Lessons From the Field: 5 Proven Strategies for Faster Growth – Rob Walling – MicroConf Europe 2019

0:00[Music]

0:10five proven strategies for faster sass growth now what's been interesting for me on my journey is it's it's often hard to come up with one or two new talks every year and have it be something novel and unique the easiest way that I found is build a start up a bunch of interesting stuff happens talk about that whole takeaways that other people can apply and that's been like the the best talks that I've done over the years have been acquiring hit tail and ten Xing that and a validating drip than doing a little launch and growing drip and selling drip and what it was like after stock you know you think about it

0:43it's a lot of stories at a certain point what you're doing is no longer interesting to people at micro comp because now I run an accelerator and if I were to tell you all the stuff we've been doing dealing with lawyers and all the other random stuff it's just it's not interesting for me and I'm living it so uh-huh I love I love what I'm doing at tiny seed but you know the struggles are just a different thing so what I decided to do is I talked to I asked permission from the ten startups that we have funded with tiny seed in our first batch or about five months in to the

1:1612-month accelerator program and I said hey are you cool if I share things that are working for you and what the cool part of it is now it's not just a single startup that I'm looking at I can actually extrapolate across ten now an end of ten as you know does not you know a conclusive result make but it's at least a little more information and I can tell you yeah like four or five out of ten of our companies just did this and this is working and here's why and I think that's the point I don't want to throw tactics at you hey cold email go

1:51try that you've already heard it but I know that cold email is not working in certain verticals and I know that it is working in others and I'm gonna do my best to try to explain why such that you can say hey maybe I should do that now or maybe I shouldn't yeah so a lot of tactics get thrown around and this is a good book traction by Gabriel Weinberg but you can go through this book and you can get 18 or 19 marketing ideas and you can go through SAS marketing essentials by Ryan battle you can get 18 or 19 marketing ideas and pretty soon you wind up with a list that

2:23looks like this and I've been there and most of you are probably here right now and I had to cut a bunch of off of this if you can imagine but the idea here is my talk is not I'm not trying to just give you this list or I'm not trying to add you know 10 things to your list I'm trying to help you maybe pick one strategy away maybe - that should have at least a little bit of a better chance working for you but first it's a micro comp tradition and I really liked Andy's Andy's talk that he kind of stumbled upon the micro Nam tradition tradition

2:56of looping his family and but these are my three kids this is my why and this is why I've you know along with my wife who's on the picture because she didn't want to make it to the rescreening of Return of the Jedi what that who doesn't want to yeah so we they rescreened it at at a local theater it was so cool I wanted to go to Empire Strikes Back it's the best one yeah all right yeah the kids wanted they think Jedi because the Ewoks are stuff it was it was it was rough but these these are my kids these are my why and my other why is I'm not

3:29sure why Princess Leia is so she really she was like that in all the pictures it's like she didn't want to be there or something but I'm not sure I cuz Princess Leia smiled in the movies right so all right so let's dig in so five strategies and then we get to go down and watch a sunset toast the sunset so the first strategy that several of the companies in Tennessee to be using is integration marketing first time I ever heard someone integrating not just for the value to the customers but as a marketing approach was a guy named Ruben Gomez who runs a bid sketch and in 2009

4:05nish 9 or 10 if he integrated with Basecamp and I was like you run proposal software and I guess the project management but like how much value is this he's like you know there's some value but the real value is that I got them to agree to promote my landing page and they're gonna mention it in an email and I said that is the best idea ever can I steal it and he said you have of course so we didn't really have a name for it and it obviously it's pretty simple I said let's just call this I'm gonna call the integration marketing and I started yapping about on the pod

4:31passing stuff but the key here is integrations can be super powerful powerful for retention if your customers use it but integrations are one of only two marketing approaches that provide both traffic and value to your existing customers because if I run AdWords I can drive traffic that doesn't provide value to my customers if I do SEO I can get more traffic but it doesn't provide value the one other marketing approach I know you're wondering about um its content marketing bottom of the funnel content marketing because of that can drive traffic and also educate your customers on how to use your product and be better at it but integration

