# From Zero to $4M / Year Without Quora, Hacker News, or Mixergy – Jesse Mecham – MicroConf 2014

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8N7YrBM4o
Duration: 51 min
Language: English
Words: 9555
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/jw8N7YrBM4o

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[0:00] [Music]

[0:07] [Music] all right thanks guys I'm excited a little nervous this is my third microcon first time speaking two years of begging and finally got it so I wanted to put up this slide that's five kids count him five so anyway really quickly my I'll tell you showing my kids up here the first one's name is Porter the tall one taller and what he was going to be born in June of 2004 I had been married in February of 2003 and I had started school a year before that I was in the accounting program down at BYU and pretty rigorous program I had three years left I wanted to get my

[1:01] master's degree I thought I'd be a great public accountant that life is awful so I quit after a year of being in that field after school but I was looking at three years left to school to get my master's degree my wife was gonna graduate in Social Work it's not the most lucrative field right and so we were engaged to be married it was November of 2002 and we're engaged and I'm looking at what our finances would look like together and we were gonna be super super poor and I had this aversion to taking on any student loan debt so I was in this class I think it was called information

[1:42] systems 100 or something like that and they were teaching me how to use spreadsheets I've never seen him before and I'm doing this class and then I realized that I'm gonna be broke and so I I remember sitting down in the library in the basement in this computer lab I didn't own a computer I was using the lab computer and my wife was working in the library making eight bucks an hour and I told her I said well I'm gonna set up this budget so once we get married in a few months we'll be on top of things and she was like okay because that's how

[2:12] easy it is when you're where you're married to convince someone to get on a budget you you know it's super simple it's like honeymoon phase yeah sure we can do that that sounds fun so she was totally amenable to the idea and I did it and I was using my newfound skills in Excel I'm painting this picture because I want you to know how inept I was at anything that I'm gonna show you and it's it's gonna get bad and and funny but um I was I was just brand new right so I built this this budget you'll see screenshots of it and then we get married and we we start doing the

[2:46] budget thing then the quarters starts to be in the picture and I'm trying to make money and work at the same time and I realized that we we're gonna have to take on debt if Porter comes and then I don't want Julie to have to work I really want her to be home she wanted to be home with them and so that was the impetus for me trying to sell my budget spreadsheet so that was a Minimum Viable Product I didn't even call it a project it was just called the budget but that was kind of my I have a clicker here I'll use that that was kind of my first

[3:19] thought was if I could make rent which was three hundred fifty bucks a month in this basement apartment utilities included it was a steal of a deal except we were sick all the time from something in the walls I'm not sure what it was but we had respiratory issues all the whole time we lived there so 350 bucks a month maybe or maybe not worth at all that you know in 20 years but they if I if I could sell this budget and make 350 bucks a month I thought this is great because I'll graduate debt-free I'll get my real job I'll be making loads and loads of money 48 grand a year

[3:52] as a starting accountant and I'll be set so it was like this grand vision or like I'm gonna solve this particular problem it was just this really strong need for me to make a little bit of money to make a world of difference and that $350 a month for some I mean for everyone it's may be a different number but for me that was the number and it was small and it was life changing right so it doesn't have to be this big grand thing and I didn't read a single book about anything to do with entrepreneurship I just needed $350 a month ongoing so you

[4:27] don't have to really know maybe abandon the clicker you don't have to really know anything so when I started I didn't really know how to do this spreadsheet stuff I didn't know how to do any copywriting anything about websites HTML was foreign to me but I just started doing things as it came up and and I would see like oh I need to learn a little bit of what was it called what's the call you write macros in Excel what's that called yeah that was what it was I try I learned that for a few months and then realized that that was a nightmare and ripped it all out and just

[5:06] started just doing my spreadsheets so there was no knowledge just me like saying oh how do I do this okay I'll do it how do I do that I didn't I don't go online or I didn't go online I still really don't and say like I'm gonna start building a spreadsheet so what's the best way to build a spreadsheet what are 10 mistakes that spreadsheet builders make and try and find like become like an info star about the problem I wanted to solve I just started trying to solve it and then from there learned a ton I think a lot of times we can get caught up in learning all about

[5:41] our problem instead of just kind of attacking it head-on Maya I mean how naive I was was I didn't even know that you could go look to find that stuff out so you guys have the curse of so much information I think sometimes you can stall on the I'm not gathering information and really end up not implementing what you want to implement so it's just something to be aware of how much am i consuming and how much am i creating I'm glad I was doing this all before I knew anything what let me try this again that will happen 17 more times most likely I don't know why what that was

