# How I Inadvertently Launched Speckled: Corinn Pope - MicroConf Remote

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgLBJTfZeao
Duration: 37 min
Language: English
Words: 6871
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/pgLBJTfZeao

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[0:00] [Music] uh it's time to start the founder journey of getting to your first fail so corinne pope is a long time microconf attendee i've had many conversations with her and i'm stoked that she's here to share the stage with me today she's the founder of speckled a tool that helps product managers build the right thing at the right time after stair stepping her away from a corporate gig through an info product business and then to a product apprenticeship she recently made the leap into building sas products and in the quest for product market fit she enjoys talking to customers designing and developing new features and of course fussing over conversion

[0:37] rates as we all do hailing from austin texas she fuels her enjoyment of running stupid long distances her words not mine with tex-mex and toppo chico's so corrine pope welcome to the show thanks for joining me on microcomp thanks rob all right good morning everyone i'm really excited to be here and talk to you about the story of how i inadvertently launched speckled now from my story i hope that you can learn from some of my mistakes and take away some new tactics to apply to your own ideas i'll start with the origin of the idea and how it got off to an admit at least slow start talk about the

[1:16] groundwork that was laid way before this ever became a thing and finally move into how i managed to build up the momentum that i needed to launch my product so let's get into it how many of you have had this happen to you you get an idea you're super excited about it so you run to your journal or your note-taking app you write it down the more you start thinking about it the more convinced you are that this is the one like this is the idea that you need to work on right now so you spend probably a little bit too much time picking out just the perfect domain and then you dig

[1:56] into the fun parts now this happens to me a bit more frequently than i'd like to admit but you know the beginnings part is just so much fun however fast forward a couple of months sometimes even a few weeks and something happens somehow you've lost a bit of momentum and your great idea has migrated over to your project graveyard now my project graveyard is a pretty expensive place the amount of money i spend on domain renewal fees is straight up embarrassing but you know this isn't a place where we really want our projects to land we want to launch them put them out into the world get people on board

[2:45] and make a tool that provides value to the people that we serve right now quite honestly this whole cycle is how speckled got started off it was a sunday in june in the middle of a hot texas summer i was sitting outside writing in my journal brainstorming some ideas i had a job at the time and we were getting all of this work piled onto our plate but no new resources to handle it so we had to prioritize pretty ruthlessly so i was like okay i have this issue and i get the feeling that other people may too so i'm going to register a domain and

[3:25] get to work so i design the website write the copy start drawing up some user flows and wireframes but then life gets in the way now as i mentioned i was working a job my team members were everywhere from eastern europe to the u.s to the philippines and it felt like i was in meetings from sun up to some down on some days and to be honest at this point my job was the top priority and you know the time needed to get this idea really really kicked off just wasn't quite there but still you know this idea kept bugging me it elizabeth gilbert has this concept in her book big

[4:11] magic that ideas are going to constantly come visit you they're going to wake you up in the middle of the night distract you and not leave you alone until they have your fullest attention and then in a quiet moment they're going to ask do you want to work with me and at this point you can say no you know that's okay maybe you're not the right idea for me you know why don't you go and meander over to my project graveyard or you can say yes and so this idea had been really bugging me and for so long i wanted to work on it so i said yes

[4:50] at the end of 2019 i had made the decision to leave my job quite honestly i was a bit burnt out at the time i needed some time to recover and get all those creative juices back so i took some time to relax hang out with my family over the holidays follow some curiosities and then once i was ready start working on this idea and about seven later seven months later i inadvertently launched my product and today i want to talk to you about the time between committing to the idea and actually launching like what was the difference between this project that landed up launching and all the other ones that had landed

[5:33] in my side project graveyard now in prep for this talk i did a lot of looking back to try to figure out what it was that made this one different and i realized it came back to this concept of momentum now previously i do the whole get super excited about something lose momentum kind of thing but this idea it managed to achieve a sort of escape velocity and avoid the graveyard and there were two things i realized that helped me achieve this escape velocity and that was to have a strong base from which to launch and the other one was the tactics that i implemented to get enough momentum to