5:11marketing is some I'm gonna talk about right now and I'm a bunch of the founders are using it to success so I'm gonna talk through how I think about it and how I've used it to success and then you know what's going on during this talk I'm gonna have a couple things I'm gonna talk I'll have like a screenshot of one of the company's websites and I'll explain what they do and why I think this is working for them and I'm also gonna have several bar graphs that I'm pulling from the sneak sneak preview of the state of Independence ass so we did a survey Microsoft sent out emails

5:43and and we got people to tweet it and we did a survey and we wound up getting fifteen hundred and seventy-six responses which was way I wanted five I wanted four or five hundred like I was like that's a win so all now fifty nine seven six that were not all complete there was about 850 I think there were total meaning filled out every question but the other 700 we can still use for the questions they filled out so the guy we hired a statistician who's been doing this for 40 years and he said when Gallup does these polls if they hit a thousand responses it's 95 percent

6:15accuracy with plus or minus three that's what he told me so I'm super pleased with this now obviously you can't do causation you can do correlation but today we'll just be doing some simple graphs that look like this so this graph I pulled straight out of an Excel spreadsheet this report is nowhere near I mean I just have like 20 graphs total then I pulled a few for today but what we did is we asked all these these self-funded or indie funded SAS companies what are the top two marketing approaches that are moving today that are driving revenue and so you can see SEO is what about 17%

6:51content marketing 16 and a half email marketing is 10% so you see there so integrations is way down the list it's number six and I think that's an interesting data point I think either integrations are too hard to build because they require engineering time whereas other marketing approaches don't or perhaps they're not working for certain folks because I do think they're verticals where it's hard to do it or it's just an underutilized form so when I did integration marketing um after I Ruben and I have this joke and we say I steal all my good ideas from him and he says that that to me but

7:24when I stole the idea from Ruben and started doing it I had one integration with.net invoice which is two thousand eight or nine I had did three integrations when I had hip tail and we did 32 or 33 integrations with trip because it just became a channel for us it was big and what we did was we had five asks and I would drop an email either hopefully to a product person or a founder sometimes it was to support and I'd be like hey we're gonna integrate but the asks that I would put in there and I'd say look this is going to be a mutual thing when we're done we

7:54want to integrate with you our mutual customers are asking here's what we want to do for you would you reciprocate and so two asks that I had or that gives as you can see it is we you know we want to email our list our 5,000 10,000 person email list and you know marketing list we want to write a blog post about the integration we want to put you in our kind of app store integrations list which was just a bulleted list at a certain point on a word or I'm gonna on a web page now we're gonna do an in-app mention we want to tweet it out can you

8:29do those and then what they would come back with typically as well we can do like three of the four or three of the five and we'd say cool we'll do it let's this is a like a joint venture you know it's like we'll write the code and then let's let's mutually kind of scratch each other's backs the bonus the six bonus there is was a webinar and that I would only ask if they were really gung-ho about it and I thought that it would be worth spending the time to to hop on a webinar with them often I knew the founder or I knew the product

8:58person because getting to webinars is you know it's a big deal so with us it worked well it was at certain times for drip was between 20 and 30 percent of our new trials in a given month it was it was a really 15 to 30 I'll say depending on what was going on so it's very successful for us and I'm seeing this happening in the batch and it's super cool and they may not use my exact you know this was kind of my playbook but but one startup is called branch it's a SAS app and it's for it's like continuous integration continuous development for WordPress okay which

9:31really isn't something that's done much with WordPress they they tend to use general tools and so you may have met Peter you may have seen him here he's a continuous integration tool right so the way that I think about who to integrate with which is often the next question is like well so who should I integrate with sometimes it's obvious sometimes it's not as I think about what apps come before me in a workflow and what apps come after it so let's take drip email service provider it sends emails it's like MailChimp if you aren't familiar with drip what comes before you send them emails landing pages so we

