Six Tricks That Helped Me Triple My SaaS' Growth Rate – Brennan Dunn – MicroConf 2014

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0:07[Music] so this is a list of everything I do I'm a Silla preneur I work entirely by myself I do not have any staff I used to run a consultancy and I had eleven employees nowadays I am kind of working to never do that again so I'm gonna be talking out plan scope which is my first business or my first product business today but I also have written two books I have a membership site of a workshop I have a podcast and I have a newsletter and this is all kind of like a my weekly to-do list of things to kind of work on but why I do all of this is for these

0:44three people up on the wall and I guess we're all showing kid pictures I don't have five like Jesse but you know working at it I guess so this is uh this is why I do what I do and this is my arch-nemesis I this is my home office and I try to do whatever I can to spend as little time up here as possible I grew up on computers I spent you know high school in college playing around in computers I love computers but everything that I'm doing in my business is optimizing toward that so a lot of what I'm going to be talking about today is ways that I've put into

1:24place automation that allows me to focus more on this and less on this so why do we all come out to the desert every year for microcon we all come out here because we want to grow we want our businesses to grow we want to it's it's it's strange because you leave more like almost every talk I just want to run out to the hallway and just kind of like you know sit on the on the ground and just plug in my laptop and just hack on stuff right because I get inspired to change and to do things and to implement new stuff but on top of that I just walk

1:57away I mean one thing I love about this conference is everything is so actionable everything is so like do this and get this resolved so with that with that being said that is what I'm going to focus on in this talk so who's been here or knows what this is don't be ashamed okay so this is World of Warcraft which consumed much of my early marriage because I realized being poor newlyweds it was actually pretty cheap to just pay $30 a month for two accounts versus going out for movies and you know having dates and everything like that so I asked my wife we lived off of ramen and World of Warcraft for a

2:37while but one of the really interesting parts about this game and really any role-playing game is the idea as you want to level up you want to get to that next level and you get to the next level you gain experience points and experience points can be gained in a few different ways you can kill stuff or do quests or whatever but you start to realize eventually that there are better ways of getting experience than other ways and this is just this is like business I mean this is there's so much overlap between like slaying level 1 boars and getting to that next revenue goal or adding you know getting to five

3:10figures a month versus four figures about the recurring revenue and what I realized is you know we're all here in this desert and you know in Vegas yearly because we want to walk away with ways that we can build a better business so that we can get to whatever goal is matter to us what matters to me as I mentioned are my family but for you it could be really whatever whatever matters to you so I'm really focusing like I said on plan scope which is my SAS business it's a to-do list if you really think about it but it's it's business-to-business I'm focusing on consultants so freelancers who are

3:45really consumers but we're wearing their business owner hats so you know they're an individual but they're it's funny like as a former freelancer or consultant I I would drop hundreds of dollars in training or software that helps them get my business and then I would go into the app store that night from my phone and reluctantly buy that 99 cent out right so it's it's it's so weird dichotomy so plan scope is my is my main sat or my main product business and and it's been around I launched it to two years ago two and a half years ago it's doing pretty well but the surprising part that people ask me so a

4:27lot of people write in you know either through support tickets or just you know my initial email is hey I'm the founder replied tell me why you signed up and so on and I get a lot of people asking so how big is your team and my common response is well it's about you know 0.25 on a good week because I really only spend maybe three or four hours a week maximum on plan scope I don't spend a lot of time my goal is not to do an 80 hour a week start up if I did do that I probably would be much bigger than it is

4:56now but again there are more important things in life that I'm optimizing for so what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk and my wife hasn't seen what pictures I use so this is all new to her we're gonna talk about six things that you can do to spend more time with you know in my case these people asterisk you know I hope these aren't the three people you want to have as their goals but if so we should talk but um you know what whatever is important to you so was it Samuel I think you had a chart that was almost identical this yesterday right yeah so this is the kind of the

5:32all-important SAS sales funnel you have visitors percentage in them small but usually much smaller percentage of them become trials percentage of them activate and percentage of them paid or pay and then you have the secondary funnel which is okay now that somebody's paid how long until they turn out so you know a churn rate is basically what percentage of your paying customers are are you going to lose every week or every month rather so these are the two kind of charts that we're gonna focus on and what I've done is I've kind of picked out different phases or transition phases so trial to pay or trial to activate it or visitor to trial