[6:21] and you guys could probably all tell me but here's an example my spreadsheet see these I don't know if you guys can see this but I'm gonna give you a little excel lesson okay so at the very bottom you have this pound sign and then div zero it's like hashtag give zero now that's what you'd say and that was my main man my main hashtag that I followed and I I found out years later I had this engineering friend he's like you know there's this formula called is there that can kind of conditionally remove that I was like that is brilliant because it would make it look so much nicer but yeah that was

[7:02] the that was where you'd enter your income I I don't know if I didn't mention this yet but we we teach people how to manage their money sell them software to follow our method so this was my budget sheet that was three months of it if you scroll down more and more and more you'll get the rest of the year but it was one huge sheet so if I spent money on in March in whatever category that is rent on the 28th I would just drop the value in right there so you have 365 days down down it and then for how many categories you have

[7:40] across you have all of those fields and I would just populate that like hey Julie did we spend something on groceries and she's like yeah and so I just put it in there that was what we launched with I mean I was selling this and people were giving me money for it minimum viable that was like lower case minimum viable ask me about these colors and what I thought about colors and palates I have no idea they're all all these colors were available so I use them this is an example of building more than you need I added bonuses and things I don't even everything to say about that but the

[8:27] nice thing is I got to change my mind over and over and over again and I could launch with something that was to my standards now I awful right but people were paying me money for it very small amounts but for me it was game-changing because I only needed about three hundred fifty dollars here's an example how he iterated all those sheets that were there the original product I pulled down I learned about different functions that let you consolidate a lot of what I was doing and so it ended up looking a little bit better so side note that has a slide not really a side note because

[9:02] there's a slide for it but when I first tried to sell it $350 a month I was going to do ten bucks I went online and I did see that someone else was selling spreadsheets sorry that was my idea validation someone else is doing it I don't know if they're actually making money but they're asking for money so it should work and I listed it for 995 PayPal Buy Now button I think I'm I think I might have had something send it automatically that was pretty fancy when they bought no one was buying but I listed it at 995 and then AdWords thankfully AdWords was so cheap back in

[9:40] 2004 when I launched this at September of four that I could like 60 bucks got me lots and lots of data or lots and lots of visitors but that was not my first attempt my first attempt at visitors was to go to our apartment complex not making this up I made flyers I printed out a bunch and I just canvassed our apartment complex there's like hundreds and hundreds of units in this college campus housing right and I just canvassed the whole thing Julie bless her heart with Porter who was like three months old at the time she's like in the stroller going along with us and I'd go up and down the

[10:16] stairs and then she like a couple hours in she's like hey you know I'm we're good so I just kept going and then I went home and I was using this site to track stats I think it was before Google Analytics or I didn't know about it I don't even know but I was using this site to track and I just would refresh just check to see if anyone hit the website one person one person did from the ayat from the IP that I was guessing was in the vicinity and that was pretty exciting but a total waste of time so my next attempt was Adwords 60 bucks got me

[10:47] enough visitors and I am not making any sales though and then a friend of mine said I think ten dollars is too cheap nobody's gonna buy something for 10 bucks the price itself tells you it's not worth buying and that's something that I think a lot of people here would agree with so I upped it to $20 just arbitrarily right same products same copy horrible copy we'll get to that but same everything and sold it you know my first my first sale happened within the day and that was a validation for charging more is sometimes not just about well the person sit in their way and like does it have

[11:29] the features to justify they were seeing a low price and say now not even worth it and Patrick talked about that a little bit yesterday on the side of the enterprise where he's saying you got this person that won't even look won't even consider the low price because it's just it's not there their self selecting for something higher and we all self-select to a degree close we buy or you know restaurants we go to or whatever it is so maybe double your price or at least increase it that got me my first sale which I then had to refund because she was on a Mac and had no idea how to help

[12:00] her so I I know her email address if you guys want to email her bless her heart because I remember every interaction we had I went to the only place that had Mac's on campus I went there and there was this massive display cuz there's like the video editing place and I'm like is this a Mac and the guys like yeah so I go in and sit down load up the budget and it was when I was doing the visual basic stuff had no idea what it was doing so I I started up on and it's just like air air like all these windows are popping up and and that's oh I just