10:04integrated with instapage and leadpages and other quick funnels and a bunch of other landing page providers what comes after drip so drip is all about nurturing leads and and getting people warmed and then typically you want them to purchase something so we invent integrated with stripe and PayPal and Gumroad and Sandell and Shopify and all these shopping carts so those were our first now we eventually had other other things like spitting out into a Facebook custom audience and stuff but those were the ones that we just went in so Peter here runs branch which is CI CD for WordPress well what comes after I'm in a CI CD tool I push the button do

10:40your CI CD where does that fit that to well it fits it to a web host and so this is already live Pantheon has integrated with Peter and the crazy thing is you might say well is it Peter he's you know built all this cool stuff he's just one dude and and branches fairly early stage and Pantheon is is one of the largest WordPress hosts it's a very large very well respected and they not only you know said yes let's do the integration but this is a blog post they published a month ago I mean they really they really pushed this so this stuff can work well he got multiple

11:15tweets out of it so I'm proud of what's going on and he's already in discussions with multiple other wordpress house as well another example of this is an app called sim sass and Matt wincing is here you may have seen him he's in the back so since ass is like think of it this way it's forecasting for sass app so it you know a lot of us have our metrics providers you have to write a custom dashboard use bear metrics profit well or whatever to look at your metrics and then they have a little linear extrapolation right but since s is like a very complex model that allows you to

11:48to do detailed forecast so what in his case what comes before since s like how does Sim stats get its data well it needs your mr are your churn it needs all that so what were the first three integrations that that he did there are metrics profit well chart mobile as you would expect because it's a huge you know a show of hands in this room if you have a SAS app who uses one two or three of the apps that we just named for your metrics okay so anyways the the idea there too is his mat just didn't go and build this he got into conversations with them at well one

12:28was at a micro comm one I believe was that LTV con 4 BOS you know he went out he shook the hands at founder and says hey I'm gonna do this this this is a mutual win for us right because I'm gonna forecast and I know that you guys probably need forecast and you don't want to build it because it's really complicated so he integrated he's getting some some good press there and his onboarding is now super slim and the last example for this one is static kit which is if you've heard of a static site movement some folks are getting really you know WordPress can get can

13:00become a heavy tool if you're just trying to throw up a quick web site so there's this whole static site movement and getting stuff in flat HTML and and static kit provides you with the endpoints to have an email forum on now because the static site is literally HTML so there's no functionality so if you want to do email capture or you just want to you know have a contact form as he says or a feedback survey you need some functionality so he's built that and it's a low right now it's a lower end price point but again we sat down we were chatting about stuff and sure

13:29enough one guy sitting coding in his essentially in his spare bedroom is now integrated with Zeit and there's a night net 'la fire like the two big hosts in this space and she tweeted it of a mention in on his podcast insights like well sure we'd love to promote that so his integration went live a few weeks ago now I've shown you examples of some things that went pretty easy that worked so this isn't always easy if I was building an ESP today if I was building dripped today and had no network it would not be easy it's very crowded there's a ton of integrations when I

14:04email leadpages or instapage or instant whatever and and they're stripe they're just like there's already a bazillion things integrated with us so when is this easy well both pulling from the models I just showed you the examples but also other experience I have if you're in a new space like static it it's just static sites are still an evolving technology and there just aren't that many great tools so if you're early it's a lot easier to do this because everyone wants to integrate if you are bringing a new paradigm to a mature vertical so the examples of that are Sims ass which is a mature it's a

14:39new paradigm which is like forecasting is not common in what we do in smaller SATs outs and the mature vertical of course is SAS and same with with branch right because that's CI CD which is a yeah I'm sorry yeah yeah it's a newer paradigm for that vertical WordPress is a mature vertical and CI CDs new to it if you have a good network everything gets easier if you have a large customer marketing list everything gets easier because then you just have it to trade and the other last one is if it bridges a gap for a larger company and fits a hole the best one you

15:11can hear about man is if you know of someone inside a large host or a large SAS app and they're like customers just keep asking us for this and we just we're not gonna build it but we can't or it's too much time and you happen to be able to build it like that's a killer thing because then they'll slot you in they'll recommend you that write the blog post because it it solves a pay point for them and ultimately if being acquired is something you want to do not for everyone but if it's something you want to do this is how you start doing that you know you'll walk in there and