[6:17] get this thing out into the world so let's first talk about building your base now to get this started you're going to need a strong launch pad that you can push off of and the great thing about this part is it's something that you can work on way before you ever start building a single thing and for me the first part of this base is made out of confidence and skills and and this component took a good 10 years for me to build and you know i'll just put it out there i'm not the most confident person in the world you know many days on this journey i've

[6:52] woken up and been like oh my god like what did i get myself into can i really do this and you know other days it's like okay this is great i can't believe i get to do this on a day to day basis this is awesome so you know while i'm not 100 confident i am about 80 of the way there and i realized before starting that this that if if i could get to 80 confident and build the skills that i knew that i would need i could manage to pick up the rest along the way so i started working on more and more ambitious projects

[7:27] now rob calls this the stair-step approach and it's an approach that took that i took that worked for me all right so i started off in a corporate gig i was doing project management for government i.t infrastructure projects let me tell you it was a complete snooze fest i could only push papers around and follow arbitrary processes for so long before i began to ask is this really something i want to do the rest of my life so a couple years into this role i decided to start a little info products business on this side there i learned the basics of running a little internet business

[8:07] how to build and distribute a product and how to make a little bit of money on the web however i also learned that you should pick a niche you like and you should pick a market that is going to be able to support you financially now i didn't either i picked a niche that could not support me and i quickly began bumping up against the wall now the goal was always to build a product but i didn't feel like i was quite there yet i was missing some skills and i realized that so i swallowed my pride and i went and i got a job working for

[8:44] someone else now i was managing someone else's product but i was working on developing my product sense learning how to manage a development team do onboarding calls conduct customer interviews and all other things that come along with running a sas product and after a few years i was a bit tired this darn idea was still knocking down my door i was ready for a change my confidence was almost there and i had developed the skills that i need to get started but confidence and skills aren't the only thing that you need to construct your launch pad you need a community now i'd always thought of myself

[9:27] as a bit of a lone wolf like i don't need anyone i could do this on my own it's going to be fine but over time i started working out finding a community and now that i have one i realize just how critical it has been along the way and there are some really great communities out there micro conf connect is a great example there's also indie hackers maker pad women make i'm in the go rails community and i love that so go find a community contribute and give more than you take really dig in and find your tribe next up join a mastermind they're going

[10:04] to give you the accountability that you need to push through from week to week and they're going to be the sounding board that you need on this often lonely path my mastermind group members are on the call supporting me right now so hey guys also consider getting a mentor now if you're going to go straight up ask someone that has never heard from you will you be my mentor you're probably not going to have a good time you know the people you want to be your mentor are often really busy in-demand people so that being said if you get stuck on something and you want them to weigh in maybe type

[10:39] it up in an email add a little context shoot it over to them and if they respond then that's great you know you take their advice and you work on closing that feedback loop let them know how their you know their advice went and you know start building that relationship and if they don't respond no worries okay um and then finally this is this kind of this kind of thing is something that i wish i had known before i had gotten started so i just wanted to make sure to include it realize that not everyone is going to understand this path you know it's not a role at

[11:18] some famous corporation complete with a matching 401k plan and three weeks vacation it's a little different some family and friends may not get it at first and heck even my parents have no idea what it is that i do on a day-to-day basis now when xander called me about speaking to all of you i was so excited one of the first things i did when i got off the phone was to call my parents and let let them know so you know they said hey hey mom and dad like i'm going to be speaking speaking at microconf remote and they're like oh oh that's nice corinne

[11:53] congratulations you know that'll be a great thing for you to put on your resume for when it's time to get a real job it's like ouch but you know i think they'll get it maybe eventually at least i'm secretly hoping that they do but the funny thing that i realized from this is that you don't need permission to go get started on the path like you you can just go get start get go get started so go start build your confidence build your skills and then get ready for the next phase get something out there and start building your momentum all right so let's start with the most

[12:30] logical place to start the idea now people say there's no such thing as a bad idea but i would say that a really good idea can help you get a lot more momentum than say just an okay idea now even though i had this idea for speckled i still spent some time making sure it was a good one and making sure it was a valid problem so i went and i made sure people were talking about this problem online that people were complaining about it in forums and websites and you know all those places online so you know that that was there i made sure people understood this category