[12:29] brought her back I'm like you get a refund cuz that's the end of my troubleshooting anyway so you can waste time it's okay to waste time I wasted lots of time learning and that's not a waste of time at all right you just do stuff you just get going less reading more doing less consuming more creating right you just do stuff and it's okay if you wrote awful headlines or spent time doing strange SEO or any other thing that you're like oh man five years down the road I really wish I wouldn't have done that was sure I wish I knew then what I know now because I would get

[13:08] to you know I would do things faster but I don't regret any of it because it's what taught me what I know now so be a mover and just be comfortable with those mistakes and you learn a ton it's it's a great way it's it's an interesting way to go about things because you end up with a lot of interesting stories this is my just a snippet of the first copy you guys can't really read that probably but just to give you an idea like I just led with stats like I think I said trillion like four times to try and impress on people because we all

[13:43] identify with trillion right I mean that's a you know you feel that you feel that and so I was saying like household debt has grown from 2.2 trillion oh my word to 3.5 oh my word you know you feel the weight of that personally on your emotions get a hold of your finances that actually wasn't too bad but but there's better copy than that the idea was okay the copy itself was kind of weak welcome to Union to budget calm because you should make sure you welcome the hughster by explicitly stating it so anyway what was my SEO tactics personal finance excel spreadsheet that was my phrase I would

[14:28] go for what a waste of time but I learned a lot so here's some more copy I think this might a bit on the next page I was on to something and this is the most important part of the presentation well the next slide I was onto something when I had those three little things in green because I was kind of saying like hey here's like some foundational principles like live within your means okay that's obvious like this is like dieting but for finances right the same diet book comes out or like different diet book but same thing like eat less or you don't eat this or don't eat that

[15:05] or whatever it is but it's just read tooling the same ideas that have been around forever and that's that is what it is so this was me restating the obvious but to a lot of people not so obvious and that's something else you have to remember you know live within your means spend after you earn this is a different concept for budgeting most people kind of forecast and then their forecast is off anyway and then they feel like budgeting is a failure it's not you guys all should spend after your and say for any day okay so I was onto something a little bit there but let it go the

[15:39] important part in all of this is to find what makes you unique messages may be the wrong word or maybe I should say like unique selling proposition I just learned about that like a few years ago that you have to be unique but that that's pretty obvious right I mean you want to stand out somehow and so I chose an industry that's not crowded at all with other competitors because no one ever creates a piece of software to manage your money right I mean that's it's a brave new world for us so you have to stand out somehow and then I've noticed a lot of different we were

[16:14] talking about yesterday or maybe it was the heat and a dinner right about like bubbles of solutions right like help desks we see a lot of those now or different analytics pins we see a lot of those now everyone was kind of scratch or project management right everyone's kind of scratching their own itch and it's like whoa okay now everyone's scratch the same itch and we've got this plethora of tools well money has been around since what 85 or something went into it came out with quick quicken and then it's just been around forever luckily I didn't do any kind of analysis to decide if competing in that field was

[16:48] sensible or not I just did it and then the way that we compete is with our unique message we have four rules to help you stop living paycheck to paycheck get out of debt and save more money faster I didn't just make that up we say that all the time that that's it just for rules and people are like wait a minute for rules this is intriguing and then you get into well here's I'm gonna blow your mind but like when you spend money record it in your phone people are like oh my word with those four rules are you serious it's brand new to them to me I'm like of

[17:31] course you do that right to the customer who's in debt and filling all this stress and their relationships kind of on the rocks because of money they're like oh my word this guy has this method there's only four rules not 7 or 10 or 30 and not 2 because that's not really a method right but for so let me show you what happened when I found my message because I didn't have it at first that copy was not a message that was garbage here's my 2005 I was in Excel bandit at this point so I've made my P&L in Excel luckily I know how to do a P&L because of my accounting

[18:10] classes right so it's all coming together I got a look over here to see this so in February of 2005 I was interning at a big accounting firm down in Phoenix and I was excited because it was busy season you could make overtime and so I'm thinking I want to make overtime because I'm making more money than I've made ever in my life I won't work all this overtime so I I had been there about a week I go into my managers office and I'm like hey where am I assigned what do I do and he's like oh you're um you're unassigned I was like what does Emma sign means and he's

[18:41] like well kind of has me come closer like he's telling me a secret just sit in your cubicle and try and look busy and I'm like really yeah like you could beat our audit manual if you wanted I mean see that's like reading the tax code you know oh yeah I'll do that which page should I start on you know the first page work left to right but um it just so I know and I wanted to be honest because they're paying me to just sit my I'm like you really mean that I'm just supposed to sit there what do people do and he's like well a lot of guys like