15:39pretty soon they're like wait a minute he's doing this for four or five webhost I only want to do it for us so that's the end of that one that's the longest one of afternoon by the way and since I talked fast and I don't tell jokes during my talks I am have a couple short intermissions just kind of mix things up sorry to take a drink of this straight vodka I mean water here and this child will be telling the jokes for me they're not good you're in a concrete room when the saw in the table what do you do I don't know what do I do

16:16the answer is you saw the table in half two halves make a whole climb out though

16:27you're in a concrete room with the table in a mirror how do you get out I don't know how do I get out you look into the mirror you see what you saw and you grab the saw you saw the table on half - how's Michael you climb out the hole this guy's got swagger yeah aside from him wearing a shirt that ladies and gentlemen fin walling I will tell him I'll tell him you applauded he he is now 13 and we'll hear from him a little later - but he's wearing a shirt that's not very TV friendly I just I just noticed okay let's cover the next two before that

17:06next intermission I know yo I'm looking for to the intermission so I think y'all are too so strategy 2 is called email and this is like I mentioned early on like I'm not gonna sit here and tell you do cold email we all know that but like when is it working and when do we think it's not the thing is is all these tactics especially traffic driving tactics they have a half-life they work for a while and then everyone does it and then they work less or it gets really hard to do an SEO organic search is going to it let's assume forever assuming Google doesn't just have ten AdWords and pushes

17:36to the second page like it feels like they're gonna do but realistic realistically it just gets harder and harder right that's that's what I mean by this it is the same exact tactics that I used to rank in 2006 they don't work anymore unfortunately so things like you know keyword stuffing and your footer remember when this work that was that was fun and then hub pages we do anyone ever post an article to any of these places yeah I was I knew Alex again yeah anyone ever posed 500 spun articles did yeah so this was stuff that used to work and it frankly just stopped overnight because they stopped their

18:09algorithm but there's a whole list of stuff that has worked for a while and then it just becomes a less and less effective and I think of you know plutonium uranium these these radioactive things they have a half-life of like in a million years and it'll be half as if half as radioactive and another billion it's a quarter another million it's an eighth and blah blah blah so in startups it's a little shorter than that it's not a million years it might be two three years so this is a list I threw up wait threw up that was a weird thing this is a list I had I had on a slide at

18:40my micro comm talking six months ago in the US and I walked through it all and I won't do that here because it's not the point but I was just that going back through my notes and podcast and I was thinking about approaches and when they came across my radar kind of in our community and so you can see like split-testing I did a talk at BOS actually in 2008 and people relax blood testing what is this thing you know and it wasn't that it didn't exist because internet marketers and info marketers were using it but startups we just weren't thinking about it that way and

19:09email marketing became popular and da's and all that but you can see the first time I heard about cold email and first time I got a cold email was early 2012 now I really realized predictable revenue came out I think it in late 2011 so it's not as if you know it would didn't exist before then but that's really when I from 2012 over the next couple years I just I think we all saw it ramped up big-time and I would argue it's less effective today than it was seven years ago as most tactics and so in the marketing category back to that same screenshot I

19:40showed you early or cold email is still number four it's at about nine % it looks like so where is cold email working today in the companies that I know of in my end of 10 that should expand Oakley next year it's 20 or 20 or 30 so I should may be able to make these these talks even and you know even better but one place it's working is with SAS not called gather and as you can see visual spec management for interior designs and architects and they're sending cold emails and they I don't know what the exact numbers were but tripled quadrupled the number of

20:12demos they're getting and now they're working on you know trying to close those so it's working for them client rock which a lot of you may know Brian marble who's been a multi time microphone attendee and this just for lawyers so it's intake for lawyers and he's sending emails he's getting people on the phone and then trying to figure out you know what to build to make him happy and Riaan be there's another one I had David Heller on the podcast who's at once or twice I had him on the podcast once to talk about Enterprise sales and the struggles he was having and they're actually doing quite well but his

