Finally, a Good Solution for Gathering Content with James Rose and Content Snare

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Our guest today is James Rose and we’re going to be talking about a product that he just launched this week or last week. When we recorded it, the product was just in beta, it’s called Content Snare. And if you are a freelancer you will feel the pain of the problem that Content Snare is trying to solve. So we talk about all sorts of great stuff like design versus content first. Or things like actually interviewing people for the product that you’re developing, writing copy and how hard that is and a whole bunch of other things. I really really enjoyed this interview. I met James through a recommendation of a friend and that’s how we got him on the show. So I’m really excited to have this launch. And so have a listen. I think you’ll get a lot of great information out of it. So without further ado, on with the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today my guest is James Rose and we’re going to be talking about a project of his called Content Snare. James, how are you today?

James Rose: I am very good at this morning session over here. What time is it for you there?

Joe Casabona: It is 6:25 in the afternoon. In the evening I guess for me, yeah. So I’m wrapping up my work day. You are probably just getting started with yours, right?

James Rose: Literally just got in to the the coworking space I work from.

Joe Casabona: Nice, very nice. For those of you who don’t know or can’t hear it, James is reporting from, I actually didn’t ask this before the show but, Australia?

James Rose: Yeah of course. Brisbane about halfway up on the East coast.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I have a friend from Melbourne.

James Rose: Yeah, Melbourne is some of you guys would say.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

James Rose: She did a very good job with that.

Joe Casabona: Thank you, yeah. She made it very clear to me that it’s not Melbourne. Melbourne is in Florida.

James Rose: OK, I didn’t know that.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. So but yeah. So we’ll be talking all about your product, Content Snare. So why don’t we start things off by letting us know who you are, what you do, and what Content Snare is?

James Rose: Oh, well I’m James obviously. So we co-founded a software development business in about 2010. I was an engineer at that, I’m just kind of sick of working for the man and I started a little business with my manager at the time ‘cause now he is my co-founder and other director and that was in [inaudible 04.39.7]. I don’t know if you remember like, article spinning? Yeah, it’s like a dodgy SEO content technique over products at the time. Kind of sucked and we decided we could do one better and that’s kind of where we cut it to you to learn how to market things ’cause we were pretty bad at it for about four years.

Yeah, so that was the start and then we got into websites, building websites for clients because everyone seems to have stories of shonky web developers like everyone had a story about getting screwed over. So we thought, you know, why we just do this and not screw people over. Sure we’ll, you know make a good business out of it And then we kind of always wanted to get back into software at some point and that’s when you know during the process of building websites we noticed a few bottlenecks. And the biggest one by far was content getting continental clients. So that’s basically how the idea started and yeah.

Now we’re, we actually went beta two days ago, which is why this week sucks. It’s very very busy. So yeah, that it basically it’s a way to help automate the process of getting content out of your clients and like a central place to put all that content so that you know you’re not chasing up in multiple emails and getting these like Google Docs or word docs or whatever back with like read instructions in italics that say please link this word to the about page. You know, just all that this the crap you say over and over and over. So yeah we’re trying to help eliminate that a little bit.

Joe Casabona: That’s excellent for a lot of reasons then. So spoken like a true veteran of the field, right? So you get it back in whatever format is best for the client which is great but inconsistent and then I end up losing things in email. But the other is that it’s very hard to get content out of clients and most designers will tell you that you should have the content at the start so that they know what they’re designing.

James Rose: Absolutely. Like that’s a, there’s a, I guess a little bit delayed around that. Like design first or content first. People do one or the other. But I like to think that content versus a good idea. And you know, that’s kind of why I like the concept of this, you know, like my project manager is hitting me up for Content Snare the other day. She’s like, “Is it ready yet?” There’s already, you know, for this reason because it’s just, you know, if you can get that content first it makes the build so much easier and if you build the idea is that you be able to set this on the clients. You know, say all the content you need sort of deal. You might be your wireframe or you might do, you know, a little strategic or planning stage box out of all the content that you need, or plan it out and then just send it to the client and not worry about it until it all comes back. You know, we get a copywriter or whatever but that’s kind of that’s how we intend to use it, you know, so that when that notification comes back and it says that you know all the contents ready, that’s when the website goes into the build queue. And we don’t even, we say to clients with you know, until you get this content back that’s you’re not going to be in the queue right? We’re not promising any dates till you get us to content.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And it’s great ’cause they can actually see their progress, right?