[19:11] read the news some on my own are you serious yeah I'm serious so I was like okay so I looked busy rewriting my copy and down my profits were screaming 38 dollars in 10 cents in February the the line items on the left side are funny because download.com like I remember them commission junction was there I made money with Adsense for a while a significant amount compared to my sales it's I'm glad I didn't pursue that vain forever trying to make money with Adsense but you can see all sorts of attempts at different things I made but the key was in February had sales of $110 which 20

[19:57] bucks a pop I probably sold 5 right 5 of these the spreadsheet packages and then I rewrote the copy and I discovered when I was rewriting the copy that I had for rules I didn't start out the business with this four blows because I didn't know what hey no I had it so as I'm writing the copy I was kind of like oh wait you know I I'm kind of teaching people like spend the money you've already earned like live on last month's income you guys should do that it would give you a lot of a big release of stress if you could what you learnt in

[20:31] March you spent in April what you earn in April you spend in May it's it's a solid process improvement it helps you say you can break you don't have to time bills to pay check if you got if any of you are living kind of paycheck to paycheck you don't have to time those bills to the paycheck because the worst thing you're not worse there are worse things but money management wise process wise sitting there and having to do all the work of timing wind bills are paid you think about how much value is added and there's zero value right and this is me on a tangent zero value to you timing

[21:01] your bills to your paychecks because in the end all you're doing is paying the bill right so how the bill is paid is meaningless the only way that you can possibly win anything is by just not making your life crappy by having that process be time consuming so you remove that time consumption by just not having the time the bills of the paychecks you don't have to do that dance where it's like oh I just got the paycheck okay what is do and I can do this and sent you know all that stuff's gone when you can live on the last month's income that was rule one now it's will for for

[21:33] marketing reasons I found out that I mean I realized that the rule the second rule was to give every dollar a job just make sure every dollar has a purpose and that's your way of prioritizing what you spend when you spend according to your priorities according to your values you feel content even when you don't make more money and that's that's something that resonates really well with all of our customers is when your money is doing things that you actually care about your like hey I feel pretty good I don't have to make millions of dollars I'm feeling good because there's no friction with what the money is doing

[22:06] and with what you actually wanted to do the third rule is we call it save for a rainy day and that came out in my copy and it was where I mean I I give people the Christmas example it's like everyone is so surprised that Christmas comes at the same time every year same day you know it's like oh my gosh what are we going to do well you knew you know you or what's today this is why Rob had me come today is April 15th people it's the best day of the year right I'm I kid you not I talk with my accountant this morning he told me how much more I owe

[22:42] than I've already paid like that made me sad but I knew it was coming I should have been a little more ready I did okay but it's it's a horrible it's a horrible day and that's why I'm speaking today so these save for a rainy day is just you saying okay Christmas is gonna cost us easy math twelve hundred bucks right so let's make a Christmas bill where it's a hundred bucks a month and we set it aside each month and then when Christmas comes you just have a blast and spend all $1,200 and you don't feel guilty and you're not paying for it you know a year later on a credit card that

[23:17] was our third rule the fourth rule was to be flexible we call it rolling with the punches like a boxer when they take a swing and you're supposed to move in the same direction as their punch right to lessen the blow with budgeting it's your plan it's your it's just whatever you want to do so when you start a budget if I were to sit down with heatin he's getting picked on cuz he's right here front and center so if I were to say okay heat and let's set up your budget he's like well I love eating really excellent food and I'd be like no no because we're on a budget well wait

[23:51] but I like to spend time with my kids no no I like to take them to movies and absolutely not no movies anymore why I have no good reason that and that people can't give you a good reason for being restrictive and we're trying to tell you like listen be flexible you say I'm gonna spend $500 on groceries and you spend 550 who cares move things around be flexible it's a living thing a living plan that was our fourth rule those rules are what blasted my sales from $100 to $300 in one month and then look at the next month in April that was 450 in May was

[24:30] 870 and I did something from May to June that Patrick would be really happy about but I'll tell you guys about in a second that boosted me to that 2,000 for a college kid that still was earning money you know by the hour and trying to get through school and with a new baby 2 grand and revenue was it might as well have been two hundred thousand you know what I mean it was it was life changing so with the messaging better it still looked crappy there's I just want to throw it out I mean that is bad the logos good because I did it but blue and red is a fantastic