20:45struggle was trying to you know cut the lead time of enterprise sales and cold emails working for them so we do have three examples here of places where it's working pretty well so the as I talked to these folks and I talked there are other people in the batch who are trying and it's not working right it's just you're not getting ROI and the big the biggest thing I see is if everyone's already inundated with it it's not working so are you in a vertical where everyone's getting a bunch of email maybe maybe lower this on your priority list if you're in a vertical like architects maybe you're left out on this

21:15one you know cold email can can be the thing and it's amazing when you have five or ten thousand total addressable market five or ten thousand companies in that in the US or in you know the world because you can just even if that was pretty easy and any man so maybe use blue tick so strategy number three is pricing and it's been crazy how many pricing conversations we've had in the batch we do weekly calls and it just seems like every week every other week there's some some conversation about raising reworking figuring out what's working what's not and I'm not just gonna say raise your prices although I

21:51am gonna first save raise your prices but we've had a company in about to do that twice in the first five months and they're thinking about doing it a third time and so back together which I just mentioned in to respect management so when they joined the the cohort within the first month I did a call with with them Brian and Scotty who run it and their pricing was 39 bucks further cheapest and it went up from there and I was like no dude 39 this is not isn't not enough guys you know and you're always nervous because it's like well we got some pricing objections they were

22:26there was serving kind of a lower end of the market where they were individuals and so they raised it I believe up to 79 and they realized that while the solo founders were kind of moving away that it was a it was a signal that the tool was better and so they started you know moving upmarket they had to build more features and such then they raised it again it's another lowest one is 99 and we were just talking we had a little short tiny seed retreat before Mike recalled and he was like I think I'm gonna double it I want our bottom end price to be 200

22:54bucks maybe 250 and so they're gonna try it again and this is a kind of thing of it's risky it's super scary it's super stressful but when it works you know you think about let's say they've never touched the pricing forty bucks versus 200 bucks if they make it and it's a 5x so you could be at 2km RR you could be a 10k ever are it's like huge huge massive leverage here so if you have never raised your prices it's a micro comp même at this point but you know what an example of folks who are still ratcheting that up the other thing though that I don't think we talked

23:25about enough with pricing is just reworking that pricing so again an example this company called lode stir and it's run by Andy here you'll know him he's one of the few people here is taller than me I think he's like six six and it's a load testing for web apps so you sign up for load ster you have your app and you say all right pointed out this thing and tried to take my website down and see where it fails right before I go live with it and so when he joined the batch he has his great price points so if you can't see it it's like $300 for the low end

23:59six hundred thousand and then let's talk there was a great price points his churn is is quite high and the reason is that people sign up for load testing they load test for two months and then they say I'm not gonna need this again until I put another site live said to cancel some people do it throughout the year but other teams don't so he was noodling on it and he had some he already had some ideas about it but he sit in the last five months he's tweaked his pricing and he now has a load stir fuel which is basically pay-as-you-go and it's a trip if you

24:33look at MailChimp they have pay-as-you-go and a campaign monitor used to I don't know if they still do it but it's pay-as-you-go and that's almost an anima 2 mr r and sass right we don't want the one-time so far this is this experiment is working for him and now we introduced this third thing and you can see there's tabs at the top right the unlimited jar on the right that's just the sass that showed the first and then loads to fuel is there and these fuel plans basically are like t-mobile like they carry over your minutes so you pay 79 bucks a month for a thousand instead

25:04of 119 for a thousand so it's cheaper and if you don't use it all it just carries over in your balance gets bigger and bigger and bigger as long as you're a customer you keep it so it's creative right we don't see this often and the big when he brought it to the batch and and and in our and myself and we were like it's like twelve pricing tiers like this is complicated are people gonna wander off and that was it and we said look and he was an agreement like let me push this lag and I'm gonna put hot jar or whatever and I'm gonna see what the