6:08or activation to paid and over the last year I've really looked at each of these and I realized you know these are tweakable they're like knobs you know if you tweak one it influences everything that comes after that so if you can get more visitors converting the trial you get more paid customers you get more activated trials and you know and so on and likewise with churn if I can decrease that drop rate I make more money so let's I've read it in that so we're gonna now identify and tweak different points of optimization on these two charts so the first is reacquiring drive-by so I got the term drive-by from

6:45rob and drip I think it's a great great way of kind of rep the idea of somebody comes to her site doesn't leave anything behind and just bounces I'm gonna talk about retargeting so does anyone here currently retarget good success yeah okay everyone knows what we're targeting is who that's work should I okay I'll just in case you were the one percent that doesn't know the idea being if I rip into like a random like gardening website you see like a SendGrid ad like nope no marketer knows this said the sun grid CMO did not say you know what it would be great if we advertised on you

7:27know home gardening calm or whatever like retargeting is basically they it's you see ads of sites you visited so I extensively use retargeting across landscape and all of my businesses and the typical what typically happens is you google a site or you get to a site and then you get tagged and then that site will just start promoting their marketing site to you everywhere you go I get I get really angry whatever I go to face what can I see a ad for a service I sign into a few hours ago because they're bait literally I mean they're literally burning money on marketing me on the customer anyway that

8:09that is inside the to kind of like really the to kind of ways I look at retargeting our information versus products so when people find plan scope or people find anything on plan scope that I oh there's two paths that they've come through there's the first path which is hey there googling how do I raise my rates how would I get clients how do I do whatever and they hit one of my blog posts so I do a lot of content marketing like you know Ruben does on bid sketch and a lot of us I think doing our product loves the idea being not everyone is looking for software but

8:40they're looking for things that kind of correlate with something you know their if you're a freelancer you're looking for how to get clients how to charge more how to get you know whatever which is a good overlap for selling software to freelancers so the first kind of acquisition channel I guess is or is people hating my blog and you know getting tagged and and so on and they balance and go back to Google and maybe read the next article and then the next is people saying hey I need freelance project management software or I need software or they get a direct link to my marketing site and these are kind of the

9:14two two different types of people both first step if you will probably don't even know about planned scope or the software they don't care they're just they wanted the article they wanted the info and they either write a few articles and left or or whatever second part know that they're looking for software they're on their mark my marketing site there seems screenshots they're seeing you know by now or try now links and what I've really come to determine it is having one size fits all retargeting is a really bad idea and what I mean by that is when somebody's on Facebook like if you're on Facebook you're looking at wedding

9:49pictures you're looking at like BuzzFeed articles or you know whatever like that's what you're looking at you're probably not in a purchasing mood you're not in the mood to buy software try software or whatever else and what I've started to realize is if I can push people who have only see my blog or are looking at or have been tagged by me and are on Facebook does something like an email course which has very little friction you know give me my give me your email address and over the next week I will teach you everything you need to know about how to make more money as a consultant that is something

10:22that has a very high conversion rate because people are you know that's not distracting them from looking at BuzzFeed articles so I get a lot of opt-in I get about a 30 40 % conversion rate from Facebook to my email course which again has a very high and that's pretty much like what drip is all about the idea being not everyone is ready or in the mindset to buy software so if you can at least build a relationship with them over time and explain to them the split of them the why like why should they care about transparency when it comes to their clients or communication

10:55or whatever else and then the how which is your product can kind of you know come in at the end so I've been doing about extensively with Facebook Ads and also people who have only had my blog but never saw my parking site conversely if they've seen my marketing site and they're using and they're being shown ads on the Display Network which is you know websites rightly banner ads not not Facebook these are people I am driving back to my marketing site because they're much more I mean I've done a lot of experimentation around this and what I found is Facebook is really really bad for me at least at getting people to try

11:31my software but the display network is a lot better so I would I would really consider trying to segment out your your visitors into people who have read content versus people who have actually seen product and try to try to target differently and try to promote differently a few different things that you could try out I wish more people would do this retargeting shouldn't stop when somebody gives you their email address or signs up for your product we all have lifecycle emails which are meant to kind of condition people all during the trial sequence but you can augment that effort by retargeting ads for a webinar you might do weekly that