James Rose: Indeed, yes.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s excellent. And then on top of that the project isn’t waiting on content at the end. So you’ll launch faster and invoice faster and hopefully get paid faster. So…

James Rose: That’s the plan.

Joe Casabona: Very cool. So this is the first maybe type of product that focuses on this. Before you build content did you do any research to see if there were other things out there?

James Rose: Yeah. We did. We did find one. Well there’s a few out there that kind of do bits and pieces of what we’re trying to do. None seem to fit the workflow very well. But yeah, we do a lot of research. The funny thing is i’m still finding things you could kind of use like someone I spent a lot of time in Facebook groups and someone posted one the other day that was kind of almost built for this you know, like you send a little request to a client with a couple of fields and you know they fill it out send it back. But it was more made for like small requests you know, not like trying to build a whole website. We actually, yeah. I mean I used a product like this a couple years ago called Square or something and it shut down now. But in my book he used to use it. That’s how I found out about it. And he’s actually interested in Content Snare so I mean to be able to get information back from his clients about bookkeeping, you know, so yeah. We talked to so many people. I mean that the biggest research phase was actually interviewing people ’cause the idea sort of was a little bit different in the beginning. It was more of like a briefing tool and then content was like an afterthought. But I interviewed 15 designers locally and every single one of them focused on content being their biggest problem. So that’s kind of we pivoted before you started there. And yes, like that was probably the biggest research and then it was yeah, just looking around for other products. We did find a few similar things and then I mean I don’t know if you can’t, this is research but throwing up a landing page and then trying to get word out, right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah.

James Rose: Yeah. That was the most important thing. And it’s with every software with any business you gotta launch, try somewhat validated before you build it and just the language people were using when they signed up ’cause we have like a little survey after they sign up that says you know, what’s the main reason you signed up today which is one of the best things we ever did. That’s one thing people take away from this that’s like that’s it because those people are basically writing my copy for me. I know like I know the language to use, I know like just I know what their biggest problems are because they described them right there after they put their email in. And that’s been amazing. So yeah, recently the research I would say is that box and the interviews.

Joe Casabona: Man, that’s great. That was like a mini master class in launching a product idea. Like talk to people that you intend to sell to and ask why people are signing up for your, for updates on your mailing list ’cause that’s I have the hardest time writing copy. And it’s mostly because what I have in my head from my target audience is just in my head, right? So I have, you know, I need to hash these ideas out with people I actually put in the market too. So that’s great advice, right?

James Rose: And you’re right. Copy is so hard. Taking me years to get kind of mediocre at it.

Joe Casabona: Yup. And so that’s great. And content is hard too which is probably why it takes clients longer to get it to us. But with this tool hopefully it helps them move the process along.

James Rose: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Cool. So you just talked about interviewing designers and the people that you view as your target audience. Do you have any contemporaries you talk to people in your field or maybe outside your field for business advice and direction and things like that?

James Rose: Yeah. I mean we’ve done like business coaching courses like I recently just did. I don’t know if you know James Franco just came off now. He’s an Australian marketer. He’s quite big here but he runs a membership type area and then he’s got a high level mastermind and we just did a coaching thing with him called silver circle which was really beneficial. So I mean I do value that whole you know, spending money to get better guidance and stuff ’cause you know sometimes it’s good to just have people outside you for use outside of your own head you know, to bounce ideas off and stuff. And I do it just as a little private mastermind with some friends that I met at a Tropical Think Tank, Chris Tucker’s event and yeah. So we catch up once a week and you know that that’s pretty much it, obviously coworking space where I am right now helps you know just so weather it’s just ranting at people, yeah. That’s like, that’s pretty much, yeah, yeah, now we’ve got the Facebook group with work full of web designers so they’re the ones that give us a feedback on internal stuff at the actual product.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That’s great. So did you kind of like a sidebar? Did you find it hard to build that Facebook group or was it pretty easy to get people to just like sign up for the group?

James Rose: You know what? I went into it with no expectations. I thought it was going to be incredibly difficult to build ’cause I know people have done it now. Like a friend of mine did one locally like a small small business Brisbane group and at his description of it was he was the only man out on the dance floor dancing for the first you know, five months. And he just says sitting there boogieing away by himself before finally some other people started jumping in. So I was kind of like this is gonna be hard. But we had an email list at the time of maybe 400-500 looks, it wasn’t huge. But we emailed them to get this sort of initial little crew and then it also goes into our email autoresponder. So I listened to Janet Murray’s podcast who’s a lady I met. She’s in PR English lady, a really big following and she’s good at luck, yeah. Sure, massive Facebook group, popular podcasts, a lot sort of stuff and she says that just everything you should have should just focus on getting people into the group. You know, not trying to, I don’t know, get them to like your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter. Just pick one thing and go for it. And that was one of the best things we did.