25:31conversion rates are like and if it works I'm cool and if it doesn't I'm gonna undo it you know I'm gonna have the undo command Z on my server and I'm gonna go back to you know just the basics so so far it's working it is still early about love the creativity and thinking about how to get people you know if your app has high turn how do you get them to maybe have a different paradigm around it the other one last example on this pricing thing is an app called popsicle and it's after school registration software and I love we love this vertical cuz who and I right mind

26:04would go go into this I'll talk about why he went into it later but when when he joined the batch yeah when he you think you mean the first month of the batch she had just flat pricing it was three percent for everyone and that worked really well he was serving public schools and there's reasons this works that I don't have time to go into about three percent and within the first month he was like because we said we loved that three percent model because the schools don't have to pay anything out of pocket is getting schools to approve budgets super-hard takes a year takes all this

26:32stuff first thing he did was he's like alright so I'm gonna have a $99 a month minimum I'm gonna do a $1.00 per child and I'm gonna have a small transaction fee of a half a percent that's a subtitle there and I freaked out and I was like what but I do whole model it's a three percent thing that you know there's no budget needed and he had thought it through he we talked for an hour and he's like here's what I thought and I kind of tried to poke holes it and he said you know I'm really we're getting a lot of private schools and the

26:57private schools actually like this model better for reasons that aren't that important but he knew his customer and he actually saw his customer base shifting he saw more opportunity here and he had to rework he's pricing and this has been a success for him so that's number three last intermission same kid here we go I was looking at a box of Ticonderoga pencils and it said the world's best pencil on the outside so I was wondering how can they be number one if they're always number two number two pencils all right he made it up I know it wasn't very good he also had one he had one

27:40about micro golf that was funny that I didn't include he made it up yeah what is the bacterial founder what conference do they like and house like I don't know what micro comm because bacteria is Smallville what's a bacterial for you miss the angle it it has to mean something you know all right strategy for and I promise he's a good shorter we're using sign up friction this is something that that it's interesting to be real touching startups and evolve a startup for as long as I have because my stance used to be very strong and I was very opinionated about always asking for credit card upfront and my stance on

28:14that is changing it's okay I'm not a politician or people would like quote me back to myself but so again back to that state of independent sass we said excluding freemium with the forever free plan do you offer a free trial and so 60 was that 64 percent said yes it's like okay so then there's another 20 percent that is freemium so it's about it let's say eighty four percent you can try the software for free without paying basically the trippy part that I did not expect is seventy three percent of them do not ask for a credit card in advance I wish we were doing the

28:54survey ten years ago because I think this would have been flipped everybody asks for a credit card at one point and then it just slowly the barriers drop now it's not in every space and it's not you know you get the idea V outs but this is a trend and I'm curious to see we're gonna do the state of independent asks every year and I wanna I'm curious to see how these things change so removing the credit card for treat free trial if I was still running group today if I was launching a SAS today I would personally seriously seriously consider not having a credit card and this comes

29:21from someone who I can point to bazillion times on a podcast for and said my default is always ask for the credit card and I'm at the point where I actually think reducing the friction and owning the lead is is more important one example casteau so many of you know Craig Hewitt from the rogue startups podcast he's part of the tiny seed batch he runs podcast hosting and they up until 48 days ago if I'm doing my math correctly I was a September 2nd I don't know what day it is but yeah so as of September 2nd they removed their credit card and the interesting thing is it's a lot of

29:56work to do that as the experience you don't just hide the credit card page because you have to rework onboarding after rework oh you're at the end of your trial I can't just say hey it's about to charge it's not on now and your credit card you have to prompt to me update so there's bunch of stuff it's not trivial to do this but he did it and he was frankly free as I would be nervous about it you know anxious about it so if you're gonna do it here's kind of the how I'm how I'm seeing it pan out and how I've seen it pan out for years

30:21frankly because with drip we had we didn't remove the credit card but we had we asked for your email address and password and then we had a credit card form and there were two separate steps and we saw about 50 it depend on the traffic but it was around 50 to 60 percent dropped off when they saw the credit card so I knew that we could double our a number of trials if we drop you know the credit card requirement more people would have made it in now more than would've been unqualified but that's that's kind of a point so my experience two to three X your