12:10kind of showcases how to use your product or how to get how to make best use out of it it could be if you do one on one founder onboarding of your smiling mugshot show up on a on a banner ad somewhere and say hey you with a founder that that software you're trying now click this to go to my calendar I mean it's that that works well it could post us key study success stories usage guides I mean these are things that when somebody's in a trial I mean that is such a valuable like if somebody's said I want to try your product now it's your

12:44turn to convince me that it's worth paying for these are people that you should really make an effort to retarget and we're so used to I think thinking of advertising is getting somebody you know getting that first bit of info from somebody right getting what we need getting their email trusts getting them to sign up for a trial we don't really think about it as weight of conditioning so I would encourage you to give that a child additionally you can use retargeting is a way of forced RSS I mean you can if you have an active blog and you're pushing you updates to your product you could retarget paid

13:14customers and push product updates into their Facebook feed you should definitely be doing this over email anyway but it's a good way to kind of augment that through different medium alright let's talk about segmentation so dishing is good we all know that right the reason niching is good is because people want a product that's made just for them so I teach this all the time with when I teach consultants but if I'm a designer or web designer who specializes with medical sites and I'm up against a generic web designer if we're talking to a medical clinic chances are I'm going to win the contract even if I'm more expensive

13:54because I'm lower risk you know I'm the one me just for that medical clinic same applies of products we all want that product that's made just for us that fills everything we need so one of the things I do is early on in the signup flow I figure out are you team or are you solo do you mean lead a design or do you need to do development and how do you build you what's your rate and how do you build daily weekly hourly fixed and that influences literally every thing that follows afterwards so life cycle emails are gonna if you say you're a development consultancy and you build

14:29$10,000 a week you're not gonna get stories about my freelancing days you're getting stories about when I ran a consultancy and I'm gonna say it as a consultancy if you chose days agency I would say agency the on wording you're gonna get a sample project with developmental tasks and the budget that's plugged in it's going to be set to ten thousand dollars a week in a messaging the way the reporting language works the way I set up labels it's all gonna reflect what you put it and again the goal is to make that product for what further ways that you could try to individualize your product this is a big

15:04one if you're listed in a third-party integration marketplace say Basecamp comm you integrate with Basecamp and they have you in their little integrations database if you see Basecamp commas refer cookie that person and then when they go to sign up the first thing you should do is hey let's get you set up connecting your Basecamp account I mean it's a you know it's such a no-brainer and it's just one of those things where like they don't need to think like people don't want to think they just want to be like oh wow like okay I clicked over from base camp and you're already asked me to integrate

15:32with base camp this is great so also create specialized landing pages for each of these different types of people who would who could buy I mean these are great just because I've gotten people saying heroin a 20-person shop there's no way that your software will work for me or there's no way software that works for freelancers could work for me and my team which it will but you know there's people think that there are our core differences potentially that would make it so a product that serves a certain Gatien won't serve their niche so specialized landing pages even specialized you know I've seen a lot of

16:09products where they'll say like for agencies or something at the top and you click that it's a landing page just for agencies this is a this is a kind of a master level technique I'm not doing it yet I'd love to but you know if you can figure out where people like googled and stumbled upon your your blog and what they were reading you could tailor what comes next when they actually sign up for an account based on so if they're googling around for pricing stuff they hit something about pricing you could tailor parts of your lifecycle emails for instance around that it takes code and automation and setup to do but it it

16:46works so people you know when non-programmers to I'm a programmer they assume I'm you know up doing math all day or I do rocket science or whatever I like I said it's like a Plinko board I just do a lot of if-then statements I mean that's literally what I do for a living and it's so easy for us is just do a lot of conditional offends that are reflecting what somebody said they are so if they're a development shop and you have an F that says you know if developer show this or whatever or if from base camp show this these are really easy for us to do I feel like

17:20they're technically really easy for us to do I just don't see a lot of people utilizing in and I'd encourage everyone here to do that trial scoring so anyone have a background in sales actually okay cool so lead scoring the idea being not all leads are created equal right so I am within the last six months I started scoring all of my new trials and I score them based on usage and and what they're doing because I do I occasionally do manual outreach I try to you know talk to people and figure out what's why are you nodding age why are you engaged and trial square he's probably