[13:12] and were buying things like it i was not quite ready to start a whole product in a category that no one understood so i wanted to make sure that this was a category that existed and i wanted to make sure that i enjoy being around the kind of people who have this problem now i'm a product manager i love product people so i was like okay i think i'm good with that one i can hold my own and this was kind of the basic criteria that i made sure to suss out and make sure that this was a decent idea now there may be more questions out there you want to consider

[13:50] but these were the ones that worked for me okay so you want to start off with a decent idea and then it's time to do some dun dun dun marketing yep if that makes you if that makes you squirm then i am right there with you now i feel like this is an obligatory micro comp slide i feel like it's advice that is commonly dished out and it's commonly ignored and i think i know why it's just that building is just so much fun like who doesn't love going into this flow state and doing all the stuff that they love to do and talking about yourself and

[14:33] hyping up your product is super super uncomfortable most introverts like us don't really like to toot our own horn it's awkward and quite honestly it sucks but you know what sucks more going into a flow state for a couple of months surfacing for air with something that's ready for the market and realizing you haven't told anyone about it yet so we're going to try to avoid that and this is the technique i use to avoid that and it's by building a reverse press release this is kind of something that amazon does for their new products so before anything is ever built you write a press release

[15:15] hyping up your new product talking about its features the value that users are going to get from it and heck maybe even throw some fake customer testimonials in there for good measure now once you've shaped up a product that you'd be happy to see hit the market then it's time to take some of that language add it to a landing page and make sure you add an email capture now spend a little time promoting that around a bit and you'll start seeing new emails trickle onto your list now then and only then do you actually go and build the darn thing now as you may have picked up i am not

[15:57] an engineer by training i only started teaching myself how to code last year end of last year really and still have a bit of a way to go still though i was very optimistic on how much i could get done and how quickly i could do it you know i remember writing in my journal in january be like ah i could totally launch this by march in march i wrote oh yeah it'll be done by april maybe in april it was like okay i think i could get it down down by uh down by may and you know things just kept getting getting pushed back and it was late february i was on a

[16:34] call with one of my code mentors and i was walking him through this problem that i was having and he basically told me that i was making this entirely too complicated for myself i had all these tables in my application and a very academic understanding of what a database should look like so already a couple months in i was tearing everything apart starting all over again and it was a bummer but from this i learned to keep it simple instead of adding features cut them now this is what my initial mock-up for my product look like okay nothing too crazy but here is what i actually launched

[17:17] with just this part in this pink box just this little prioritization feature and had i tried to get everything on here done i probably would have lost any momentum and sent this project to join the many others in my project graveyard now it did feel super underwhelming to launch with this i'm not going to lie but the thing is i got it out there and even getting this out there was a bit of a struggle to be honest that last ten percent of the work was taking the same amount of time as the first 90 it was like wtf i kept hearing myself say oh i'll just build this one more thing

[17:58] this one more feature i just need to make this one more bug fix i just need to fix up the ui ux it needs a little bit of tweaking it's not quite there yet still need to add notifications so on and so forth now fortunately i realized that i was killing my own momentum so one day after fixing some issues uh i i realized it was it was good it was good enough you know it wasn't perfect but it wasn't you know absolutely terrible so one morning i pushed everything to production i let that marketing list that i had so conveniently built up a few months ago know

[18:43] that you know hey it's live it's free to try out and i watched as some users rolled into my production database you know there was no splashy product hunt launch there was no launch party heck i don't think i even popped open a bottle of wine or cracked open a beer but you know what i did have was a product that was in motion it was out in the world it's picking up momentum users are starting to use it and now i'm trying to figure out how to build and maintain my momentum and to be honest this is a work in progress from what i've learned so far you know

[19:24] feedback has been critical in this part and learning how to take it how to take it not personally has been a challenge and it's been a really good learning lesson now i'm definitely not good at it by any means i remember i got my first piece of negative feedback i was out camping i checked my phone because i'm apparently the kind of person who brings their phone camping i know shame on me and i saw this piece of negative feedback come in and i was like oh man like this sucks so i sit there wallowing myself pity for about 15 20 minutes stare into the campfire