30:53trial count when you do this but now it's on you to activate them because if you don't activate them they don't automatically extend their trial which is essentially what if you ask for credit card upfront and they don't activate and they get to the end of their 14-day a 30-day and they get charged they haven't activated they're kind of just extending their trial as a payment trial really and I do that sometimes or it's like 20 bucks I'm just gonna do it gives me another 30 days and I'm gonna come back to it in this case it's not getting them activated they're just not gonna enter their card you know because

31:22they don't wanna it's it's too much effort this tactic is exceptional if your primary user does not have a credit card so selling to developers as one example and it's developers on teams of twenty people well developers wants to get started with your little CI CD tool or your little you know whatever you have and they don't have a credit card their boss does or their bosses bosses and they're not gonna go around asking for that so in this case I actually there's a lot there there's I think there's a lot of leverage in this particular case and as I've already said I think it becomes

31:55table stakes if most of your competition especially isn't asked for it like if you look around and six out of ten seven out of ten enter competition isn't it's time to start thinking how where is this puck going you know the markets gonna get there how am I gonna how am I gonna stay ahead of it this was the forever free plan one because I also think freemium is becoming more popular so about 20 percent have forever free and it doesn't mean forever free I mean no time limit I mean you it can be a usage limited trial like you know you can upload X amount of

32:26podcasts or you can you know it's like it expires at some point based on on stuff but 20% so freemium which I know several founders doing at Rubin from bid sketches now our launching doc sketch and he's doing freemium I know he chose doing fYI and there are two or no there are three companies in our batch that are about to do it actually therefore but since I haven't done it I don't want to talk about it because it's kind a competitive thing they're doing if you're gonna do free ma'am here's here's the tough part with freemium I also think the puck eventually is gonna get here these

33:01trends just change but if I was a sasquatch AAB I wouldn't do for him from the start unless everyone else is doing it because it's a it's a long-term play you're just you're pushing revenue down the line and if you need that 8k or that 10,000 you know your dollars to quit fastest way to get there I think is to is to not do freemium but the longer term view you'll get more revenue you know over time activation of course remains crucial Patrick Campbell from profit Wells says the beauty premium is you own the lead because now they're in your software and they're gonna hang out

33:36until they activate as opposed to it next time they look for it oh my trial expired well now I'm gonna go back to the whole you know all your competitors and figure out who's the best if they already have the thing you know that account in your app you on the latest entually you know is also unfortunately easier to do early because when we went to freemium with drip we luckily we who had been acquired by a venture-backed company because we went to a $1 plan and then we went to a free plan and it nuked 20k of MRRR just wiped it off because people drop down and nets that's a

34:06bummer you know and it wasn't something I could stomach as a bootstrapper myself but um this is where it's easier to do early and when we went freemium it if I recall it's it was around 3 4 X our trial count which was already pretty substantial okay home stretch here strategy 5 is a question mark a weird it's a backwards s question mark and the fantasy the the inch fascinating thing is that was looking at this list and I was saying what has everyone been doing what I've been working on what's the big struggle what's the big challenge whatever been advising them on 8 out of

34:4210 founders have done this 8 out of 10 so there were nine well no there were almost nine hundred applicants and tiny see the first batch we picked 10 and so I'd like to think that these ten are pretty that they're going places you know that they that we have some like the success in in store for them right that we do we pick pretty well an 8 out of 10 of them and I could argue 9 ten of them they built on past experience this is not the first app in there in this sphere this is not the first time they're using this knowledge and I'm going to walk you through I

35:17don't know five or six examples branch all these we've already seen but branch remember again it's continuous integration continuous deployment for WordPress well Peter also has a wordpress plugin that he built before this is called WP pusher which is just deployment it's not continuous it's totally different snot a SAS app but he has an audience he has revenue he has a bunch of stuff that he then was like wait a minute I'm just gonna parlay that you know and so now branch he's not going in cold if I were to try to build branch I wouldn't have any of the stuff he has Matt was sim SAS