So in a, you know, email orders like the second email, it goes out after they sign up. It mentions the group and says where you can join. You know, it says why they should join, your benefits, that sort of stuff and now it’s at the bottom of every blog post. So when they get to the bottom of a blog post which were pretty hard on content marketing, it says get some free advice and join the community blah blah blah and it just comes in waves like we got 30 sign ups overnight that I’ve gotta go through and check and remove spam ones and all that. I have 650 now. I said I’ve been gone for three or four months so it surprised me, yeah. I guess if you build it into your process like that so everyone sees it, that I think that’s good.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s great. And that’s like another thing like it’s, it feels like you know, kind of where we’ve got information overload. Nothing really like it, nothing should be an afterthought. if you wanna do this thing you need to work it into your plan and you know incorporate it in such a way that you can just be like “Hey, I made this. Join it.” right? ‘Cause people are inundated and stuff like that. So…

James Rose: And I think after, you also have to provide values. Just one thing I forgot, like I always looking for the best resources for web designers that I post in there constantly. And you know, like my friend said I’m sometimes, I’m the only man on the dance floor, you know, but then sometimes a bunch people join in and we have these discussions, you know, posting engaging questions or you know, daily themes you know, like Mondays, like what he did up with this week, you know, a little post goes in there automatically and stuff. So trying to get people engaged, yeah, that’s the big thing. It’s not just getting them in there.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s great, that’s another great piece of advice there. So switching from kind of the marketing community building stuff to the title question, right? So you mentioned that you’re an engineer before this, right? So why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you built it if you actually have like hands on keyboard coding or some of the methodologies for managing a theme or whatever you want to talk about here.

James Rose: Yeah. So I had a lot of help in this from my business partner. He handled most of the tech side of things from this. This is actually the first project where that’s been the case. I’ve normally managed the team or the development team and sort of bit of marketing, yeah. But this time we still have very clearly defined roles to make it easier but I can still tell you how we built it.

And so we already had a software development team because we do custom web applications and slash products for people so we’re kind of lucky there. I mean as far as hiring goes, I think this is one thing we’ve done well compared to a lot of sort of remote hiring, you know, like they just put a job up on Upwork and with the, you know, they post and get a, you know, 90 responses in the first 10 minutes. Shocking! But yeah, I think if you can write a really good job but that’s where it starts, getting the right developers, you know, if you got a really good job post that makes sure only the best people come through. And then filter them and test them you know like I think the most important step is the testing. So you know having a small project that might only take a day for them to do and paying them for it because you know paying someone a couple hundred bucks to build something versus you know a $10,000 mistake which we’ve had before in paying the wrong developers to do something. So if you can spend a couple of grains on testing five people or something, you know, it’s just, it’s so worth it in the long run. So once you get those good developers and then finding you know they might have friends or referrals ’cause the best guys often work with other best guys. And that’s how we found out UX guy. He’s best mates with our lead developer. So you know, import him in, we got the UX done and then we built the actual tool. And as for the tools that you asked, yeah. It’s built in a Ruby on Rails back end or sorry browse API backends and angular 2 front end class.

Joe Casabona: Nice. And so did you start doing this in angular 1 or did you know far enough in advance that you’d be doing Angular 2?

James Rose: We did know far enough in advance, thankfully, yeah.I know a lot of people have issues with that like they just like a whole other language that should even code angular anymore.

Joe Casabona: Right, right.

James Rose: Yeah. So that’s ’cause we actually use angular with our clients as well. So we did, we have a sort of cross-skills, you know, we’ve got our lead developer at the time didn’t really know angular but he’s been very willing to learn right? Because it’s, why not? It’s another skill to add to his skill set. So he’s been learning and sort of developing at the same time and along with the rest of the team. So we rank, we only had four developers on this, four most of it. Two front end, two back end just to try and get it out quickly. You know, it could have been, we could have done with less but we had everyone on our back to get this done.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So when, you mentioned that you’re managing a remote team. Is that right?

James Rose: Uhum.