[20:00] and realize that you know this feedback is a gift and you can use the feedback that you get after you launch to work on iterating your product and building a better product so you could do a lot of positive with the feedback that you get and also combined with using your own product you'll quickly figure out what it is that you need to work on improving so in review we talked about building your base and how building a community your confidence and your skills is going to set you up on the path for success down the road how a good idea is going to help carry your

[20:39] momentum a bit more than say an okay idea and of course then you could go you know by the domain and start thinking about some of the fun parts but before you do that spend a couple of days setting up a very basic marketing system so that when you do come up from air for air after building this you know you're not starting from a dead stop you do have some momentum and some some place to go from here and to be honest i'm not sure what happens after this part i'm really looking forward to hearing some of the other speakers that are going to be coming later today

[21:18] to see maybe what's in store for me down the road but in the meantime i hope you learned a bit from the story about how i launched speckled and how it got started off pretty slow how i managed to build up some momentum with a decent idea a very simple marketing system and a paired down product and how i inadvertently launched to make sure that i could keep my momentum going now if you're thinking about taking this path and launching your own product hopefully with a bit of a more deliberate launch than i did i'd highly recommend it it is incredibly rewarding and i think you're going to enjoy the

[21:55] ride you got it well corinne again uh audience questions are gonna start coming in i'm gonna kick us off with a couple questions um that i had for you great talk i really enjoyed it and loved hearing your story um i think the the first thing i wanted to ask is about the stair step approach that you mentioned um what i've noticed is i personally traveled the stair step approach but i didn't realize i was doing it as i was doing it that wasn't my goal from the start necessarily i was just so risk-averse i didn't want to build the big sas app quit the day job i

[22:26] had a wife and a kid and a mortgage and all that i'm curious with you did you from the start think i'm going to build a small one and then a next and next and next level up or was it more of an inadvertent walk down that path it was probably a combo of the two i think that i probably got to the info products business and i was like okay like this is cool like this is a path that i i could take in the future but i'm not sure i would like to do a product in the future and i'm not quite there so i think i'm

[22:52] going to need to take a couple of stair steps so i kind of got there halfway there organically and then the rest of it was a little bit more planned yeah yeah i think that's a pretty common story actually i think some people start doing it because they want to keep the day job or they don't want to leap from one island to the next they want to have you know a foot on both of them and then once they hear about it it's like a theory that matches up with what they wanted to do anyways you know and it kind of gives them permission to do it i think

[23:19] another thing i want to touch on is about you talked about asking for permission um which is something i've harped on quite a bit because i've spoken at events where it's just tech founders but i've spoken at events where there were like filmmakers and and writers and i've noticed that there's a very similar um i don't know mentality that a lot of us are scared to ship and and with writers i say are authors you know i say don't ask for permission from a publisher or agent go write like you look at andy weir who wrote the martian he started writing and publishing it on his blog and it was

[23:50] really good and people started liking it and then he eventually published it into a book he just wrote um filmmakers you can say i need money from a studio you can say i need permission to get distribution or you can do what kevin smith or robert rodriguez did and you can go out and just shoot a film for 20 grand you know and it's not going to be the best film ever but it's at least something that you're making and putting into the world and the same thing with startup founders i feel like a lot of founders are waiting for permission i mean in the silicon valley narrative

[24:15] it's waiting for permission from people to write you a big check to do it like i can't do it without 10 million bucks and it's like no you can a bunch of people have already done that um but in your case you know you really talked about almost asking for permission from uh i don't know it's like from it wasn't you weren't waiting for funding but you were like waiting for uh was it permission from yourself or talk about that a little more about what your particular you know predicament was there yeah i mean i definitely always had a little bit of imposter syndrome and i

[24:43] was like okay well maybe if someone else tells me that i can go and do this then i can go and do this um but you know i think you know i i just like having this knowing that i have the support of people but eventually it got to the point where you know eventually you just don't care as much and you're just like i'm just gonna do it screw it so um yeah so i just uh i just went i just learned to get over that uh that feeling of um needing permission to go do it and just do it and it definitely was a little bit of a learned skill like

