Building Things to Help Sell The Things You Build – Patrick McKenzie (Patio11) – MicroConf 2013

0:00[Music] how do you hello everybody my name is Patrick McKenzie perhaps better known as petit eleven on the internets and i went back and looked at my last two micro cop talks and it seems like I always do a kind of sad of me fish outta water story from Japan to start them off so I think I well this is more of a happy fish out of water story so if you remember a few years ago I was a salaryman in central Japan and really not liking life and due to this whole entrepreneurship thing I was able to quit that but even after quitting after seven months of the worst

0:30man over time held that I'd ever been put through I had severe burnout bordering on clinical depression and a good friend of mine came up to me one day it's like Patrick you need to take a break from it all you know stop trying to make no headway on your business like you've been doing for a while get out of the house meet some people get back and connected to human life she'd come to a barbecue with me and I said yeah sure I'll come in the barbecue day of the barbecue rolls around and I woke up and depression is a funny thing like and maybe clinical depression is a little

1:01strong but it was getting close to that I woke up and I'm like I just can't get out to a car to go to the barbecue he was kind of picked me up at my door I said I call him up I'm like Keith I can't make the barbecue free today I'm sorry I'm just I'm feeling sick and he said f that you're coming and so Keith drags me in the drags me into the car we go out an hour and a half to the barbecue I'm kind of miserable I get to the barbecue you know you're gnashing and sausages still kind of miserable and then I see her and her is Miss Reiko

1:31she modest she's sitting in the back of it sitting in the back of the room she was the most beautiful woman I had ever laid my eyes on and we got to talking a little while in addition to being the most beautiful woman I'd ever laid laid my eyes on she was the funniest happiest woman I'd ever talked to and we got to talking about a lot of things business life quitting the day job and philosophy and she mentioned my favorite philosopher very well known as Japan is B Beyonce and and so I'm like this is one of those moments where your life flashes before your eyes like I'm about to do the most

2:09awkward thing I've ever done in my life but for her I will do it we were sitting in a quiet park in the middle of central Japan surrounded by other Japanese people who don't know me and I just stood up you know the geeky white guy very introverted baritone it's like I'm going into full-on diva mode here I'm up in the club we just broke up I'm doing my own little thing and I did the full all the single ladies song for three minutes you should think that was awkward like five seconds to go imagine doing it three minutes in front of 200 people you don't know and to have no reason to like

2:44you and could potentially call the cops to report a drunk and disorderly foreigner but a couple years like uppal years later I asked so when was the moment when you knew that this was going to happen and she said about the time when you said put her ring on it and that did happen last year so that is my funny story

3:07thanks very much a funny story over with now we're going to talk a little more about software and business and whatnot you can follow the slides at this bitly link right here if you're in the back you if you're in the front and don't need it I'd suggest you know keeping looking to Meeks presentation as part of that presentation I guess so my original business I'm not gonna belabor it over the heads because the 50% of the room who's been here for two years this heard enough about bingo to round out your life if you think you're bored of it I've been doing it for eight years oh

3:37god I never want to talk about bingo again ever but I'm being ricard creator makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers and it's the business that kind of accelerated me out of the day job and two wonderful opportunities like this and like Jason Cohen mentioned in this talk bingo card crater is doing business on hardmode because you should not do a b2c business as a microphone or you should definitely target business-to-business have so much higher lifetime value you'll have such an easier time selling it easier time supporting it ask me about all the times when a teacher email Mises and emails me in a panic and says

4:11you've taken away the blue googles and I can only access the green Google's I like the blue Google's better you need to give them back it's not happy so um now there have been other people up here who have millions and millions of dollars in revenue and I think some of you folks in the audience who are just getting started on your entrepreneurial journey or maybe haven't even launched yet are thinking wow I can't really relate to somebody who sold for businesses and has multiple millions of dollars of Revenue every month so we were all there at once just like you like 2006 did six months work on bingo

4:43card creator you might remember the story that made like a thousand dollars wasn't even a blip on my you know annual tax return next to the underpaid Japanese seller man day job or is making less than 30k a year bTW if it wasn't totally obvious from the last two years don't take a job as a salary man a Japanese company so not to repeat what we went over the last couple of years but over time gradually grew bingo card creator to the point where it was like crater II and the approach to the day job and I'm like I can finally get out of this hellhole and start doing things

5:12that I actually like so one of the things that I did after quitting the day job was started my new business we haven't talked about that much yet so we're gonna talk a little bit of pop ointment reminder point reminder does phone calls to the customers of professional services businesses to tell them please make your appointment on time I did one wrong thing with appointment reminder and I want to tell you about this so when I told penalty that I was going to start with this business he's like it's the most passionate thing in your life optimizing the scheduling at you know small doctors offices and I said oh heck

5:43no but it's a great business anyhow he's like don't do it man don't do it you're gonna burn out on it should have listened to Pell D I'm still going forward with this business but I know kind of it's a mistake and it would be 10x where it is right now if I had just listened to penalties so listen the penalty if you're wondering you know of all the niches I could go into should I go for the one that sounds like a better business objective business objectively or should I go for the one that sounds like a solid business but that really I have a burning fire in my belly go for

6:11the thing with a burning fire in the belly so weird thing about me and transparency I've always been super transparent with my numbers except for a point of reminder I've got a like weird kind of semi legitimate reason semi excuse which says that if I ever tried to take investment for it I don't want VCS to like you know be able to look at my growth chart and quote it against me and like discussions so I'm not going to tell you the numbers from appointment reminder today but I will show you some of the behind the scenes stuff for it but anyhow if you've been here the last

6:42two years and seen my maracle comp stuff 2010 and 2011 were pretty good for me quit the day job yay I started doing consulting for a variety of fairly well renowned software companies that had products that were much better than bingo card creator and just trying to make them as sophisticated as bingo card crater is on marketing front like say fog Creek software a few other companies I worked for WP engine for a little bit but yeah 2011 aside from a point a reminder not on screen consulting and bingo card creator where it's at for me 2012 was an excellent year one major reason Rico and I got married

7:21so two things to say about this number one one of the awesome things about being on this journey if you can you know get to the point where you can put your day job is it won't be obvious from the next graph but I took three months off of work like entirely for my wedding for my family coming over to Japan paddling around before going out for my honeymoon and why that and that's one reason to not take investment by the way because if you you know tell your investors at Sequoia hey guys i'm peacing out for three months but i'll be back later they won't exactly react to that with

7:53the awesome you know congratulations on your wedding we expect you to be here at 7:55 in the morning and do 19 hours like all of our other portfolio companies so I'm just my I for lifestyle design running your own business is where it's at and another thing about this so it doesn't look like it but this is the most important part of the presentation and I think this is something we hammer done last year in microcon but I want to mention it again explicitly I don't have kids yet but when I do have kids I want to teach them that in addition to growing up and becoming say a teacher or

8:30a policeman or a doctor these jobs that are obviously socially important they're becoming an entrepreneur and providing value in the world is a righteous and awesome path for them to walk down and that's true and our businesses have many stakeholders you know employees customers vendors that we you know we're providing checks to every month and all of them have a great you know we have a great responsibility towards them to create value and to treat them in a just and honest fashion but more than any of those folks even more than ourselves we have a responsibility to our families that we get into this business to