17:58one of the best things I've done it's a very simple thing to get set up once you do it and it's a good way to see like well I'll show you what I what I do around this so you know the goal here is to learn in to optimize so we want to learn why are people activating why are they not activating why are they paying or are they not paying and we went to then optimize what we find both quantitatively through our trials scoring but also qualitatively through talking with people and make our product better so we have more paid conversions one of the things I do is I when

18:29somebody converts when they buy when they pay I take a snapshot of everything in their database and save that because I want to know what is common about people who are buying plants copla made when they convert what I've realized is the these are the common attributes that like 90 plus percent of people who convert have done all this they've obviously created a project they've invited at least one client to join that project they've invited a team member through a team account they've integrated with a third party invoicing app they've logged twenty hours it's actually about twenty two hours but for the sake of presentation about 20 hours

19:01so knowing this I set this up as a perfect 100% score or 100 score and everything you know below that you know the higher you are 200 the more likely they are to tist eclis to convert so I think this is probably the only a code you'll see this uh this conference but hopefully it's readable but this is my trial happiness score and all I'm doing here is I'm just summing up I have you know zero to 100 and I come up with a score based off of how frequent when did they log in and there's also decays so if they have a lot of in for a while

19:35their score kind of decays over time have they you know added it to client or team member so add 20 points how many hours have you log to get into cave I want that to be a zero to 20 score not just a 20 they get 15 points if they've added invoicing they get another 15 up to 15 if they've added comments and done stuff internally and what this turns into is something like this this is an older I changed some stuff around so not many people look engaged but what I've done is this is my active trials and the brighter the green the more engaged they

20:06are and these are the well that I'm gonna reach out to and really make sure that they're having a good experience and really nudge them toward towards conversion what's even more important is these scores if you remember Patrick's talk from last year with the trial expiring email he would have two different emails one for a good trial one for bad trial if trial happiness is above 60 show this or use this copy otherwise use that copy it's pretty simple you can do a lot with this you can do a lot of in-app kind of nudging because our goal is really to get people to get a higher score so they

20:41convert so once they have these scores I start to question like so how does how did these people get to a 90 score or how hard these people suck at 30 and I try to figure out by talking with them why are they the score that they are and this has shed a lot of light on where people are getting stuck you know what's confusing what's what's you know what's losing people what's getting people engaged and this has been tremendous and just giving me the info I need to better my onboarding our number one job as software sellers is to nudge people towards and when you have that kind of

21:19that milestone that 100 score it becomes a whole lot easier to figure out you know how to do that so take away I try to include these takeaways which are kind of a little actionable things you can try it's gonna do automated or life so Cueva let's try doing them manually first like just do them through Gmail manually send these life cycle emails and kind of do kind of really rudimentary split testing and see what works and what isn't working then then eventually when you figure out what works you know stored in a cron job or customer i/o or whatever you have news okay next educate everywhere so Jessie

21:56gave a really good talk on how education is prime or you know the prime focus of you need a budget well we don't always realize is that our product is like a really small part typically of somebody's entire business and the more we can kind of better the whole business the better the more likely the error to actually become great customers ORS so when somebody creates an estimate in plants go instead of saying okay well click this button now put in a price and do this and do that what I do is I send them advice you know tips education on how to close the estimate because my job

22:33is not like I want them to close hit estimate because then they're gonna realize hey like this tool helped me and convert or getting this new plan you just paid me five plus figures this is awesome so the email I use it's hard to see but when I send out the slides you can probably read that a little better is when I sent when somebody creates their first estimate I send out a you know this thing that says hey you just create your assessment my goal with this email is to help you raise the likelihood that your client will accept it two to three times it's not about software you know

23:04it talked including software the overarching theme is this is software that's helping you close assessment well my goal here is to say hey I've consulted for years like let me tell you what I've seen that works so you can close assessment and I have an internal dashboard that when somebody actually closes of estimate it puts a little to do on my dashboard that says hey reach out to this person and say congrats on closing that estimate and I send that manually through Gmail it's not a automated email and that's like the perfect way of saying you know the reply to that email instantly becomes testimonial fodder like if you if I can