[25:16] and i remember the first time i told my parents i was even starting like an info products business and they're like why don't you just stay with your job and you know have that 401k plan and the benefits and everything that comes along with it but you know that's not what i wanted to do right and that's the part you touched on where family and friends aren't going to understand i ran through the same thing um no one in my family was or friends were entrepreneurs and so i got questioned a lot as well as even like yeah it's always going to be a struggle um i have some questions coming in for

[25:45] you first question says i love the press release idea how do you push it meaning how do you promote it organic seo ads how do you build buzz how did you build buzz around it and that's from deep okay um yeah actually in terms of the press release that wasn't something that i actually released into the world it was more of a thought exercise on how i wanted to shape this product up and get it to the point where it was something that was exciting to people so it was a good way to me for me to try to figure out some of the messaging that i could

[26:21] then put in my landing page so i didn't necessarily publish this or promote this anywhere it was just a document that lived in me you know in my notion and you know i just would eventually and sometimes go back to it just to make sure that i was on the right path and building the thing that was exciting to build as i was building it yep yeah it's something i've actually done myself um to write to write the i didn't just call it a press release i would call it the landing page so i would start with the landing page before i would build a product or

[26:53] write the book or launch like before we launched the very first micro conf mike tabor and i sat down and built a landing page with all the marketing copy and some headshots of people we thought we wanted to be in and we didn't we didn't release that before we invited the people but then that was really the launch you know before we booked a hotel that's how that's how we did it so i like that piece of advice um for our next question we actually have a brave soul who is going to come on and ask it via video producer xander we'll bring them on

[27:26] hello my question is uh you had people sign up on your landing page because they were curious about the product how much did you interact or did you interact with those people at all during your building process i i did email them a couple points throughout the process and another thing that was also helpful was after i sent them to that email capture i also sent them to a thank you page that had you know what brought you here to you know why were you interested in this product today and that helped me get a lot of good information but yeah i would email people occasionally

[28:04] on the list but i probably should have done it more than i did to be honest but you know hindsight is 20 20. yeah your your first one is always hard i'll tell you what i so just a quick piece on that um when we launched drip which was 2013 now wow so long ago um we started building up a pretty good list and i had learned enough by then that i knew that we i should be in contact every few months so i was sending some screenshot updates but more importantly i started sending light surveys and saying hey what's your role what are you looking for from drip what do you

[28:39] hope it does you know all these questions and then i was able to segment that audience um and then i had some one-on-one conversations i most via email actually i didn't do a lot of kind of zoom stuff um but that did help us shape the direction of the product from the start and so that's a pretty loose framework i think i went pretty in-depth on startups for the rest of us which is my podcast i haven't mentioned yet today but um there's an episode there where i talk about doing a survey of a pre-launch list and that really walks through the questions i asked and kind of the um

[29:06] help it gave me but it just goes to show you corrin didn't do that and still had a you know it had a decent launch so it's like you don't have to do these things they just add they add a little bit they maybe help you a little bit more with vision or they help you land a few more folks all right another question all right there's another one where someone's coming on camera producer xander please roll it hey corinne thanks so much for your talk really appreciated it um so i have i also come from a non-technical background i'm in sales and business development where did you learn coding and which

[29:38] programming language did you start with cool yeah so i in the beginning i just took a whole bunch of tutorials and did all the basic tutorials for a whole bunch of languages i ended up going through the ruby on rails tutorial and that was the one that made the most sense to me so that's what i started off with so i started off with going through the tutorials finding some things online and then i eventually joined the go rails community and they have a really great uh bunch of videos to learn there so if you're interested in rails as the language um i would definitely recommend them and

[30:19] uh yeah ruby and rails just made the most sense to me so that's what i ended up going with wasn't super anything super exciting wasn't this cool new javascript framework du jour it was just just rails i still say that those old proven tools are like the way to go um if i were to build an app today i would i would go with something very proven and also well i don't know i'm just uh at this point i'm not going to be said about using boring technology i know i know so much of an ecosystem so we have quite a few questions and maybe let's try to lightning round them i