9:12support them and to ultimately achieve the goals outside of the business it's just a mechanism for living your life not a reason for living your life and when I think of reasons for living my life and why I have this business tied into it to such a degree I like to think of three L's to love to live and to learn and so you should really have those in your business journey if you don't stop figure out whatever you need to fix when I was a salaryman I was not really feeling it I needed to fix that if you don't have it fixed that it will be a

9:43transformative change in your life and that is far far more important and all the stuffs that I'm going to teach you to make you thousands and thousands of dollars with a single mouse click seriously okay so 2012 um after taking the three months off and when that yeah revenue went kind of crazy so this was rescaled from the last graphs the other years I was like you know creator in their approach to the bridge of 80,000 and went up to almost two hundred that was kind of happy especially with two weddings to pay for one in America one in the Japan there's a product here training we're going to talk about that

10:15later my consulting business and bingo Kyra fader bringing up the bottom and of course still not showing appointment reminder so um I have three goals in this talk in addition to the most important thing that I've just already told you number one for the folks who are not launched yet when it inspire you a little bit for the folks who have already launched I want to know do meaningful things for your business and for everybody I want to buy you your ticket to micro craft 2014 and Rob said he wants everyone to come away with three actionable things I've got five stars in this presentation which will

10:50make you several thousand dollars of revenue for less than two hours of work so if you do nothing else please implement at least one of those five stars is one of your actionable things feel free to implement all of them this is the fundamental SAS equation and it's SAS number SAS one and one for the folks who are very into it but some of you folks are just starting out in your journey so I thought I'll say it explicitly the sum of your revenue over any space you want to look at whether that's all of your marketing channels all your customers is the sum of how

11:18much traffic you get times what your conversion rate is throughout your entire funnel times the average revenue per user over 1 minus your churn rate this is very important that these numbers are increases in these are multiplicative ly effective so if like me you suffer from badd business attention deficit disorder and you just have to be working on a different thing every day because you hate you know doing the grind on churn for every day for six weeks in a row if you take each of these numbers and increase traffic by 2x increase in conversion by 2x increase a rpu by 2x and decrease turn by 1/2 the net impact

11:55on your business is 16x improvement in revenue and that for most of you will more or less like 16x profits that's very aggressive by the way like traffic is the hardest to optimize for I talked about this extensively already he had Dave Collins presentation about SEO or earlier Rob's presentation I'll tell you something that I realized after a client told it to me and I hate it but it's true and useful so I will tell it to you anyhow Joel Spolsky said in introducing me to somebody at the company so this is the bingo card kid who figured out that if you're an SEO expert it totally he

12:32didn't use the word raffle stamps but it was a little explicit so I won't say it it totally raffle stamps the value of running your own little small shitty software business and I'm like oh true Oh true so there's that so most of you will not be able to like just push a button and 2x the amount of traffic you're gonna get a conversion rate optimization is actually much easier than traffic optimization believe it or not and you can see my presentation last year on like a bee testing and funnel analytics all of you can do this it's going to take you weeks or months to see

13:02results so I'd encourage you to look instead at optimizing your average revenue per user because many of you can accomplish it with like five minutes of work that you could do today or even during the presentation please don't do that do it later tonight do it later tomorrow do it have to get home whatever and churn rate you can run your own little operation retention like Rob did earlier I'm gonna show you explicit ways to do that okay star number one charge more and I stole this present this slide off my presentation from the last two years and I'm gonna repeat it every micro conf I'm ever invited to because

13:34many of you haven't heard it yet and the rest of you who have heard it many of you haven't listened I didn't listen to my own darn advice until this year so I started to so I don't know if you can see it from here but a reminder used to be at nine twenty nine seventy nine and then there was an enterprise plan which was really calling me cuz I wouldn't let anyone actually sign up for it it's currently at twenty nine seventy nine $1.99 I just totally killed the nine dollar plan and added a $1.99 plan at the top why did I add that extra plan because when I

14:03had people calling me they said I'm just a bit above the you know $79 plan which works out to like 15 appointments a day and if you have you know more than three employees you blow through 15 appointments a day very very quickly and somebody would say I have five employees so we need just a little bit more but not enough to be like a big freaking Enterprise we're not st. Jude's Hospital and going to deploy this across 100,000 desktops tomorrow that could actually happen so what do you have for us Emily I've got nothing I should have something so I made something $199 office plan now let's look at the

14:36appointment reminder sales graph so this is scaled so I don't have actual revenue numbers on here it's scaled at the the month of the first microcon which I think was June 2000 2011 is $1 and then goes up and to the right I want to point you to a big of a jump here $3 to $5 this is actually like my marriage right here so I was actually not working at all during this period and the only thing that happened there was my designer pushing the push the $100 $199 a month plan live to the website which added like two months worth of recurring revenue every month and then you know

15:16continued going in a much more dramatic fashion so charge more okay so lifecycle emails for software-as-a-service Suman businesses we talked about drip email marketing last year yes and I never repeat the same topic in to conference talk so we're going to talk about lifecycle emails which is a different way to use email how's the different than drip email marketing well typically a lifecycle email is not something that like Nathan Barry and Brennan were talking about where you're convincing someone of you're convincing them to trust you and then eventually selling them it's after they're already in the trial or they're in a commercial relationship with you you're going to

15:54send them exactly the right email at exactly the right time tied into their action with your software to push them into some sort of additional conversion with you life's like emails generally require a little more specific application logic and some you know deep thinking into what your funnel looks like and the good part is that's the hard part after you know what the funnel looks like and you you know know where the the points are in your application where you can push somebody a little to left a little to the right and good stuff happens you don't really need to be a copywriting genius forum you don't need

16:26much traffic I've seen people who like have awesome results from lifecycle emails when they're sending out like a number of emails per month that you can count on your hands okay so you heard Jason Cohen mention in the first presentation at micro codfish bought used several tickets to micro con from the next several years but we'll say it again if what was it if cash is king then annual billing is God but what about the atheists in the room who didn't implement annual billing when you started out is it too late no we repent and you can be saved you can send out an email right now to the people who are on

17:00monthly billing and say hey thanks for being such a dedicated reliable customer of us in return for this we're going to give you a free month of the service if you just upgrade to annual billing today it'll cost you blah will reset the clock on your subscription until blah click here to get started and then just put them send them to a page on the website where it repeats that and puts an OK button there this can have conversion rates of between 10 and 25% because people you know some folks who aren't ready to do an annual billing when they're on your pricing page after they've kicked the

17:31tires for a few months and you know they're sending out 200 appointment reminders to their customers every month and their customers are saying this is awesome please I wish every doctor I've worked with did this they're like yeah I'm totally gonna be here next year wait a free month that's free money to me sure boom and they just click the one button and then them clicking that one button means you get 11 or 10 months of cash flow in your pocket right now and depending on what your pricing structure looks like that can be you know so when you work out the conversion rate math here that could be $200 in cash money