23:38you know say hey congrats I just saw you close your first estimate any advice you can give me on how it could have been more painless that is that's a great way to kind of get that qualitative data to help you grow all right um and like I said yeah celebrate your customer successes when the close estimates when they do key actions that are the reason that they sign up your project or your product you know celebrate that with them okay so big takeaway try to figure out reflected in product what are the key actions what are the things that get done in it not the like creating database records but

24:14what are the actions what are the goals that people actually sign up for your product or product to do and bake those kind of celebration metrics or whatever around that okay don't accidentally oh so this is the one thing that I want to recommend if you haven't done this I expect everyone who hasn't done this to you know go up to their room after this talk and spend 20 minutes of coding to get this done we all have these kind of funnels right that tell us where it we're dropping off why people aren't using our software why they're canceling we can kind of quantitatively figure out

24:48what's going on but that doesn't it doesn't always give us the big picture so the not so there's a lot of reasons to collect I mean Robin Mike gave a really good episode of their podcast a few weeks ago about why you should collect credit cards upfront the biggest reason I think people should collect credit cards upfront is it requires people to cancel if they don't want a big key builder when you don't do that people just direct away if they don't use your product right like it's just disappearing to be the other and never show up when you require people to cancel otherwise they're going to build

25:23you can slap a little required text area and say why are you canceling or you know why you know I say something like um please help me improve by letting me know why you're why you're canceling your account I stick a little required equals true flag on that text area and the backend is literally you know take the text areas content slap it in the mail or send it to me with this subject I have a gmail filter that just sticks it in a label it's very high-tech but it only took about 15 minutes to write in this alone is like one of the best features that have written for plan

25:59scope because it's given me so much data about why people are canceling wide trials are not converting and so on so again my gmail label is basically a lot of emails that you know I capture lifetime value I capture their account name and everything else but you know I keep this all in Gmail an event and occasionally I just go through and I normally normalize it into a spreadsheet set up you know columns like you know it needed features that weren't there it it was bad fit for their company or you know maybe they switch to some competitor or whatever and having this kind of just plain text data seems like

26:37a non scalable whatever thingy but it's just you know I'm looking for trends I'm looking for is there some like feature that is missing or is there some environmental you're like that's just keeping like a lot of people will say well I read on to work you know that to me that say that's it that's a hey well what if I could get you more work right like that's getting you more work you're gonna stay around longer we both win at the end of the day so I try to I categorize every cancellation into two columns the first being a product reason could be something like it doesn't do X it's too

27:12confusing to get set up it's too expensive they kept breaking my clients wouldn't use it my team won use it these are kind of product related things and then there's environmental I got a cancellation I got a job at github okay like you know great or they stopped consulting and then there's a few that I kind of put an asterisk next to it because it's not exactly a really a valid cancellation reason it's I wasn't using it well that's great nothing means I can follow up and say so let's talk like why weren't you using it what can I you know what can I do to make it so

27:46future people or if you come back that you actually use the product I ran out of client work I went out of business these are great ways are great reasons also they had that kind of unified audience where you can sell educational content because if I can get people to stay in business it benefits both of us what ever discovered is people are at the high-water mark their emotional entanglement with your product when they go to cancel and that's why if you've ever tried emailing people after they cancel saying hey could you tell me why you canceled response rates are so low because by then they're done with you

28:16like gone but if you have this blocker text area and I get about 5% of people might asdf that for but 95% of people actually give me legitimate feedback that really helps me so good I would just if you don't if your cancellation page is just a button out of text area it takes a few minutes get it to email you and it's probably like the one the best like a few minutes coding you'll you'll do in a while alright so lastly let's talk about ways to increase lectin value so the goal of a trial is to establish product fit and when that's been completed we charge

28:53that's why I am I'm really impressed with Josh Pickford and how he doesn't have a trial he charges immediately because the product gives you value you connect you know connect to stripe damn stats that's what you came for but not all of us have that luxury you know a lot of us kind of need time to kind of prove what uh that our product is valuable so going back to lead scoring if I can figure out you know when to get to a certain threshold what if I what if I ask him hey why don't you upgrade now pay now yeah you have 12 days left but you know why don't you pay