[30:53] believe we have six minutes left and we have 12 questions so let's see how many we get through um the audience was obviously you know engaged and interested in what you're saying first question when your first users started trickling in do you know where they came from was it from your email list social or something else yeah it was pretty much all for my email list uh i hadn't done too much social promotion but yeah it was it was my email list that was that was the main source email list for the win i'm such a big proponent i'm glad you touched on that all right a question from arthur

[31:27] kliptchukov he says how else do you keep your scope focused and constrained for your first launch i don't always know when i'm in a rabbit hole thanks arthur yeah that's that's a tough question um you know i do try to keep uh my list of all the things that i'm working on i use my own tool for that i keep everything prioritized and i you know it's just if i landed up taking way more time than i thought it was going to take i kind of have to step back and be like okay why is this taking so long if i get really stuck i'll um i'll call

[32:03] up like a code mentor and be like hey can you help me through this problem and that'll help me get through it but yeah you know it sounds silly but meditating every morning and having kind of like a high level overview of what's going on at the moment and making sure every week writing down you know what went poorly last week what was going to happen this week and you know what can i learn from last week and apply to this week so you know making sure that sometimes you know you get into the rabbit hole and you're like doing your work sometimes you just need to remember to

[32:40] zoom out a little bit and you know take a high-level overview of what the work that you're doing is yeah and that's a really nice way to sanity check it um two other things that i've done because it's a really hard question it's there's no one-size-fits-all but one thing is when i had a co-founder that was super helpful um when i didn't it was my mastermind group so there were two other three two or three other folks that i would get together with every couple weeks and typically i would say man i'm really struggling with something i would email one of them and just set up an impromptu

[33:08] like i need to bounce this off the wall you know i need to bounce this off someone else for a sanity check all right we have a text question from janet a carr she says corrine could you go into a bit of detail on how and where you distributed your press release and landing page so again you didn't distribute the press release but how did you promote the landing page i think is probably the best way to ask that so since i was part of the audience that i was selling to i knew where they were hanging out there were a bunch of slack groups online

[33:36] where people were hanging out so i started getting involved there and occasionally you know if they had a self-promotion channel i would post it there there's a whole bunch of facebook groups you know you just need to find the watering holes that your audience is at and go and participate in them and uh and you'll start to you know get some involvement from that audience and you know it can just pick up from there so that's that's what i did personally awesome from david mcneil how important was it for this project that you were doing it full time whereas with previous projects you were also juggling a full-time job

[34:18] well to be honest doing it full-time has definitely helped it definitely gives me a lot more focus and you know instead of you know approaching it in two-hour chunks i can sit down for a good amount of time and really really get some of the harder parts and get into that flow state so i think that having it doing it full time was definitely beneficial however you know there's something to be said about building something on the side and you know spending a little bit of time chipping away at it here and there i don't i don't think there's a right answer for you know it really depends on what your

[34:51] personality is and what your priorities and what's going on in your life at the moment yep i would agree all right our next question is coming to you live from zachary kessin welcome zachary bruce anders going to wire him up here we go

[35:13] uh-oh no audio no audio yeah we don't have audio on zach if we have the text and the question be a text i could read it or as producer xander you can send me the next one all right what is a good way to get people into a mailing list if you have no traffic hmm i think you kind of have to produce some traffic yeah i think you do have to produce some kind of traffic so like i mentioned before getting involved in the places where my community where the audience was hanging out was a good source of traffic for me it was probably the best source of traffic that

[35:55] i had um so go and get involved in your your audiences communities and you know you know give more than you take in those communities you know answer questions you don't have to be the one always promoting what it is that you're working on make sure that you're providing value to the people there and you know then maybe organically they'll check out your little you know profile link and be like okay what is this person looking at so yeah all right 26 seconds left corian last question from georgia nikolev he says did you find your product market fit first or did you have the audience first and

[36:32] you built a product they needed i think i went with the audience first approach like i i knew that i really wanted to serve project product managers i knew that our lives were pretty chaotic at times and that they could use all the help that we could get so i i definitely concentrated on product managers first figured out what problems that they were having that i was also having and you know went from there so i definitely went audience first for my project foreign pope thank you so much again for joining me on microcompremote today [Music]

[37:14] you

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