18:03for every email you sent by Jamaica contradict it okay so we talked about increasing your average revenue per user how do you do that in a in a way that your users will appreciate but without having to do a whole lot of work so many of you have different plans which are segregated based on some numerical quota right and the idea is let's say you let somebody have 300 appointments a month or 20 gigabytes of disk space or whatever it is and probably if they go over to like you know 305 or 330 you say hey you need to step up to the next plan but consider

18:40Bob Bob is that the $79 plan where he has quota of 300 and he's at 280 appointments so he's within his quota is Bob happy with that at a lot of companies Bob is not happy Bob is a little scared because Bob thinks any day now he could accidentally run over his quota and maybe bob has dealt with people who aren't as wonderful people as you before like say a phone company or something what happens when you run over your quota with a phone company either you get charged like you know six bucks per SMS or they just shut you down and your business folds in the middle of the

19:14night because you pick the wrong thing on a pricing plan two years ago so Bob's a little scared about being you know that close to quota so why don't we send Bob an email and say hey Bob we empathize with you we know you're running up close against your quota why don't you upgrade and get a little Headroom so you have the peace of mind of knowing that this will always be around there for you so I did this at a consulting client so this is by the way a for those of you who like doing consulting this is a good story of something you can do at your consulting

19:47clients and feel free to like steal this exact thing into it for them and make them a lot of money 4:30 o'clock rolled around at a consulting client and they said all right we're pretty much done for the day I said well we got 30 more minutes let's see the most money I can make you in 30 minutes so I went over to their lead engineer and I said I want to run you I want you to run me a sequel query and they have like three numbers that if you go up you have to go to the next next thing I said tell me anyone

20:11who's within 20% of quota on any of you three numbers and spit me out a CSV file got the CSV file was a lot of folks I said all right now I want you to make three plans that are your current you know higher tiered plans but just was a bit of a discount built in and I'm gonna spend 30 minutes writing out an email that basically writes itself saying you were on the silver plan you should upgrade to the gold plan because you're losing 20% of your quota if you do you know you'll get headroom and because we want to make this an easy decision before you will

20:41kick you at 20% discount for life and then just push the send button on that email that made them thousands of dollars in that last 30 minutes the day that they were just going to throw away and in terms of like client relations do you think anybody remembers anything else we did that week we made them a lot more money than thousands of dollars but all the CEO talks about when she talks to other CEOs about you should hire this kid is dude we just had 30 minutes and he made me like $6,000 by pressing a button for many of you this is like plural percentage of revenue with 30

21:14minutes at work so do it by your chicken to my comp next year okay so the title of this talk is like building systems that help you sell the things you're already building I'll encourage you if you don't already have it to have a little dashboard where you do your customer support activities that just shows you everybody who signed up for your service and some level of signal and how much they're actually using it so for example here's just something I grabbed off my dashboard and then waited out all the names because that would be kind of bad you can see here's somebody signed up for the small business plan

21:45and he is using it pretty heavily a hundred fifteen appointments a month and it can you know it can be an appointment for me or whatever the metric of interest is Neera business and doesn't use the recurring feature at all and he's billing and his next charge is on May 28th this is something as I'm doing you know answering my email and doing routine customer support routinely looking at this and just kind of seeing patterns out of the corner of my eye and doing a report like this takes like 20 minutes and Ruby on Rails and then you get it forever it'll be the first thing

22:14you see every day when you wake up and start doing customer support emails just putting in dashboard and then even if you only have a few customers you know you don't have enough to do a statistically significant AV testing but if you've got five customers on this dashboard that's five little data points that you're looking at every day and your brain is making connections one connection you might make is so I have one part of the dashboard which so is active trial accounts and obviously this is just a sample versus canceled trial accounts this is way way small text I apologize but the thing that you see if

22:46active trial accounts people who have given me the credit card and not yanked it away from my hot little they're using 158 appointments this month 149 appointments this month and if canceled trial accounts didn't schedule an appointment didn't schedule an appointment scheduled appointment scheduled 11 appointments didn't schedule an appointment uh-huh so if you never you okay this is obvious in retrospect but if you never use appointment reminder to remind people of their appointments apparently you don't want to pay me money for it cool so how do I increase usage of appointment reminder which will make them not yank their credit card out of my hot little

23:18hands and let that revenue go up so first you create a month it's kind of like a model of your customers decision-making process when they're going through your trial mine is really really simple they start the trial and then one of two things happens either they succeed with it they get their 120 clients a month in the software works because it works and they are so happy when the month rolls around because I've saved them thousands of dollars or they get confused about the software or maybe they can't get it set up maybe they can't figure out how to port their own practices number into it whatever my

23:49fault but they don't get in to scheduling all their appointments so I figure how can I make it more likely that they succeed with this rather than they get confused so I have an email sequence that goes out during my trial day zero you know the day they sign up they get the same email that somebody gets from every service they sign up for thanks for signing up for it blah you know it's obviously generated by a computer and most people don't actually read it but on day three and it's probably a little late I send him an email coming for myself we go through all of these in detail say hey I'm the

24:20CEO if you have any questions write me an email always write back on that day 20 the computer runs a little heuristic and says are they really succeeding with this trial if yes sell them on going to the full version at the end of the month if they're not succeeding try to rescue the trial because trials that cancel are worth nothing to me obviously right I mean I on day 27 I just tell them just FYI three days from now I'm gonna charge your credit card I want to be totally aboveboard about that let's go into the emails and in detail and again don't stray strain your eyes too much my copy

24:50is not Joanna's copy it's not really all that exciting I just in my welcome email the auto-generated thing establish expectations for the trial and I told them what I want them to do with it because people if you just throw them like we talked last year if you just throw them into a piece of software they don't know how do I get value how this I tell them you know what you want to do right now well first you should take the tour that's built in the software but in addition in that put in your own number one of your clients appointments ask me if you have any questions and then give

25:17them a little bit of a getting started guide I also say by the way and the founder and CEO I know you could be buying this from a billion dollar a year company and if you ever talk to them you'll be talking to some outsource customer service worker in some low-wage country who can't actually do anything for you but if you talk to me I can fix anything I've got the magic rail stuff and please write me at any time so the third day email my little personalized welcome email you notice this this has a nice design and by nice I mean I bought it from ThemeForest for

25:50I kid you not two dollars but I send a non designed email which looks like I just typed it into a computer my personalized welcome and it just says hey I'm Patrick I saw you signed up for the trial a few days ago I'm the CEO of the company and I run development on the product if you have any questions email me it's styled to look like I'm sending it one to one even though I know never lied to the customer but giving them the expectation that if they write back to me I will write them back isn't a lie right announce my availability now it's

26:19come for an email some friends slash internet buddies I know will say at the bottom of this it's sent from my iphone and that's a lie so I don't do that but a lot of folks do have this automatically sent by the computer to not be like 30 minutes to the dot after they sign up like 27 minutes to say oh I'm really you know on top of it and since I'm 14 hours away in Japan I don't really love doing that cuz most of the time they'll email in bit in the back of the night and I'll get to them in the next morning but for many of you I think