[25:08] combination anyway anyway you do it I there are some you love the guarantee at the top 100% guaranteed it's so classic but you guys see what I was trying to do with that big expensive thing and then the tiny neon green income can you read that I was trying to show them like your expenses are bigger than your income so that makes you feel crappy I should have just said that because that makes this makes no sense I looked at her the other day and I'm like what does that mean oh I remember what I was doing yeah so we hired a designer and that's what our

[25:44] site looks like now better a hundred bucks to anyone that can give me a viable not in cash I'll have to PayPal you the money or something last night took all the cash but gain total control your money that headline is killer so a hundred bucks to anyone that can give me a viable headline that I would one want to test so you have to pass that sniff test but two that would beat that because I have tried for three years to beat that headline and haven't anyway just just a thought easy money so you notice on this here what our message is gain total control your money

[26:27] the reason control is a good word is because I surveyed all of our customers and I said how did you feel once you started using YNAB we call it YNAB for short you need a budget and then I got all their free form responses back dumped it into a word cloud and the was the best word so I choose no I'm just kidding I control popped out sat down control and then I wrote this headline and it's it's short but people are feeling out of control so when you're saying gain control it's it's solid then the little sub line underneath goes along with what I was saying about get out of you know

[27:02] dead stop living paycheck to paycheck save more money on the left there we already want to change things about this homepage but on the left you say a proven method our mistake here we shouldn't even talk about the software in that middle section and we shouldn't talk about our free live classes on that right section and we shouldn't list all those people that have you know had all this success it's too many it's it becomes it's kind of noisy so that proven method we need to lead more with that and we have some ideas for it but the method is what makes us unique that's our message right and that unique

[27:36] message we run with yeah we do software and we spend a ton of money developing the software and the software makes us a ton of money in return but the way we convince people to give the software a shot is by teaching them why we're unique in the first place so you lead with unique all the time everything about everything you do is about what makes you unique all of your copy your brand feel with our brand word is friendly so the way we wrote our blogpost the way we responding customer support that the typeface we used is friendly I didn't know any of this our

[28:14] designer he came up with all that but friendly is the idea and then the unique aspect is the method so I'm always telling people what do you do what we teach people for rules to help them manage their money better than they ever had before it's like a paradigm shift we sell them software to help them implement what we teach okay software totally second-class even though it makes all of our money right second class in our message and that has been all the difference for us that's how we compete with with these bigger guys someone's gonna ask me what's the difference between you and mint mint is

[28:51] like doing post-mortem analysis right you walk up there's the body you're like well you dead you know you maybe tap for a second yep truly dead and you're like shoot they're dead shoot darn it bummer and then you walk away and a month later you're like we got another body you know so why NAB this is just coming to me now I did not plan this why not was like what was the movie Minority Report Tom Cruise and you had those the weird bald people that could foresee crime that's why NAB write the murder doesn't even happen you prevent it before it have there's no dead body because you've been

[29:44] looking ahead rearview mirror meant looking through the windshield while you drive why NAB okay I'll I actually think meant what a great what great timing sad they sold cuz I think they would have done cool stuff remove that from the video but so on our method page we lead with the rules and it's all about the rules everything's about the rules it's all about the rules just over and over and over again because that's what makes us unique art that's even been copied by these people I don't know who they are we just saw it one day and I think maybe read one of our developers founded it

[30:19] like hey someone's there trying to copy what makes us unique so that that does not work you can't do that I'm sure there any way you guys have all been copied by them probably too I don't know who it was or what they were doing just keep iterating like I ate it on my copy and found our message we're still iterating we've got great ideas for a better check out page to boost our conversions or a better home we'll focus even more on our message one thing I did that was really great and I didn't do Patrick's email course because he didn't have it available in 2006 when

[31:01] I wrote my email course and I didn't use drib because apparently wasn't ready back then so I used I think it was a weber that i used way back because they've been around since before the internet I'm pretty sure and I used them and I wrote this 10-day course and it just catapulted sales so if you were to write just the most bare-bones sequence and stick it in a drip or whatever you want to use it would make a difference the course I wrote was just me talking I mean I may be proof read it I don't know I was sitting in the at the library and just kind of cranked out you

[31:39] know why ten days because that's how many I ended up with right so why not seven I have no idea first and I've written other email courses we have a business one that I want to send you guys to they'll we'll get to in a second but I end up on nine days all of the time I don't know why but there's no magic number for it there's no magic like this email before they seem able for that email just do it just write it like in a day write ten emails and then get it set up and going it catapulted our sales I think I brought the slide