Joe Casabona: So what are some of the tools you use for that? You know a crowd favorite we used, you know, like GitHub and get issues. But we have other things so like track hours, find facing tools, and things like that. So I’m always curious to hear what other people are using to manage their kind of remote teams.

James Rose: For sure. I mean that we’re slightly different ’cause we’re almost to businesses in one like we still do. We’ve got another business which does like WordPress basic, WordPress development like really basic stuff not like what you guys do with Crowd Favorite. And that’s, that team is all in the Philippines and it’s pretty much run with different project tools in the lab.

So we all focus on the software side of things. And now Content Snare and the web app dev we use Jira. Part of me wants to say unfortunately ‘cause I hate the interface so much but luckily I don’t have to go in there much anymore that the team sort of have their own you know. We’ve got pretty strict process in there for you know, feature development testing that my business partner built-in you know, so if they move some code into done or whatever like a featuring the darn it runs its automated tests and then it kicks off a peer review and then they’re like we normally have a client testing stage but we’re always see our own client for Content Snare. So then my business partner will check the feature and then that’s only when it gets rolled in. So that’s how I guess the project management structure. We use Bitbucket for the [inaudible 20.51.9] place so nice with Jira. Yeah, I think there’s some confluence stuff set up as well for documentation. But the one thing that is a bit different than most companies is we don’t use Slack.

Joe Casabona: Wow! That is different from those companies.

James Rose: We actually use Slack competitor called Glip and we randomly stumbled onto them because the reason iit came down so it really is because we had to pay for Slack because we have had I mean it’s like restrict channel access or something like that to a couple of people which meant we had to pay for everybody. And it instantly went from like nothing to it’s 150 US a month of selling across our teams and it was just gonna look really like I know it’s like you know [inaudible 21:42.1] and it’s actually really cool like it does a lot of the same stuff Slack as I mean. It misses do not disturb which is kind of a critical feature for us but it doesn’t really cool stuff like being able to add tasks into channels. So if you want to say you can, it’s got like a sidebar where you can add tasks and events and stuff like that. And they waste their you know, with you don’t lose them in the chat like you do with Slack. so that…

James Rose: Yeah. I think that’s pretty much it as far as tools go. I mean we’re deploying on Heroku because it’s easiest to get set up in the beginning, you know, rather than China having to get sysops people and lots of stuff involved. I think that there’s definitely some other tools in there like, you know, the stuff that UX guy uses to shut things. I don’t know if it’s called Zeppelin or something like.

Joe Casabona: Oh, yeah, yeah.

James Rose: Yeah. Like so there’s only like small tools here and there but that’s the major stuff.

Joe Casabona: Cool. Well that’s awesome. I’m definitely checking out Glip which I just did some Googling while you were talking about sticking home by RingCentral which is something that we also use in Crowd Favorite. So yeah, very cool. So awesome. So I know that at the time of this recording you are just into beta so I don’t know how many transformations your product has gone through as just launching. But maybe you could talk about a little bit about I know you mentioned what you had in your head is a little bit different from what became beta, so maybe we can talk about that as well as where it’s going in the near future?

James Rose: Yeah for sure. And then that is pretty much easy. And I mean there’s this pretty major transformation there like I had this whole thing planned in my head but after you know the first sort of six or seven discussions, I was like, you know they’re definitely not talking about this as much as is that something I didn’t mention before too is not guiding people in those initial chats you know, like I had this idea in my head that I wanted to do briefing but I’m not, I didn’t focus on briefing. I said, “Tell me your process of your whole website” you know. And then found out where they sort of focused on and sort of dug in and to work out where the pain was, you know, if I just went in there and said “Oh, do you need help briefing things?” you know, it would have been a totally different outcome from those chats so that instantly we ended up with this new idea. We’re not new idea but slightly tweaked which are intended for Content Snare. So it was a massive transformation before we wrote one line of code you know, or even did the UX.

Joe Casabona: Yeah that’s great and that’s so important, right?

James Rose: Oh yeah.

Joe Casabona: [crosstalk 24:13.4] up to anybody and be like “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. Would you use this? “Yeah, I’ll use it, sure” Like that’s the least helpful feedback I think that you could probably get besides it’s not working.