26:45that's a good choice so that day 20 which is honestly kind of late I could probably move it up a little bit and when I do the check to see if the free trial is going well if it's going really well I use their own data against them Phone unquote I figure out how many appointments that they've already scheduled for this month and how many I've successfully reminded and how many no-shows I've saved them and I say based on my predictions and being the appointment reminder guy and knowing how this works across a couple hundred companies now we've saved you $350 worth of staff time and predictably

27:18about $600 worth of Revenue bTW a week from now we're going to charge you 79 bucks and then I just ask for the sale I'm like you should probably you know do that because it's gonna make you look like a hero and I should probably give an immediate incentive in this email for you know we're gonna charge you a week from now anyhow but if you want to you know step that up to today I'll give you like Erica said a 30-minute consultation on how to run your business better because I'm good at small business or whatever whatever the appropriate thing is for your audience this email grants money but

27:52unfortunately not all trials go well what happens if they don't do anything in the trial they gets the day twenty I try to figure out why it isn't going well so first I say hey I'm look and I'm totally non-judgmental here I say look I'm a small businessman myself I know sometimes I just get so busy and don't have time to do one more thing so if there's anything I can fix for you like you got stuck at some point and getting it into an boarding just tell me what it is if this is just a bad month for you and you need to come back to it

28:23later tell me I will extend your trial by a month for free there's no reason a one-month trial has to be just a one-month trial I mean you you're the captain of your own ship right if it's a two month trial for anybody you say it is but it's a two month trial for anybody you sit you say it is and I don't have great uptake two on that you know I saved maybe one out of five trials this way but one out of five trials going from zero value to me to several hundred dollars of value to me is I went right this is also a great

28:49opportunity for customer development because if somebody says yeah you know I I kicked it around a little bit but isn't really what I need say oh great I'm sorry about that because I wanted to create value for you but can I ask just for helping out everybody else what did you need and maybe they weren't looking quite for appointment reminder maybe they were looking for that thing somebody else saying was I really need follow-up after the appointment and I could inform directions for later product growth or for me fixing problems within the product I'm stealing an email from Brennan Brennan here this is the weekly checkup which is a product

29:23decision you have to make within your product to say every week there's like something we should be telling our customers about their own use of the product I call it the get you promoted email why is this because once a customer said hey I'm trying to buy it my boss needs an ROI calculation can you do that for me like yeah sure I'm a math guy so I did one like wait it's positive why don't I do that for everybody but I gave her the ROI calculation and it made them so much money it put the boss's kid through Harvard apparently that she got a promotion out of it like getting your

29:55customer promoted is a great way to make sure they are there for you next month so I should get as many customers promoted as possible Brennen does it very well where he tells you you know last week you made or yeah last week as a freelancer you made 2,000 bucks after working ten hours nobody opens their inbox Monday morning and says I made email it says I made 2,000 bucks last week oh dang I didn't want to hear that email no everyone loves hearing they made money I mean PayPal made a business off of you got money right so high perceived value to this email high engagement with it

30:29people will open this email every week and read every line in it because it's always that little dopamine rush on their Monday morning or their Friday afternoon and it gives Brent an opportunity to embed both you know a bit of an announcement here and maybe even an upsell to something else that he's making for freelancers and I'll guarantee you that increases customer lifetime value now this makes the ROI discussion that they have every month where can I afford this $199 a month product or this $499 a month product or this thousand dollar month product it makes that discussion totally academic because they've you know they've been

31:00forwarding these emails around to their boss every week for the last four weeks saying boss I'm totally killing it so get that feeling of totally killing it for your customer because it'll totally kill it for you too so another thing you can build on your dashboard the only way to have insight into what any particular single customer is doing with your application this is very boring but I just have you know a simple thing that says a few basic stats about a customer lets me see their last 50 appointments anonymized obviously so I don't you know inflict a hype of violation on myself because that would suck and then shows

31:39me their usage history every month for forever and this customer has been with me a while as usage is going up into the right so the business is succeeding so question for you what happens if I get an email in one day that says we attempted to charge you know Bob's credit card and it was declined bob has been with me for the last 16 months he's paid me $435 I should give Bob a phone call and make sure that Bob you know updates his credit card it's very easy um my thing revolves around telephone numbers so I usually have Bob's telephone number on file already but if not you know all of

32:16you folks are savvy Internet users if I told you dr. James Anderson from Libertyville Illinois is using your product but just captain today can you find his phone number yeah you've got that I'm like five seconds on the Google's right so just give me call and say hey Bob I'm the CEO of the company you use for the appointment reminders for all your patients so your credit card charge didn't go through this morning and I was so worried about the system like shutting you out so do you want to give me the updated version of the card boom you saved that you get the next $400 of money and Bob will talk

32:45about you to all of his friends because usually when you get a get a phone call like that it's from some support rep at AT&T who's gonna charge you a penalty thing and you're like no I would never charge you a penalty we would never lacked you out of your account I just wanted to make sure that stuff didn't break for your business they'll love you boy even if they're not like established customers I don't do this I probably should do it for anybody who cancels or has any summary problem but I'm time constrained and when I have to call bad that usually means I have to stay up

33:14till 3 o'clock in the morning do it so I only do it for folks are a bit established but absolutely everybody should get a Dunning email repeated a few times Dunning emails kind of a term of art just the where's my money email here's the subject line action required what reminder could not renew your subscription it's just like copywriting to say you know I don't want to be like AT&T or a bill collector and bust your kneecaps over this I understand we're all busy and sometimes the credit cards didn't work out how we might have to but I get to the point ASAP in bold we tried

33:42to bill you it didn't work you should probably update your credit card prominent link to that I give him a three day grace period so that it never causes a problem in their business when there's just you know a minor hiccup like this and after the three day grace period if they actually get locked out and you know they're not important enough to you to give them a phone call at least give them a courtesy email saying okay we understand we weren't the right choice for you so we took the liberty of pausing your account and that thing you know some sometimes folks they're a little too

34:14busy to read your three Dunning emails that you've already sent them but when you pause their account oh that will get their action in a hurry especially if you're actually creating value for them for many SAS customers they like they sign up to use their service but they're not actually like using your service and maybe pausing the account isn't the worst thing in the world for them and they're worth money but you don't really want to have them as customers right like you don't want to be on the next Netflix model where your customer where your company is only profitable if no one actually uses your service so you

34:42can let them fall by the wayside the fears of people who are actually like using and getting value out of it make it as easy as possible that some stupid financial chicanery does not turn off that value for them okay so this wasn't plan for my talk but I've been talking to a bunch of people in the hallway track and I keep hearing them consultant and I hate it and I want a quick consulting so how do you commit quit consulting we'll give you an example I quit consulting and that isn't you know it's that easy it's a little harder we'll talk about the harder part but I

35:16did a lot of consulting last year and because of something that happened in the last three months I hereby formally quit consulting I'm never doing it again and thank you Mike recon folks for talking me through this way and so you're asking you know if I was ridiculously happy doing consulting and it generated over $100,000 in revenue last year why am i quitting so suddenly the last two to three months really sucked I can't tell you why they really sucked it because it involves a fortune 500 mega Corp and an NDA which if you sprinkled holy water on it would burst into flames and their legal department