[32:16] back yeah it was from 900 to 2000 it was just because of the email sequence nothing else changed what are the email sequence do it taught the method which was our unique proposition I said nothing about the software I even said like here's how to implement it with a pencil and paper you could do any other tool you wanted you could build your own spreadsheet or whatever anyone can copy our software right you just start today right but that will not that's not what sells and so you don't differentiate on a feature at least for not for very long because two weeks later after a sprint

[32:54] is done someone else will have your feature and you just you don't want to be caught up in thinking okay if we just add this there are a few kind of mission-critical product features that you have to have but those aren't going to be the game changers for you those are not going to be what customers say oh man that is the reason I use that product it will be because what you bring is unique and as Kathy Sierra says it makes them badass it makes them just awesome right and we've talked about that a lot yesterday here's don't be dumb like me so I'll maybe kind of wrap up here then we'll

[33:31] get to Q&A but we moved to Texas and I've got two two kids at this time and we go to this we go to a new church there's a new pastor there I don't know him but I know he's a businessman and really successful and so I'm thinking I'm working for this big accounting firm I was making about I think they're paying me 48 grand a year and working 80 hours a week right and then I think I was in a slide yeah I do and then the business by this time we had launched SEP standalone software spreadsheet was was done and we launched some Windows software made a huge

[34:08] difference and we're making about 20 grand a month in profits and I'm making like four grand a month working 80 hours a week for this accounting firm and the risk-averse guy cuz I'm super risk-averse was just like no no no no you you look out be safe and I'm mad that I did that like I I'm a recovering CPA I was a CPA in Texas for a year and I took the exam I did it in like a month which is extremely unheard of but I just crammed and crammed and crammed to try and get that done and become a CPA because that was all in my

[34:42] supposed safe game plan right and then here I have staring me in the face this opportunity that I ignored for a year and and Taylor who's here you can talk with him he's our CTO he and I would talk on the phone and I'd be like at work and step out it'd be six o'clock at night and I had no moral issue working 80 hours a week taking a phone call at 6 p.m. from Taylor so we would talk about stuff try and work things out and I'd get back to work and be home at by 10:00 and they would order dinner for us like it was the best thing ever like hey free

[35:16] dinner well no I'll buy my dinner and be home at 6:30 you know that would be nice I started ordering dessert this should not be on the video I started ordering dessert for my wife because then we would come home and we would watch an episode of 24 cuz that was gripping and at 10 o'clock at night I'd come home and I'd bring a dessert so we could share the dessert have kind of a little date and I'd be off again at 6:00 in the morning or something and the I can't believe this the partner on the job was mad that I was ordering a dessert like

[35:47] we're talking seven dollars here eight dollars that was it gave me you know gave me pause I thought do I really want to be that guy in 20 years anyway back to the so I go to this pasture I set up an appointment because I want to see him and get this business man's advice right so he's in the role of like a pastor who I come to him and I he doesn't know me from Adam right and he says he's really somber when I come into the room and I think he's expecting because I'm like this young guy a newly married he's expecting like marriage issues maybe

[36:19] like maybe I'm being unfaithful and I want to like confess something to him and I could just tell from his demeanor that he's just like you know I'm glad you came you know and that he sits down across from me and it's like so what's on your mind you know really somber and I'm like I've got this business maybe he's thinking like you've been laundering money through a business but I just said and it's making like four times what I make it my job and I'm working like ten times at my job and so he's like quit what do you do you know so he was so relieved like all the

[37:01] light came back into his face and he was so happy so we had a great conversation he was like yeah quit go so I did a couple things a couple mistakes we made we gave a public launch date well before we could have predicted when that day would be so Taylor was the hero there and he I mean he just didn't even go outside like he was the only developer we offshored some of the development that was a disaster too I rated all of my savings to try and pump more money with this to hit this deadline that we had given there's no value in giving a public

[37:38] deadline until the deadline is like Apple approved us yesterday so we're ready in the App Store we will be available tomorrow like that's the kind of deadline you give right but don't there's no value in it for you to promise something way off at all because you will be wrong right and then you look like you haven't stayed up you know to your side of the bargain played a lot of golf to try and stay away from the stress it was stressful that was it was a stressful time so don't do public launch dates that's just a little something sell something soon I liked it we heard I don't know we heard