29:27now I'll give you this book for an exchange Ruben Gomez gives I think a mixergy course if if this happens which is another like if you can make that happen you know give something away that just makes it a no-brainer to upgrade early and that can add you know it's not much maybe ten days of lifetime value but still that's that's something right so I've added for a few minutes or a few hours rather of coding it's not much but I've added about thirty two hundred dollars in added lifetime value by adding like by do subtracting about ten or eleven days from a number of about

30:01thing a hundred and something people's trials and it's you know it's money another thing I I was talking to I was up in Philadelphia at a little summit where Natalie and Chris of wild bit were there and they were talking about something that they do where they will they figure out like when a given plan is typically turns like average and a month or two before that bilson hey I want to give you this free coupon or this coupon and this lifetime coupon that is automatically going to be applied to your account and it will give you 20% off your life it's kind of like I think it's a little morally dubious if

30:40I don't know it's just a way to say like people are less likely to potentially cancel if they know that they have this coupon that them might never get again because a lot of like with my project people cancel when they don't have work but you know I'm always trying to like I'm building in things that make your account more valuable with age stats that really just can't be exported and imported so you know come up with ways that make the make their account more valuable and make it less likely that they're gonna just kind of like ditch it when they don't need it and then come

31:12back later you know and so on okay so just to kind of classify all of these different these six different techniques have covered they each correlate with one of these transitionary phases so you know we're acquiring traffic the goal there is to increase the visitor trial conversion rates although it could also be for trial two paid conversion rates based on some of the stuff we talked about segmenting increasing trial activation can't read score of score to learn and optimize that's to increase the number of paid customers I get right so that all helps increasing paid customers same with you know enriching the whole customer through education discovering

31:56why people cancel helps me reduce churn and also helps me convert more people to paid and likewise increasing LTV decreases churn what this is done for plan scope has been it's not a huge boost it doesn't look like a big boost but about a 1% boost to visit or trial it's not thinking of write home about but mice the trout activation stats have gone up by fifteen percent seven percent lift in activation of paid and what this is meant is a thirty three percent lift in paid accounts so because it all stacks together right so these are things like humility these are things that have just played with it over the

32:37last year and again I'm only putting in a few out this is a part part part time project for me and to be able to add a third new paid accounts just through things like this that I'm constantly experimenting with has been pretty pretty motivational for my business so to go back to our world of warcraft metaphor look for a repeatable quests that can get you to that next level faster you know look for the easy kills the the quests that just give you great loop and great XP and and Prince Murphy so you can get all the slides a bit we a bit on ly / micro comp - PD I'm Brennen

33:19done on Twitter and Breton at plan scope dot IO thank you so Jim did you ever have people with privacy like issues where you know like you using email them and say hey yeah I just saw you got your first estimate no I yeah I mean I don't say like Congrats on making 50 grand like I don't I don't say that I think it just expected that I don't no one's ever complained I think that probably wouldn't be true if I was saying congrats and getting Bob to sign off on like a $50,000 project that would be a little spooky but yeah I do the same thing in both hit ale and drip we

33:54don't got first conversion or at first whatever and Senate like generalize what's that you said it manually or is it automated its automated and there's but there's no details and no one's ever I mean I probably sent thousands of these no one's ever had an issue when I first oh thanks for a great talk Brennen oh when I first signed up for playing scope a few months ago I got immediately personalized email from you which was not an autoresponder obviously and so I just wonder how and you do that and I'm constantly yeah I'm constantly pausing autoresponders and just like that those are days or weeks where it's been a

34:27little more time on plan scope it all send it out out manually um I don't use it like a regular basis but whenever I decide to cancel I just remember that and I remember your own value based approach so that keeps me from canceling and just come back like in a few months and use it again so thank you very much thanks i Brandon awesome talk regarding your customer happiness scores that you create based off the actions I said those were weighted do you weight those based off of the probability that any given one is going to result in in them converting ultimately or yeah so like

35:03remember that that 100 score is typically what most people who convert look like right so if you have 20 22 hours logged you're going to be you're gonna be given 20 points but if you have 10 hours logged you're gonna be given nine points or whatever that would be so it's weighted in that sense it's scaler because it's just multiplying but some of them are flat like if you added if you've integrated you get 15 points so what's what's cool is people will decay over time so somebody doesn't log in for a few days it'll just your score will just go little drone er yeah it wasn't anything