35:52got like voted out of the axis of evil for being too damn scary but microcon is like the happy positive bootstrap first conference so instead of talking about fortune 500 mega Corp and the various ways they screwed me well and we'll talk about like happy forward-looking things of how you can either make your consulting business better or get out of it if it's not what you want to be doing you get back to likely you know living loving and learning why would I want to quit consulting a lot of people say especially in the ex fear well consulting doesn't scale you want to be in a product business because product

36:26business is scale and consulting doesn't scale is horse buggy like there's billion-dollar consulting businesses there's a lot of ways to scale consulting either you just continue moving your rate up like you know I increased my rate from $100 an hour when I started out to man I've sent out invoices for 30,000 a week that's one way of scaling things I when I put on invoice to the fortune 500 Corp I quoted them you know about a quarter of a million dollars and that might have happened so that's scaling you can hire people what's the ding like you're running out of time ding or a ding like needing just

37:04an accent ok good whoo we got a lot to get through you can improve your utilization at the margin like if you're not just if you're not all that wonderful about managing the business and you're spending too much time prospecting you just get better at business and you move up the amount of time you're successfully charging people from 50 to 60% then your revenue just went up by 20 percent and that compounds with increasing the increasing the rate you're charging or hiring people and selling things out to them but so why would you really want a consulting to quit consulting there's always a rat race in consulting you have to continue

37:34getting new clients and servicing old clients by the way if you can successfully transition your consulting business les from constantly getting new clients and more towards recurring relationship with old clients that's a great way to de-stress well my consulting friends would tell you that I would have been a heck of a lot less stressed the last three months if I was you know working with fog Creek or WP engine again versus trying to get the you know new next rung at the fortune 500 company consulting involves lots and lots of unpaid administrative time like you know sending out contracts talking to lawyers something that no day

38:07during my life if I woken up out of bed and like I want to have breakfast with my life and the wife and then promptly leave her and talk to a lawyer about some contract negotiation because boom that's what I found fun today no and you have a boss you have to go to work every day and there's like planning meetings and none of the fun stuff that we actually like right so how do you can so if you want to quit consulting why don't you replace it with a set we replace it with a software business because this is microcon right well here's why I wouldn't because

38:40you're one year two years three or four year five years six years seven I'm now on your eighth a bingo card Vader I'm pretty good at this business stuff maybe I wasn't like over here but it was pretty good over here notice how spikey this stuff is every you know summer when school is out for summer and the teachers stop paying for teaching bingo cards my income goes like boom and I would be thrown into the bread line at the welfare office which asking me for the welfare office story later and you don't love white guys Japan what can I say anyhow but yeah unpredictable income is

39:16a bad thing as business owner why don't you replace it with a sass business so this again it took me years and years and years to a Texas business and many of you will do it faster than me because you're smarter than me but again Gayle Goodman had a great talk about business of software last year she called it the long slow sass ramp of death and that is so true like Rob said it took him six months to get his head around marketing something I have worked at I have worked at clients that have multi tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue and it said they will tell

39:52you you know it took us four years seven to really get our head around the engine of growth for this business and then start scaling it and you might not want to consult for the next four to seven years so given that you are already a successful consultant what can you do that will accelerate your exit out of the consulting business in the next you know several weeks to several months kind of timeframe if that is what you want to do with your life productized your consulting service which means you take an engagement that you have delivered to a lot of people something that you know you can do and you can

40:23create value with and you just take the you out of that and deliver that as a product people that can be something like an e-book like Nathan berry has where Nathan berry was a successful consultant who did mobile app designs and web app designs for some you know pretty well regarded companies he's like I can teach other people to do mobile app design and web app design and then I don't have to actually be in the room and do all the PSD voodoo Photoshop yeah PST PST sorry they sound the same yeah so you can do a training event or seminar where you teach people how to do

41:01what you do sell this product eyes consulting offering through email like we've been talking about so much this conference operated a variety of price points and this way you can make several gigs for some money in a very quick time frame relative to attempting to grow a SAS business you can use this to kind of fuel to grow through your SAS business if you want to that's certainly what I did for a point reminder one of the reasons why you know didn't go to without loss of generality Sequoia or Paula Graham or anybody and say hey could you front me a million dollars and I'll grow appointment reminder well it's

41:32not quite all that great yet is I have this option where I can just make money and then not have to give up control of the business or my life to any outside investor which you know there's many reasons great reasons to take investing and just wasn't the right fit for me so back in like 2010-2011 the most common thing that happened at my consulting clients was they would tell me we're talking about the business we don't do any email can you fix that for us the answer is yes I'm a consultant I can do pretty much anything you want me to and I would implement trip marketing

42:07like we talked about during my 2012 Microsoft and micro account talk so I won't talk about too much right now and I implemented lifecycle emails like we just talked about and this generally required you know a lot of talking to the customer to say hey this is what I want to do it's not spammy don't worry your users won't hate you yada yada spend about two weeks of talking to stakeholders in the company to get them on board with it spend about one day of coding up some sort of you know get over ssin of Rob's trip app or Nathan's convertkit and just you know hooking it

42:42up to the web server and then spend a few days like I did with that Jason about you know writing the first copy for their email campaign he didn't go on it I'm not really a great copywriter but I was the guy in charge of implementing it so I had to write instead of doing that here's how you can do it for a product guys consulting first I'd go to the people who already find me credible about this sort of thing and say hey this is what I you know if you hired me and paid me a ridiculous amount of money this is the first thing I'm gonna tell

43:08you to do do email because it works really really well I teach them how to implement the kind of stuff that I would implement for them by themselves and that would require selling them on the value of email but I can do that at scale via an email campaign blog posts yada yada rather than talking to their CEO individually for multiple hours at a time and I could show them SAS products that I can recommend and programming techniques so that they can give any of their smart engineers or product people the tools they need to you know take this and run with it and I can teach

43:39them to do the copywriting or I can find somebody to teach them to do the copywriting one of the things I did was partner with Joanna and say hey Joanna can you you know help for this and teach folks how to do copywriting for email subject lines she was like oh I'm all over that we'll talk about that in a little a bit so why as a customer would you buy this when you know you can go to me and get like the filet mignon offering and have me fly out to your country and do consulting at your office well hey it's a whole heck of a lot

44:05cheaper at the most expensive this was like five hundred dollars to buy the course that I offered versus you know a fairly typical consulting engagement would be like 20,000 bucks because it's uh and also I never did consulting as a full-time thing and never did more than about ten weeks or so a year so I true and I got prospected on consulting offerings sorry people would ask me to consult for them approximately 600 times a year so 590 of them got told no sorry can't do it no time or you're not a great fit for me or whatever but for some of them I could say look I

