like get this email out and then just like money money money money money if you like money you know you might like this number five put faces near things you want clicked so why wouldn't you take advantage of the fact that humans have evolved for millions of years to be interested in faces like all of you were looking in my face presumably like we look at faces we're into them we're wired for we can't I can't help it and so put your face and your things you want clicked here's an example my face

29:17is midway between the play button which I'm happy if I click and the subscribe now button which I'm happy if they click so it's like your eye is like right between these two things like both of which are good for me here's another example this is from the drip homepage just pops up unlike in the corner look at that smiling face right next to the thing they want you to look at I would bet you a thousand dollars if you did an a/b test and replace that face with something like a screenshot of the drip interface or the blue logo drip thing that this you would tank conversions but

29:44happily put a thousand dollars on an a/b test faces they're good number six try diving save so on the educational site that I run people often what we we track cancellation reasons and the most common one for us is that people don't have time really super common like they they signup aspirationally they thought they were gonna be doing in a lot like it turns out on I don't quite have time and so about a day after that canceled we send them an email and set that says hey Saul you cancelled no big deal totally happens thought I'd mentioned that a lot of people tell us that when they cancel

30:12it's because they don't have quite enough time and so I was thinking what if we switched you to an annual plan at a big discount that way you've got plenty of time to make use of the product get value from it but you're still saving a bunch of money and a fair percentage of people take us up on this it's probably 5% or so and I'll tell you it is the best feeling in the world to take someone that just churned as now we're 0 and go into stripe and switch them to an annual plan in charge them $150 like that is the best at least for

30:41me but I don't know number 7 start a podcast podcasts are actually very pretty low on time requirements because you can outsource the parts that are time consuming and that suck so you can use something like podcast motor to handle the editing and the note creation and the posting of it and you can kind of get your process to the point where you just show up more or less record for an hour or so and then ship off the recording and you're done is that accurate for like bootstrap lab Jordan you guys use them right podcast motor yeah and it and does the trick yeah you basically show up talking the

31:14mic and you're done yeah Jordan confirms mic probably confirm to you guys same some other thing yeah it's not a huge time requirement and podcasts are great in terms of like a return on investment here's a great thing so say you're a company you're trying to build a little bit of influence you're trying to look cool in your industry and impress people people tend to say yes to podcast interview requests because just like you it's it's easy to do it you show up and you record and you're out there's no prep and so you can often get big names in your industry to come on your podcast and then you can often get

31:40them to tweet about your podcast and like there's a link to your company's website like it's a really good lead gen this is worked really well I do I host a weekly podcast called giant robots smashing two other giant robots and we get a lot of people signing up for pawpaws products that say they found us through the podcast number eight manually onboard customers I love this one if you're working on a new product or if you've never done this before but you probably haven't I highly recommend watching someone sign up for your product live like hop on a call of them have them share their screen to you and

32:08say could you please sign up and just talk out loud as you're doing this it'll blow your mind if you've never done it you will cry because you think your product is very clear and you think all the screens make sense and the text on the buttons make sense and it's not you're going to find out that it's it's not it's confusing people and you will pull your hair out because you'll watch like something like I'm not sure where I go to change the title and you're like on the edit title page and there's the box and there's a thing that says change title like people it's amazing how

32:35little people will read and so this is just this is something that's worth doing I think periodically it's especially especially worth doing in the beginning I launched a product one time where we had an email box on the hey the landing page that said like enter email here and one of the founders will contact you to get you on boarded and people would fill it out into the email and we were responded to quickly I'd do a little research on them and say like who are they and I would write them an email that was obviously not automated and be like hey that's cool you're recognized Boise I'd love to schedule a

33:00thing to get you on board how about this time or this time here's my calendar and it blew people's minds like didn't realize someone was actually gonna respond to me like actually right away and have me do it but they would say yes and so it's like our conversion rate of people that enter their email to becoming new customers was like ridiculous it was like 80% and we learned a ton in the process this is a great way to touch chat tetiz pricing by the way like fiddle with your pricing page and then mailing onboard somebody say how those present look to you does it make sense

33:26number nine home stretch you got two more double down and things that work I love this advice I stole this room heating heating siya here's a quick example so a lot of people think they need to keep finding new tactics and try and sort of spreading out and they get a little tractor to the the new shiny like Jordan's diamonds but that's very common and natural I think but you can often get really good results by just throwing more effort into the one thing that's already working for you here's an example of that friend of mine Christopher gimr runs a service called snappa and snappa is for making images

33:57for social media like if you have a tweet and you want to add a nice little image beneath it with maybe like a pull quote and like a nice background in some colors but you're not a designer you're a marketer so you don't want to use Photoshop so you use his use snap up which is like this nice in browser tool it's very simple and he was doing they acquire most of their customers through content marketing and their best performing blog post he saw was a post about free stock photo sites like the best the 30 best free stock photo sites and so that was working well for him as

34:24driving a lot of traffic to the site and a decent percentage of those people that came eventually became snappa customers and so he said what if I doubled down and so they said he said this blog post is effectively sending people away from us what if we kept them with us and so he built a free stock photo site and threw it at the top of the blog post and said number one the best free stock photo site is this one it's not understand a Patou main is a separate name but like he took this traffic and basically funneled it over into their own property which is optimized to

34:56eventually turn those people into snappa customers so it's lead gen for the business I love that he found a thing it was kind of working double down on it and my last piece of advice is ask for help something I've learned as I have done this more and more and met more people is that the more successful someone is the more likely it is that they're actually really friendly and really willing to help people I'm not quite sure why it is maybe it's correlation maybe it's causation but this just keeps being true people that intimidate me because they're internet famous are like the nicest people when you get to know

35:29them and so and they're almost always willing to help I think it's because they've fought that far and they know what it's like to be struggling they know it's like to be in the beginning phases and they're always willing to help I'm willing to help you that's my Twitter that's my email you can contact me whenever whenever like I'm I respond probably fastest on Twitter which is sad maybe but so if tweeted me email me I'm always happy to help you but other people are too if you meet someone or you you see a speaker here that's like oh man they're doing it like I think

35:56that just like what I want to do contact them ask them questions you'll be probably kind of shocked at how nice and how friendly they are so that's my advice for you thanks a lot for listening so the question was when you do your pricing tests and you get rid of your lowest here do you add one to the other end that's a great idea I haven't so I didn't do that when I ran that test myself because we get almost no uptake on the top end unfortunately almost everyone starts at the bottom tiers which is another thing I need to fix and so I have another test going right now

36:27which is like what if we put in SLA and that top tier what if we put a priority support in that top tier could I didn't I some more people up there but we haven't had a lot of success with that yep one thing to consider that Jordan does that I probably ought to steal is that like Enterprise call us thing where it's like yeah there's a secret price if you're big enough and you should probably add in touch with us yeah that's that's all patio right there cool more questions anything else what's what's the rationale on the info product is the good entry point the rationale is

37:03that SAS is a little bit harder it depends on who you are if you are kind of a badass programmer marketer type SAS might work for you the thing is like with an m4 product you can you can actually sell a lot of an info product pretty fast and pretty early on it's like if you're like my goal is to get you that win really fast so if you're at zero getting that first dollar matters more than anything it kind of almost doesn't matter what it is to me like I think you should start your first scrappy little business as quickly as possible and not worry about making

37:30it perfect and not and not worry about like replacing income just like kind of get process but if it totally turns you off and it doesn't excite you and you're like I got to build this like recurring revenue SAS thing then go do that right that's all the time we have questions guys say thank you to Ben you