James Rose: Yeah, absolutely. And then not going to be honest with you a lot of the time too, you know, like until money is involved, “sure, sure. I’ll use it.” So that was another big thing we did was a pre launch. We had about 150 maybe people on the email list. We asked for there’s a huge discount. I think it was 60 bucks for a whole year of access just to see if people are willing to put money down, you know, a money back guarantee if you don’t like it once. So I’m sorry but we sold that really quickly and that was probably the next big, I mean that was a transformation. But in my mind you know, where we’ve gone and people are willing to put money down for this which I think is a critical step a lot of people don’t do.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s people, myself included, are so concerned with rushing it to market. You wanna be the first one there but you know I ended up putting all this work into a create a blog with WordPress course and it’s not popular at all. But you know, like my Beaver Builder course which I kind of built not on the kind of on a whim is the most popular course on my website. So

James Rose: Wow! I didn’t know. I’m gonna need to look at that because I’ve been asking around for Beaver Builder training from my WordPress team to bring you guys in. Man, I’m gonna need that for sure.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, yeah. And that’s the most popular one. So yeah, talking to your users and getting feedback early on and getting them to put that money where their mouth is really important.

James Rose: Oh totally like I mean, that’s why, that’s one crowdfunding exist too, right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely.

James Rose: And then the other question was the future. Well I mean it’s basically just continuing at this beta like I said it launched two days ago so we’re just getting the feedback, getting feature requests and getting bug reports and also stuff is dealing with it. So we’ve got I think the first cohorts only about 35 people which not all signed up yet. So then it’ll just be a matter of making sure we’re comfortable with no major issues then getting the next cohort in which would be an L100 or so and then gradual rollouts until we’re ready to actually put a billing system in and make it happen, right? i hope you know, sooner the better. It’s just gonna be gauged by how many issues we find.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. That’s awesome. Well, good luck with that. It sounds like a great product and it sounds like you’re doing the rollout, right ?

James Rose: Thank you.

Joe Casabona: So the last question, so I actually didn’t tell you this before we started recording but I have the last question. And then for Season Three, I added like a Fast Five so this is like the bonus round of questions here. So, but my favorite question to ask is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

James Rose: Yeah. I mean you’re gonna be pretty bored with this one but having productive people actually is one. My God! Like this is the problem I see most people having right? They create these, like that it’s like a cool idea in their minds but they’ve done literally no validation, you know, people that have built a product and don’t have any emails yet, you know, like well I haven’t been talking about it in the right circles. I’ve been doing anything they like, no one has said they even want it. And then you know, blocks are sorted out before people say they want things and then they never actually sign up. So it’s just validation is the absolute. It’s never 100% validated, right? Like we could have people that just threw 60 bucks away and whatever but didn’t really care about it that much. But it’s still better than building a product where you haven’t even talked to anyone.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

James Rose: Yeah. And you get that feedback like the cross is really always that people want it and need it just from the way they talked about. If people are wishy washy about that they probably don’t want it or need it and probably shouldn’t build it. Biggest mistake. It’s kinda sad. I just see it all the time and we’ve done it. We’ve done the exact same thing.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. You get excited about something then you go off and build it first before and at the very least if it is something that other people might want it’s gonna take you, you’re probably not gonna see an immediate return on your investment, right? People don’t, it very rarely happens now where you launch a project without really promoting it and then it makes a bunch of money on the first day.

James Rose: [inaudible 28.37.3] but that doesn’t happen at all.

Joe Casabona: So that is great advice and I think it’s an advice a lot of people on here especially programmers and a lot of developers listen to this podcast. I’ve got like a list of plugins that I wanna write that I think could be commercial and viable but I could spend 10 or 15 or 30 hours developing it for nothing or I can ask around and see if people would actually want to pay for it.

James Rose: Yeah. And you’ve got that network and audience. So that’s the other thing too, you know, like I’ve seen the audience first instead of product first. Like I’ve seen so many people have no business, you know, they have an audience that builds up through things like Instagram or something you know just by posting silly stuff like I don’t know and they’ve got a millions of people following them. And then through that they were able to switch on a business in like two months, you know, ’cause they had the people there that they could, they were willing to give their money. So I think audience first is that’s why we do the Facebook group.

Joe Casabona: That’s right. That’s a lot of great places there. So thank you for that. And now, so this is relatively new. So I don’t know how I’m gonna like the intro it or incorporate it ‘cause it would be like at the end or whatever but this is, I’m calling it the Fast 5 until I get sued by, is it Universal Studios for Fast and the Furious. So yeah, so here we go. Just give me, the first four give me your gut reaction you’re going to answer. I don’t know if the last one is a little bit more in depth if you’d like to [crosstalk 30.07.8] So, all right. So number one, what’s your favorite book?