44:39don't have enough time to fly out to Vienna Austria but you can buy this thing well so for consulting you know you have to have mutual availability I have to have a week where I can fly out to you and you have to have a week where you can clear your product team schedule and clear the marketing guys schedule and maybe clear the CEO schedule because you got a high-priced consultant in the room and for a lot of fast moving companies that's very difficult whereas if you buy this you can consume it at your own pace implement it whenever you're ready to implement it it's also a

45:05cheap easy way to test the waters for from clients perspective it's like man I don't know if I trust email marketing enough to green-light twenty thousand dollars but five hundred is what we spend on toilet paper in a month so yeah was that cz that is by the way directionally what a company that has 300 employees spends on toilet paper anyhow so if you're a client why would you buy this so for getting it for free on the internet this is something that as penny-pinching entrepreneurs like erica was talking about we often have this reservation one thing is that for-profit businesses spend money to alleviate problems and this is just the

45:41nature of the beast another reason is that this is free if you have two weeks to research it isn't free because employees have salaries and they have to get paid every two weeks and employee salaries are huge amounts of money like if you're paying in engineer market rates they get there fully loaded cost for business is twenty thousand a month that means that they're you know just reading free blog posts and free Twitter guides and reading you know through every presentation Hinton has already done for - has done in his entire life for two weeks that cost the business ten thousand dollars in cash money it's like

46:14ten thousand dollars worth of free EA so not really free to them and also within a company as a consultant I'm sure all the consultants in the room could appreciate this one sometimes one of the biggest problems is getting everybody on the same page and making sure that this thing that you want to do to create valley for them getting all the internal objectors out of there objecting status and if you say I saw this great blog post on the internet and I really want to change our marketing strategy around for around that idea that this kid in Japan had a lot of people at 10 million

46:45dollar a year software companies will say yeah as if no but if you say look I paid $500 for this course and lifecycle email marketing I'm gonna start implementing it today your boss will be like oh yeah $500 clearly it's valuable right because you spend $500 on it okay so the key to marketing your product eyes consulting offering is that you start building an email list a few months in advance raise your hand if you do not already have an email list okay so all a few folks I'm going to ask that question at my crew hats 2014 and please don't have your hands up then clearly

47:20this did not work between 2012 and 2013 but don't fail me next year spend 75% of your time on that email list teaching people convincing them to trust you actually creating value in their businesses and in their lives and only the last like 25% of trying to sell them things this is kind of just a magic formula it works for a lot of people Nathan and Brendon if you're on their email lists they don't do like pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch they sent you all sorts of valuable things and then only once a mile is okay I'm giving you the opportunity to buy this

47:53thing for me like I am you know I sent three emails before I even breathe it a word of there is a potential commercial transaction in here and one of those three emails sent like a I got a email from a CMO at a valley funded company that has multiple tens of millions of dollars of sales it's like he didn't call it email number two but it was email number two and it just gave him some ideas on how to sell it to big freaking enterprises it's like I turned this email around in the last two days into five hundred thousand dollars of license sales guess who bought the

48:24course when it got to buted a few months later yeah I only sent two sales emails over to this list and those emails set folks to a long copy page I'm gonna show you my lump copy and I just want to say the objective of showing you my long copy is not to get you to scroll to the bottom and buy it now that would be true if like you were the target customer but you're not only showing it example the product you can actually have it for free I'll tell you about that later but long copy um so I tweeted out an example when Joanna was doing her thing

48:56if you never seen long copy go to buy my crappy ebook calm and somebody has a parody of it but here's like less parody version oh wait shoot sorry I get people on an email list so I have to give them some reason why they would want to get email from me because not everybody knows what I am sent them to a squeeze page at training calcium is calm and I said I'll give you a 45 minute 45 minute deep dive into the topic of optimizing the first run experience of your application if you sign up for my email list and then every week to two weeks or

49:28months I'll send you something else that you'll find interesting and I only mention this I put a hello bar on my blog I tweeted about it once or twice other people picked it up and might have ended up on Hacker News once but that is like not a prerequisite you don't have to be internet famous to build an email list many of the folks who totally came out of nowhere in last year we just put it up tweet about it and maybe get picked up on hacker news because it's something of intense interest to programmers and they get 500 signups in a day or whatever so sending folks to

50:01this long copy page why is it called long copy this is about 2,000 words this is the first of five slides this topic I'm pretty loquacious in my blog post but I kind of killed it for this one so long copy you can read along with this or read along at your own pace that life cycle emails calm again do not buy it I will refund you and that will cost me money if you buy it so don't buy it but establish the value propositions very early on savvy software companies make Gracey great use of email copywriting technique if you say savvy people do something and people are not

50:38doing that something they will want to become savvy or is it want to become more successful or whatever you're good edge to this so they will be biased towards trying that thing out that you have identified and by the way 70 software companies do use email the ones that are making like kajillion so that this is one major reason why that's why so many of the presenters have told you use the email so much subheads i'm not going to read any of the like regular you know font size ten text you can read it for yourself one of the tricks to long copy is that even if you don't read any of it just

51:07reading like the bolded parts should tell you the entire story so I'll just like read the bolded parts I made a kind of outlandish promise earlier it was a promise dedicated to one of the problems people have like they don't send email now if I ask all of you why don't you send email already raise your hand if this is your objection I've heard about email works really well but I don't want to be a spammer anybody feel that yep got a hand in the back got more hands all over the place alright so the very fruit and I know this I felt it in my

51:37bones I didn't send email for six years because I was afraid of being a spammer so I know my customers are dealing with that objection very first thing I told to them you will delight your customers and make unreasonable amounts of money through email you won't be a spammer they will be happy to get it every day and then I deliver on that promise I told them about how email can increase their sales by 10% and the only purpose of these of these blue things is to get people continuing to read the rest of it have intriguing copywriting like the word unreasonable you know who goes up

52:09to you and says I'm going to make you an unreasonable I'm not to money like I could I could say I'm gonna make you a lot of money that's kind of boring I'm gonna make you unreason unreasonable on money unbelievable a lot of money um I'm kind of a geek I'll own it I often use like Dungeons & Dragons inspired metaphors one that I've used in copywriting for some clients somewhere talked about like do X and your company is going your company will be richer than a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold corns oh oh it's back okay so um since this is you know how to do an info

52:47product to quit your consulting career use a case study from your consulting career because you're just filling this out of your own experiences right so my case study was distilled out of an engagement that I did for Jason company WP engine it was right about the time when those sales went like woo up into the right although I am totally not claiming credit for that they had a whole lot else going on at the time and and so you know go to one of your happy clients and say hey can I just write about you on my website do you don't like nobody in the world it's like free

53:19publicity I hate that please don't talk about me ever unless you do SEO consulting don't do SEO consulting copywriting lies even though it's like texty texty texty you can like break it up with images and whatnot this is just a fairly simple image that I mocked up in paint.net in ten minutes to kind of give the visual learners and the audience a bit to hang their hat on rather than reading my ten thousand words and again we got a personal testimonial from Jason here with the call-out I went to Jason and I said looked and I'm told it was totally up front what's this I said Jason I want to