[38:14] some cool stuff yesterday about getting money quickly we're doing the same thing like we we just started looking at the business side of things and I know that we could help small businesses manage their money better a lot of small businesses live or die by their cash flow and I know we can help them with the same method that we teach personally we could teach the businesses so in the spirit of doing what I'm saying here we we started doing services for just a few people like where we say hey we'll do your books for you we'll do it our way and we'll add a lot of value to you and

[38:48] we'll sit down once a month with you and go through it and we charge them I I don't know I think 300 dollars a month and if it was a bigger business it would be more just depending on the work we do but we actually sit down with them and basically are their bookkeeper so instead of building a website talking about it or instead of building something in our shopping cart to let them check out her instead of building some kind of a recurring model or looking at stripe or Recurly or anything the guy that's doing the bookkeeping you know doing the set he's doing sales

[39:20] fulfillment and he's also our tech guy on this because he's the one that sets up the subscribe like PayPal link that he sends to them in an email saying click here and you'll be subscribed so that's how we're running with something new where it's the same thing you don't have to just because a lot of your businesses really polish and really looking good it doesn't mean that you have to have everything go through nine checks to make sure that it's just right you can still be small and still be quick and have things be really rough around the edges and let things just kind of go as you want and

[39:53] be fast still and experiment fast so we have like five or six clients that are doing this and maybe in a year we'll have 40 or 50 or 60 and it could end up being kind of a profitable little arm for us so sell something quickly don't worry about it even if you've already got something established and everything looks great just do stuff fast and hacky and you learn a ton that way and you test things and we talked about that yesterday we talked a lot about it and I think it's it's great advice that's basically it for me except about bookkeeping keep your do your books

[40:27] today's tax day right the reason you do your books for all of you most likely it's because of taxes there's no other reason to keep track so meticulously of your ins and outs except you have to report it and end up paying these taxes and that's really really sad and makes me really upset to know that you're doing all this work or your paints I'm going to do a lot of the work and then you're deriving no value from the work because there is no value in complying with the tax code it's just avoiding punishment right so the value you get from bookkeeping is what I've written a

[41:04] new course the we're not selling anything new the course is free and you can there's two reasons you could do the course one is to learn how bookkeeping can actually add value to your business and how doing it is is important like it can it helped me go from being really afraid to hire and being stuck at about three or four people to in three years being at about I think 27 and it's it's because I started this is so bad that I'm saying this but I started actually applying my own method to the business and then realized oh I can I can hire and I'm not afraid of it you know I can

[41:39] grow and it wasn't I wasn't afraid of it so that course will teach you that and it will also give you an example of an email course that I'm using live for people to convince him to buy the software convincing parties like a PS saying hey you should buy the software all the content Ares is solid so you can follow me on twitter at jesse meek and that's where i tweeted about more business related stuff where you can follow why now but a twine am but I think we can got a couple minutes for questions wrong so thanks presentation just a curious question you started the the headline

[42:19] for your presentation was how to get to formula without Cora and stuff just as a point of curiosity I know you guys went through Steam more recently I'm wondering how that went for you guys awesome unbelievable like insane Steam users are crazy and hilarious to have in your webinars so they make the funniest jokes they're great so we tried it a year ago one of our developers said we should be on Steam and my first question was what are you talking about what is that and then ice it's a gaming platform and I'm thinking we're budgeting software so no but he kind of pushed and we're like okay so steam let us in with

[43:08] five other four other titles I think as a test because they're seen can we be a platform for things beyond games and people make all sorts of jokes about how you know budgeting is a game and it probably is pretty good or like they've played YNAB more than any other game and they're really proud of it but from the actual revenue side of things when they do those flash sales that make our software extremely cheap I would never sell for that under normal circumstances I mean we're talking like $15 but it's like the the steam people think it's a trial so they're like well I might try

[43:43] this out at some point fifteen bucks so it's a psychology thing and it's in it's crazy the numbers are unbelievable thousands and thousands and thousands and this is it's it sounds bad to say but I was worried about our support right because I'm thinking okay we're gonna pick up 10,000 20,000 40,000 and customers and the I'm not making these numbers up and we do and then I'm watching our support queue and it's just like you know so what does that tell you they're just total impulse purchases they aren't even using the software now we do we are getting more as they're kind of using their trial and seeing

[44:24] inroads there but Steam has been unbelievably successful for us we we're moving to a web app eventually and we'll go to where you guys all say it's so great and awesome with recurring revenue you know we recur with our major upgrades but we still want to have a desktop offering because of that market it's big so I'm curious how often you do major upgrades eighteen months to two years and then you charge we charge forty bucks for the upgrade 60 bucks when you buy it originally yeah the thing that's bad about that is you're you hold back features for this upgrade because you got to have enough features