James Rose: Oh, ‘Rework’. ‘Rework’ by the class of 37 signals.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. Very nice. I love that. I’ll link that in the Show Notes. I think that’s free now isn’t it?

James Rose: I actually have no idea. Yeah, so I’m gonna do the second one, ‘Never split the difference.’

Joe Casabona: I don’t know that one.

James Rose: So, so good. So negotiations but it also mixes it up with stories of like FBI hostage negotiations and stuff. It’s super cool man, super cool.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. Well definitely going to check that one on. What kind of music do you like to listen to?

James Rose: Alternative and fairly heavy pretty much, yeah. Like some examples of it are maybe’ Bullet For My Valentine’ and I try…

Joe Casabona: Oh man. I like ruin the CD that had ‘Tears don’t fall on it’ like…

James Rose: Oh wow! My sister loves that song, actually. I think she introduced me to it.

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s awesome. Very cool. What’s your favorite food?

James Rose: Buffalo chicken wing.

Joe Casabona: Have you ever been to Buffalo, New York?

James Rose: I have not.

Joe Casabona: Nice. They have like a whole wing fest in August.

James Rose: Damn! On August is my next USA trip is clearly.

Joe Casabona: Nice, very nice. Hit me up. I’m in the general area.

James Rose: Oh cool, awesome.

Joe Casabona: Who is your favorite sports team?

James Rose: That’s a rubbish question. I don’t do sports. No, ah, I did. I lie then do teams so I have, I like snowboarding. So pretty much just got any winter sports that I really like. I like watching let’s get tore up right she’s nosy snowboarding.

Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. Very cool. That’s cool. The first person I asked this too was Chris Badgett from LifterLMS and his answer was a fellow who does the Iditarod. So already like we just like through the, you know, I got like Utah Jazz and like the Red Sox. But yeah, the first answer was Iditarod so I’m like, this is a great question.

James Rose: Yeah. Sorry I didn’t mean, I didn’t mean to call your question rubbish. I mean it’s a rubbish question for me. I’m sorry.

Joe Casabona: I understand, I understand completely. Again, I’m a New Yorker so I’ve been, I’m spoiled by good, like very good sports teams so I love the Yankees and I love the Giants. So, cool! So the last question it’s pretty open ended so pick a topic, how did you learn what you know? So this could be like running a business, writing content, programming, whatever you want to go with.

James Rose: Of doing it? That’s it, it’s like I was just trying to think of everything like when I was an engineer you know, you do four years of [inaudible 32.58.5] or whatever and then you go into the field and you don’t know bloody thing and you get thrown into the deep ends and you have to learn stuff on the job and work it out and ask people and so what’s in it doing it? And then you know, when we started a business we had no idea how to market things. You know, I have read a lot of stuff doesn’t mean by reading you don’t learn copywriting. So you just have to write and write and try to sell and you know, as I look back at my, as everyone does you look back at your original copy and you like ‘Holy crap! What was I thinking?” like this is shocking! So just lots and lots of doing it.

Now the same as programming, we just,we have our first software product. We didn’t know how to write code or not in C sharp anyway and so we just learned C sharp with stack overflow. Yeah, it’s always doing it man.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Learn by doing. I love that. I say that all the time. My courses focus on that too just like we’re gonna build a thing with this instead of like [inaudible 33.55.1] high level concepts. So…

James Rose: Yeah. Best strategy. That’s good.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, cool. Very cool. Well James, thank you so much for your time. This is a great conversation. I had a lot of fun.

James Rose: Thank you. I think I went a bit over your time.

Joe Casabona: That’s okay! We can edit and start together. And you know, some bonus minutes ’cause there was a lot of great advice there.

So much great information there. A conversation that I wish I had before I launched WP one month because there’s a lot of information there that I definitely could have used before launching WP one month. So thanks again James. I hope the launch for Content Snare is going well. I also hope that you were able to come out to the United States this month to check out wingfest in Buffalo.

So everybody listening out there the best way for people to discover the podcast is to rate it and review it on iTunes. The better the ratings are, the higher that it ranks in iTunes and the better chance there will be a people find. So head over to iTunes, give us a rating and a review. Be honest about it. I wanna make the show better and I want it to be great. So I really appreciate your time in the matter.

And until next time, get out there and build something.