53:53use the experience of our engagement with subject pangaean to get more business for me so I'd like to get a testimonial from you would it be okay if I said something to the effect of I gave Jason a very explicit testimonial including like a number of how much money I didn't made his company Edition was like I'm not comfortable with like saying that number publicly and he rewrote the testimony on his own words and I just copy pasted it right here it's like it permanently moved the needle on signups that's totally money if you're talking to any sort of SAS company right permanently that is all

54:23that they want to buy and it's uber credible because that isn't coming from me you know little unknown guy in the middle of Japan I don't have despite being like internet famous not all CMO is a 10 million dollar software companies know who I am but they generally do know who Jason is and if he trusts me enough on top of email to have cut me a big check and have awesome results for it then shouldn't they cut me a very small check and have awesome results as well yes so customers have a have objections of reasons why they're not doing this thing already right that's why you're trying to sell them on

54:57making that change in their life and through those objections so I had won it like I quoted at some point in here that you can make $200 per email you sent that's an almost outlandish claim right we already told you how to make $200 per email you sent with life cycle emails just try to get people upgrade to annual billing but I said I'm going to work it out in excruciating detail using latex no less what the map is that sounds pretty credible if you're an engineering type who's worked his wages of multinational software company so I acknowledge those objections and another objection like a lot of software people

55:30are kind of squeezed out by info products I am squeezed out by info products I was so skis down I didn't even want to launch this and it took some like convincing of myself and talking to friends to say no this is a legitimate thing to do like just like consulting was so my sub head is why I sell this advice at all isn't that like internet marching internet marketing douchebaggery her sleeves beggary yeah thank you I'm sorry Vegas is making me Chris yeah Amy who I'm reading this said I can smell the guilt off this sentence but got a free you should also get over it

56:05talk to all the folks in this room who create lots of value for lots of people if you are scared about selling things because you are not the internet marketing of sleazebags and finally told them in detail not what they were like there's a chapter list down here that you can like click this button and get every chapter that would be in the course to tell them exactly what they get but that's less important to them exactly like what physically is delivered they want to you know they're not buying the product they are buying the outcome so the outcome of taking this is that they're going to decrease

56:37their churn rate they're going to increase their average revenue per customer they're going to this this and this if they take my advice so I'd leave with that and then substantiate that with and here's how I'm gonna teach you how to do that so you know the course is actually delivered over video and it was available in a lot of different formats you could download it it was non DRM - what not all of those facts are less important than change its gonna make in your business and then I'll talk about the formatting details and the fact that it's you know an MOV file with mp3 files download but later

57:05on the page okay pricing can everyone remember my all-purpose pricing in values charged more yes for info products as well charge more for your consulting services charge more for your sass charge more does anyone sell something that is not a product or SAS or software or consulting anybody in the room oh there's probably people with mobile apps ooh mobile apps kind of suck on that dimension sorry but for all the rest of you charge more so packaging is important for info products you give people multiple ways to buy essentially the same thing so I didn't really have much time in my schedule to develop many different

57:48variants of the product so I only made two one is you can take the video course by yourself or you can download video course and like put it on your own internal network share or Dropbox or whatever so that everybody our company can view it it's not DRM so any company could have done that anyhow but because their software companies and they care about you know not infringing my copyright I said look I totally trust you but if you're a company please pay me four times as much five percent of people paid me four times as much that's 20 percent of the revenue for writing what this took me maybe 60 seconds to

58:23add onto the page can I give an example from another person who was at this talk Nathan Barry as the title says an effing genius Nathan Barry does some of the best work in packaging so read his blog about it up Xing being delivering products of a similar nature and you know figuring out what features go into them and then what price is appropriate for that package so when he wrote designing web applications there were three packages at - $49.99 and 39 but the sales page for it which is a work of art and he's you know a good design guy so he's not using my

58:58ungodly this wall of text but it focuses it's linear so at anytime you're not seeing all the stuff positioned against each other you're just like looking at one possible option for you starting with the expensive one bTW started that that's important but it's linear and it just focuses on all the value you are getting and return for this price and if you're ready for that moment you click buy if not like and 249 a little steep you scroll down a little and it shows you all right I got a different value proposition it's only 99 now you get a little less and okay you scroll down a

59:35little it's like alright got a different value proposition you get just the bare-bones basics but it's $49 an affordable on any budget how did this work out for Nathan I just stole this directly off his blog because he's barely very transparent about it Packaging is a huge huge win so the book of loans sold you know about $8,000 it's a pretty happy result for something that presumably did not take him six months to develop and the book in the videos so a little more than that but then the complete package sold a lot and if you look at you know the staff bar chart here more mobile packages equals more

1:00:09money almost always true up until like five three to five after that it gets a little confusing but just adding those additional packages greatly increased the value of this to Nathan and to his customers versus just offering it all in it's a $49 price and don't be afraid to charge too much I mean some of those customers turn this around into you know tens or hundreds of thousands they'll just have revenue it for their business so they're not disappointed about paying 249 anything okay so I talked about the marketing in the sales side what about the actual product because that's obviously important um just like a

1:00:44consulting engagement is fundamentally just I come to your office and talk to you and type stuff into your computers a privatized consulting engagement is fundamentally just I look into a camera and I talk and you listen to that and you learn something from it and you know it's not very difficult there's no rocket science in that I have a webcam attached to my Dell I bought a $60 microphone because people told me when I did the free video that my Dells microphone was absolutely terrible I'm not an audiophile I can't hear the difference but apparently audio files can really hear the difference so I bought you know the best rated thing

1:01:20from one of my podcasting buddies and I just loosely scripted each of these videos I said alright I'm gonna be talking about drip email marketing I can do that standing on my head so here's the bullet points I wanna hit and I hit him and I took these you know several hours of video and sent it to my video editor to get cleaned up ask me later about working with a video editor that's a little bit frustrating but um it cost me about $3,000 and it could have gotten done cheaper for oDesk if any of you were worried about like upfront investment I hosted the videos on Wistia

1:01:51and I rolled my own delivery platform because I was really jonesing for a Ruby on Rails project because I hadn't done any like hardcore infield programming in a while and I want an excuse to do it and you probably shouldn't do that just use gum Road or whatever Nathan or Brendan would recommend to you because it obviously works right and that's the least important part of the puzzle no no customer was like man I was on the fence about buying this but then I found that you know you coated a stripe webhook and boom that made the sale never happened and I went to folks with

1:02:24related interests which added value to customer is that vanishing a little work for me what does that mean well I went to Joanna and said hey Joanna um we hadn't really been internet friends or much of anything at that point but I had read her stuff and really liked it and was a previous customer for copy hacking book said Joanna I really like how you think about writing copy and I write copy for emails and I'm not really loving it but I'm doing this thing about the lifecycle emails I'm very good about scheduling them and programming them the copywriting I am a little bit weak on and I don't have

1:02:58total confidence that I can teach people to do this would you be willing to you know write a little something for that to teach them how to do it and sure Anna was like get exposed to your audience I guess I will do that and so that happened um also you know hearken back to Nathan's talk he put together a lot of products by just going out people interviewing for them for the product about their area of expertise another way to do it is you know I was making SAS recommendations of things that I had already used for consulting clients I would just go to somebody at all of the