[45:03] in there to have the people say oh yeah this is worth it so it's it's a it kind of puts you at odds with your customer because you'd rather release right away so that's one reason that I'm excited about the the SAS model another one is mo money right that's what everyone says we'll see we'll see hey Jesse great talk so when you did decide to quit your job how much runway did you have I mean did you have any or do you just like I'm done I chickened out I took another job okay but I quit that after three months so I didn't have any runway it was it

[45:36] was profitable so I was gonna live that's not true I flipped websites as well on the side and that was extremely profitable back in the day but that's another presentation completely so yeah I had other things going on but I started taking a salary from wine I'd like steady where I'm like hey Julie this is what we have I think in 2009 so two years after I went full-time with it do you have any employees at the time when you quit no I just had a couple contractors that would do a little work for me hey Jesse Erica here from Erik it up is I've known about you and you need

[46:13] a budget for a long time I ran a blog and originally started as a personal finance blog before I decided that wasn't my passion and went to entrepreneurship so I'm really excited to see you here and thanks so much for the talk it was fantastic so I would like to take your hundred dollar copywriting challenge of going around with your website for the past ten minutes and I have one suggestion for you that I'd like you to try and maybe you've already tried this I don't know but one thing I noticed about halfway down your pages you say that your average person saves or makes about an

[46:42] extra $200 a month with your software I would play with putting that right up front and adding a personal like Linda and Joe use this to make a two hundred dollars extra a month and then like they spent Christmas you know with their grandkids or something like that where it's like a really tangible personal story of how somebody used you need a budget to basically have more money and it was a personal story that people could relate to okay let's talk so you can show me where we're in exactly how to execute cuz we'll do yeah I'm just really curious to see if something like that would work

[47:12] because I get ganked total control your money is actually really really good and I can see why that's been your control but I suspect a personal story might have more resonance okay something to think about thank you hundred bucks going to Erica I could even see putting quotes around it and saying we saved you know 200 bucks per month and then because you know the quotes always it's just ammonia right up front not even a they saved but a we saved with a picture of them so you said that the early on your email campaigns made a huge difference absolutely so I mean sometimes I think

[47:46] that the first impression is the last impression and and if I generate like six seven emails that go out on a campaign and they just suck I mean they're just horrible that I feel that you know my impression would be people may think that it's a bad product so you saw those screenshots but I put up right that is that is your your green light to just go ahead it can be it can be really bad it won't be bad because you'll try your best right yeah but you'll come back five years later and say oh I'm like I mean our designer still is like I

[48:17] don't like our homepage I love our homepage but he's like no I'm gonna change it happens you know you improve things but you'll try your best it'll be fine it'll be fine and then it'll make a big France for you you seem like a very confident person and I'm sure that has a lot to do with how you progress but when you hit those roadblocks like outsourcing that totally sucked and all the rest of it how did you overcome that and then take the next step I spent $65,000 on a code base to go to the Mac platform you guys the best platform to build on is Java right because you want

[48:56] that cross don't don't crucify me for crucifying this explanation okay or is it JavaScript here there what is it that we try it or that you didn't try Java Taylor this is true and this is why it this is why it happened because I didn't know what I was doing and I I hired a guy and I'm pretty sure he was outsourcing a lot of the work and just taking a cut this is looking back now but it was a disaster and I spent 65 grand it was like we hit our milestone pay me and I'm like well what about XYZ nope this was the amount it was awful so

[49:33] we Taylor came on board right before that was kind of ready to go to beta and he's like we can't do this like this is so bad and I'd sunk all that money into it already so you have this feeling of like well no because all the money's in but it's sunk right some cost so we had to scrap it and if you're comfortable with like what you know what are you making money for like what's the money for it's just like what he was saying it's just for your time it's it's nothing it's not really important beyond like basic necessities and so it was kind of

[50:15] tough and I felt like I'd been kind of like gypped a little bit in that specific instance but I don't know you I don't feel like I was in the depths of despair or anything you know I just you just kind of move along it was painful it wasn't my worst story I'm not even gonna say that one so was it the confidence in your program in what you had yeah and I was confident in Taylor's decision because we had worked together a lot and he had been moonlighting for me and built the original standalone application so I was confident in him and yeah confidence in

[50:48] in your original message was is is key because you can bounce back from all sorts of missteps and and all that thank you you bet it's again just thanks guys [Applause]

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