35:43scientific yours when you when you kind of do like this you know part part time effort on plan scope how do you kind of maintain the state of your mind so that you know like after playing with the kids for a week you know on Friday morning when you're gonna work four hours on it that you can really be effective during that time in towards of moving the needle of your project honest answer I those are times where like I was in a habit of getting up really early at 5:00 a.m. before anyone else is awake and mornings I work best and with no distractions so it's usually just

36:19like I'll just get inspired and you know just knock out the week's work good you know a few hours one morning or something cuz I do a lot of I mean I have a weekly newsletter I have a lot of other stuff going on so I can't like this summer I'm actually gonna dedicate more time than ever to plan scope but um yeah I just I don't know I I don't multitask but I will schedule like you know Tuesday morning will be for a few hours all work on plan scope and obviously support is intermittent that's actually where a lot of that time comes from because I do support too so that's

36:53kind of like on a as-needed basis the amount of variables that you have for your retargeting and for your segmenting seems like you'd need to generate a lot of content based on you know you're tracking where they come from and why they sign up and what they're looking for and what they do and if you're trying to create different content and different different means of doing all this it seems seems pretty heavy how do you find a balance for that with the thing I'm best at actually is generating content so the good thing is it's once you do it it's kind of set in stone obviously you wanna like you want

37:31your creatives to change over time as people if they see the same ad like you know you want to switch things up occasionally but yeah because I mean that's one side of IRA target I mean I didn't touch the inter Pro products out of retargeting so I do um I do a lot of it and it's yeah I mean a lot of it can be it could be as simple as like a creative that goes to you like your schedule once linked for booking a time to meet with you it doesn't need to be anything fancy on the cancellation form when someone goes to cancel and you pop up the form

38:04have you tried or experiment with any like giving them an extension to the trial if they actually fill it out or saying like I'll give you an extra if it's a seven day trial give him a 14-game extra seven days an extra month or something to incentivize that that feedback so Alan branch of less accounting does something really cool he he has radio fields that you select first and this is actually good because if somebody just puts in I'm not using it that doesn't tell me anything and I think ribbon of bid sketch also was telling me that I think he does radio fields now one of them might be I'm not

38:35using it and then you check that and then the text field will the label will change and say can you tell me why you're not using it all right which is a little more actionable like you don't get any action out of I'm not using it but yeah Allen branch of less counting I think if you say something like I didn't get a chance to try it or whatever it all say it'll automatically say okay well we're gonna give you another 30 days or or whatever and also I'll give you like lifetime discount coupons if you go to cancel and you've been a member for awhile or so I think he

39:04blogged about it if you go to the less Counting blog yeah all right we have time for one more my questions based on earlier you talked about how you have two different ways that people come into your to David's guitar to your I'm sorry to put this to your product website either from your blog or from the just searching for that peculiar product and on the your host in the content marketing side do you know do you have any problem with like you're giving a lot of content maybe not all of its round creating that would be related to your product explicitly it's more about help with freelancers is that better for

39:37it's not working better to for your products or is that working pretty well for for your your SAS app as well so actually I found that I've played with having a call to action go to the marketing site versus going to like my newsletter or a email course or something it just blows it away going and driving people to like information or you know at your course or something versus like click here to go view you know plants go for whatever maybe that doesn't really work because again people aren't they need to often understand the why like people don't know that they need to they have a problem that

40:13requires software um you know my biggest competition is and other PM tools it's Excel and email so you know I get a lot of people who don't know that there they need project management software so a lot of my onboarding for my newsletter for instance clarifies the need for it and then the how is software so I found it's better to drive people to even if you don't have info products driving people to like an email course or something versus driving people directly to your marketing site I mean there's a lot of friction like with plan scope you need to ditch whatever workflows you have you need to convince your clients

40:46to move over you need to convince your team to move over potentially you might not have a project ready to go for it like there's a lot of there's more friction than just sign up field count right like there's a lot of mental stuff so I found it's I'd rather it's it's better for me to just get somebody in my ecosystem and condition them over time and build that relationship over time now versus driving them straight to the marketing site thanks again Brendon [Applause] you