1:03:27SAS companies I used and say hey you know postmark the folks at wild bit I love your product I've used it to awesome success at three consulting clients so tell you what there's this thing happening I'm going to release this thing that is going to teach people how to do lifecycle emails which is your entire business can you give me some coupon codes to give to them so that I can get you some new customers for free do you know how many companies told me please don't send us new customers for free nobody so got lots of free coupon codes and then after having that discussion I said

1:04:01by the way I'm also kind of a good writer you have a blog I don't know anybody who is you know too many great articles on their blog which bind if I wrote on your blog about how to use life cycle emails to awesome extent in a software business and all of them were like you charge $20,000 a week for consulting but you're willing to write for me for free for you know just putting a little link at the end saying he's got a thing coming up we're totally on net so that worked out pretty well so funny story about the revenue launch day I just sent

1:04:30an email out and that email managed to make it onto hacker news cuz I'm a little known there that made twelve thousand dollars in revenue again being known that hacker is totally not a prerequisite because the email is the main lake driver of these things when I just sent two weeks later a reminder the sale ends today that I sent a there was a like two week you know half off sale for it because I wanted to give people a bonus for being early adopters so just sent everybody an email if you were on the fence about it it's open till tomorrow that like was literally better just being in five

1:05:05thousand people's inboxes than being on the top of hacker news for a day so email it's where it's at and the totals today of this product this product took about as much work for me to launch as a consulting gig but created maybe two or three consulting gigs worth of revenue and didn't require any sort of unpaid overhead like the contract negotiation or even flying out to America to deliver the consulting so it was a total win and you know I think appointment reminder will honestly be paying my way and I won't need to do this too much in the future I will only do it if I have

1:05:39something to say and want to do it but this would totally have paid my way as a consulting rat race even without SAS to support me so it's an option for any of you who are still in the rat race either in combination with SAS like Nathan and Brennan do or as a standalone thing okay so the keys to product success just review email email email target a pain point that you know customers are having and again if you're already consultants you've been working with people and solving problems for their businesses so you know what the pain point is just figure out how to massage that into a

1:06:09product offering work on the copy I'm not very good at the copy I was kind of painting by numbers and the numbers I were painting for were something from Joanna which is available at copy hackers called like the art of long copy or something and I don't remember what I spent on that book but it must have made me at least a hundred times more than that in sales so buy that book don't my stuff buy her stuff definitely and so I will say the one thing about you know internet marketing sleazebag array one of the reasons that internet marketers are often sleaze bags is that they spend

1:06:40all the effort on the marketing and sales side and nothing on the product especially as consultants and as you know ethical folks you only have one reputation don't just pump out crap like I was putting my name on this I've worked for like eight years now to build my one reputation on the Internet and that would been gone in a day if this was you know just like poorly produced in a craft that didn't actually create value for businesses so I didn't do that don't do that okay so for more details you should be on my mailing list if you're not already at training dot calcium use comm for folks

1:07:16who were at micro conch if you send me an email I will give you the thing we just talked about for free so you can use it to increase the you know emails for your SAS businesses and whatnot if you already bought it for me I can't like physically give you back your money but I'm probably going to do one of these on a be testing and conversion optimization two months from now write me an email then you'll get that for free instead thank you for listening here's my blog there's my Twitter I have something on my blog that as a kind of introverted engineer when I was starting

1:07:50out it didn't occur to me that you could just like write a letter you know write an email to Jason Cohen and he would write back to you because he didn't hate doing that because there's an introvert I think you know an email must be an imposition so it's very clear around my website email to me is not an imposition I want to talk to any of you about any of this or any other topic about your businesses any time you want to talk I think this community is awesome I think that we all support each other in you know achieving our goals personally and for our businesses and for our families

1:08:22and I want to give back to like the people who have helped me along the way so thank you very much I'll be happy to take your questions sure in the back way in the back go ahead and just start shouting and it's gonna take me a while to get back there

1:08:47so I strongly doubt that you don't have anything that you are good enough to teach because you have something you are good enough to presumably receive a paycheck for or to sell a consulting engagements for right like what do you do and professionally okay so as a dotnet freelancer you already know more than the virtually the entire business world about what is capable what you can possibly like do with a computer so you can teach them how to do things with a computer that helped their businesses or even just expose them to possibilities that they might not know about you know business processes can be automated tell

1:09:26them how to do that you can talk through previous engagements or previous things you've done on your job and you might not consider yourself a guru Jedi and ninja whatever net programmer but you're better than a whole lot of programmers in the worlds you can teach them what you know about programming or you might have other interests again I would target B to B not B to C but you know I worked in back-office for Japanese universities for several years and even if I knew nothing about software I am intimately acquainted with every business process at a Japanese universities back office which is actually a big problem for a lot of

1:10:04people who have lots of money so I could theoretically tell you you know how to optimize your back office processes at a university even though that's you know not something that I have any merit badge that says patio 11 us certify an expert at Japanese office back offices um I'm probably I don't generally like to brag but I will brag about this I am the world's leading expert on file exchange file formats for files which are meant to exchange the results of the Japanese central admissions test like I know every every column in that file and that's something that cost my company a lot of my time to figure out so I could

1:10:41teach people what that file is and why that about it there's you know you know more than you think you do so I think there was a another question over here or gentleman in the rust colored shirt is it Russ color I don't know I don't speak English I was just wondering oh I was just wondering how how you end up doing any cross-selling like your you know appointment reminder doesn't seem to have much to do with emails doesn't seem to have much to do with bingo cards do you tie your list is it all just help separate so don't do it like that do it like Brennan did where he had one

1:11:21audience freelancers and he was going to create value to freelancers in many different ways but again I have badd working in a particular field for more than one product seems to like destroying my love of working in that field anymore like people told me after being a car creator do another thing for teachers well a doing things for teachers is hard mode don't do things for teachers but like if it were a more lucrative thing it would have been a totally good idea to do something targeting the same niche of customers that I could cross sell to them I just like I had this old stuff to

1:11:55educators merit badge and I didn't want to ever do anything in that field again but yeah I agree with that I agree with that by the way having multiple products in different niches is not ideal on your appointment reminder sure you have you say you have an enterprise one but yeah like an API or something that other people like some of us can use I don't currently have an API it's I'm the CEO and lead developer if you can bring me a lot of business I can make one for you okay okay maybe we can chat later all right I think we have time for one more

1:12:28I am out of books though I apologize I'm just wondering for the long copy page do you have any metrics on conversion or like time on the page to see how much of that people actually read or if they just scroll down and click or so that's a great question I'm kind of the metrics guy right I have Google Analytics and whatnot and KISSmetrics installed in that I've just never looked at it so dude like email me after I get back from Japan I'll look at those numbers and tell you like we heard in the earlier presentation about metrics like if you're tracking something but you don't

1:13:09make any meaningful decision based on it it's just a total waste of time right so I was not going to rewrite that 10,000 words of copy to squeeze out an extra 0.1% of it because I was busy and going on to the next thing so you know I have the data but didn't bother analyzing it