35:53so mmm Matt's prior startup was called risk pulse and guess what it was it was forecasting for weather in logistics so you can imagine huge company like Walmart has all these trucks going all over and weather is a catastrophe for them right it knocks you know a truck over or that you can't drive on a road or whatever so it predicts the weather and a predicts where you should be where well you know where you should be when and it's successful it's a multi seven-figure SAS app that he now has a CEO running and so he took that forecasting knowledge I'm gonna do four SAS now right same thing so I imagine

36:27again let's say I was gonna start since house I would be at a severe disadvantage because I don't know the core you know I can learn it but I'm gonna be a year behind mat if not more because the learnings he's building on his experience gather husband-and-wife team know what and the husband is is Brian and he's a UX designer developer wife is was an interior designer looked if the interior design so she took her knowledge they put into the app so they would have an advanced you know each of these things it's like what's your advantage here right client rock Brian brands wife is a lawyer but also he

37:02started a maze law which is on SAS app in the legal space built it up sold it for a small exit couple years ago now he's building another one popsicle why would you go into the space well Gary the founder started one of the largest after-school man meant companies basically services in Los Angeles any franchise tip so he built up this whole business sold it and he was building software inside of it at the time I believe and because there was no software for this as you can imagine and then he wound up selling that and he's like well this now so he has that advantage Craig with Cass toast if you

37:37heard him on the podcast recently you know you're seeing the pattern it's like Craig had a podcast he had a wordpress plugin for podcasts he has a product a service that edits and publishes podcasts should I build a SAS app or should I go build a SAS app for lawyers you know it's like he you have all this stuff and this to be honest was a big mistake yeah now that wouldn't be good big mistake I made early on is if you look at my early days I had all these disparate apps that I owned and none of them tied together and it wasn't until I

38:01was like hey I'm gonna do hit tail and parlay my SEO knowledge and then I'm gonna do drip which parlayed my email marketing knowledge and you know this community that I built and now and that was successful and now it's like why why do you think I'm doing tiny seed because it just fits that I'm building on my own experience as well helping founders building communities trying to rise the raise the tide of all of us so a couple more slides the back to the state of independence a survey we asked have you I forget the exact wording in question but it was like have you started you've told us a bunch of

38:39metrics about your current SAS app have you started a prior company or pride like a software product and almost 60 percent said yes and the thing I was which is cool more than half but the thing I was surprised by is if you add up so this is the revenue of like your prior company how much revenue did it achieve right so 15 percent started one but it never got any revenue so but for between 10,000 and a million monthly revenue for their prior company I had it this up the other day and it's it was like 50 something percent so it's a substantial amount of folks are coming

39:14back and at the bat again and that's where I say often like don't go into this thinking in terms of weeks and months like this is a long journey in terms of years I think that's evidence both by them you know the batch founders that I've shown you but also by these folks that I'm seeing from from the independence house survey so why do I think this matters why do I think building on experience is important so it comes back I have a stair-step approach where I say you build the small thing and you parlay it and you build up build up why is that helpful and so I

39:47came up with this terrible acronym called saner because it's more sane to do that I don't know why it's just it works with the loot numbers so this is exactly what I experienced and when I've seen other founders for the most part experienced when I was trying to get started as a developer in 2005 and trying to build my own stuff I was super like not self confident about it I didn't want rejection I didn't want it to fail and as I had these little successes along the way I've built self confidence in me that I could do it and I could make a thousand a month and then

40:15I could make three thousand month and then four thousand so self confidence you can build an audience much like branch and push WP pusher right now he has however many thousands of downloads of a wordpress plugin you have your audience saying with Craig with Casto she has an audience that can feed into it you build your network it works super important as I said if you have a good network you could start drip today but if you don't and gell the integrations and stuff if you don't it's it's a lot harder experience just making decisions getting your gut better and hopefully some runway if you've done one

40:46two or three of them get a little money get low revenue and dollars in the bank always makes it easier so saner I got if someone helped me with that and make that better so anyways I think pretty soon ooh yeah it's almost beach time it's almost beach o clock and I for one I'm gonna enjoy the sunset with a little beer at hand but that's it for me today thank you [Applause] you [Music]