A podcast about building things on the web
Before Sam Brodie founded OffSprout, he successfully sold a niched business that focused on websites for lawyers. Sam generously shares his advice and experience with us, from niching down to how to properly keep your books. There’s tons of great advice in this episode, so make sure to listen to the whole thing!
Myke Hurley is a well-known podcaster and founder of Relay FM. To kick off Season 6, he gives us some fantastic advice on starting shows, sponsors, and lots more. His story is incredibly interesting and I think it’s a great way to start this season and the new year.
[Read more…] about Myke Hurley and Relay FM
Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to season six of How I Built It. In episode 106, kicking off the year and this season is a person I’m a huge fan of, and that’s Myke Hurley from Relay FM. If you follow my blog, you’ll know that for the last two years my favorite podcast have been podcasts where he is a co-host, and indeed most of my favorite podcasts are podcasts from Relay.fm. In this episode, he’s going to talk about starting a podcast network and podcasting in general. He gives us lots of great advice on how to figure out how to determine your podcast format and your topic, what your interests are and things like that. As a little bit of a bonus, I wasn’t going to ask him about this because it seems subjective, but he gives us fantastic advice on how to get sponsors for your podcast. He is someone that you should definitely listen to on this because that is primarily how Relay FM is supported. Without further ado, I’d love to introduce you to Myke Hurley. This is a great episode to kick off the year. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Break: This season is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. As someone who just spent a bunch of time finding the right tools and automations to save myself time, I can tell you that Plesk is invaluable. You can try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting platform built specifically for WordPress. They’re a Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin that lets you manage all of your episodes and podcast RSS feeds from your WordPress site, but have your files hosted on a dedicated media hosting platform. I love how the Castos team takes a common sense approach to their pricing, too. You can create as many episodes and podcasts as you want. You don’t have to worry about how much storage you’re using or silly bandwidth restrictions. If you’re like me and already have a ton of episodes from an old host, they’ve got you covered there, too. Castos will import all of your podcast content into their platform completely free of charge. It is just one click of a button. The Castos team has put together a special opportunity for listeners of this show. They’re giving away their most popular package, the YouTube republishing tier where they automatically convert your audio files into a video format and publish them to YouTube completely free, for one listener. For a chance to win tweet at me @jcasabona, and [@castoshq], and tell us why you think you should win this free year of Castos hosting. On February 1st, 2019 they’ll pick one winner to get this $340 package completely for free. Thanks so much to the Castos team for sponsoring today’s episode.
Joe Casabona: Myke Hurley, founder of Relay FM. Myke, how are you today?
Myke Hurley: I’m very well, thank you for having me.
Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. I am a big fan of your work. I would say 50% of the podcasts I listen to are Relay FM podcasts, and I’m excited to talk about podcasting in general, and how you built this podcast network.
Myke: Thank you very much for subscribing to the shows, I appreciate it.
Joe: For all of you listening, if you haven’t heard anything from Relay FM, there’s a lot there for people if you’re into– Like Automation is a newer show that I’ve been a big fan of. Let’s start at the beginning, why don’t you tell people who you are and what you do?
Myke: I have two main jobs. The one that most people will see is that I am a podcast host, and I host many shows mostly around technology. But also creativity is another general theme, and video gaming, and stuff like that. They’re the three main areas that are the types of shows that I make. I make a show for everything that I care about, which is– That’s the podcaster’s problem. When you’ve been podcasting for close to ten years like I have, you end up amassing many shows based upon all the various things that you’re interested in. The other part of my job, which over time is becoming increasingly more time demanding, is running my company. I’m the co-founder of Relay FM, the podcast network of which my shows are a part of. My daily roles go between tackling issues that the people that we work with need sorted, and also the main part of my role is managing the advertising sales for the shows on our network.
Joe: You wear a bunch of hats. I like your podcaster’s dilemma, and I’m starting to feel the same way. I have this show about people building their products, and then I have another show that’s toolkits for web development. But I’ve thought, “Maybe I should start a podcast about–” Whatever other general interests I have.
Myke: It’s funny– It will get you.
Joe: I’m in a mastermind group, and my friends are like, “You need to do fewer things.” So I’m trying to keep that in mind. One of the shows you do host is The Pen Addict, and I’ve had Brad on this show before so I’ll link that in the show notes. [He was] talking about how he built Nock Co. But I want to ask you, and you said you’ve been doing this for ten years. What was your first podcast?
Myke: My first show was mostly focused– It was me and a friend, Terry. We had conversations on the phone quite frequently about the things that we were interested in. Apple technology and video gaming, stuff like that. So we started a show talking about those things, and we did a bunch of episodes, this was back in 2010. Just as the iPad was originally coming out, I remember that being the focus of our first few episodes. Then we had a couple of guests on the show because they were people that we were interested in who seemed to find the show, which was awesome. Then from there, this show ended up having a guest host every single week, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people that way. That show eventually morphed into becoming a full-on weekly interview show, which was called Command Space, when that show moved to the 5by5 network. That show then became Inquisitive on Relay FM, which had a few different lives of its own as well. That was a show that I did every single Wednesday for, and I don’t know six or seven years. I have since moved away from guest format shows, but that’s where it all started.
Joe: You’ve said this– This is so weird because I feel like I know you way better than you know me because I listen to a couple of your shows. I know you’ve said that interview shows are tough, and as somebody who does an interview show, I can definitely relate to that. The other shows that you have are pretty much you and a co-host, or two co-hosts talking about some topic.
Myke: They’re fixed panels, mostly talking about a specific interest field.
Joe: Gotcha. I’m assuming that that’s a lot easier for you now that you are dividing your time between being a podcast host and managing Relay FM.
Myke: Yeah. Because finding guests and booking guests can be difficult. That is a tricky endeavor. Also when you do shows with people who don’t have fixed setups, because they’re not recording every week or whatever, it can end up introducing various technical issues. Audio quality and stuff like that, so those episodes typically take longer to edit and to finalize and to master. But also as well, those shows they take a lot of preparation. I would prepare a lot. I do a lot of research on the hosts and all my guests, and we’ve put a lot of effort into that. Honestly, for me I’ve found that over time those sorts of shows became less feasible from a business perspective. I ended up moving to stuff that was easier, or more creatively fulfilling for me, which is the types of shows that I do now.
Joe: That makes sense, and I’ve definitely hit all of those stumbling points over the last couple of years of doing this show. That and also trying to get maybe a diverse lineup of guests, especially in the web development. There’s a lot of dudes, and I want to try to have more than just people who look and sound like me on the show.
Myke: That is a definite thing. That’s a thing that I would want to do, and we try to– With the hosts that we have on the network we try and have as much of a balance as we can. It’s something that we’re always trying to improve. But yes, that’s another challenge of working on these types of shows today.
Joe: Absolutely. The audio quality thing, I’ve always thought “Maybe I’ll buy a cheap microphone and mail it to my guests,” but that’s more trouble than it’s probably worth.
Myke: You could do that.
Joe: Really?
Myke: That is definitely a feasible thing. I know many shows that have done that kind of thing. I never have, but it is definitely an option.
Joe: Absolutely. And you mentioned that your shows were on 5by5, and it’s about five years ago now that you started Relay FM. What was that like? What was the decision-making process for that like?
Myke: Like, “Why did I decide I wanted to work on Relay FM?”
Joe: Exactly. And what factors did you weigh, because you worked a full-time job as well as podcasting before Relay FM?
Myke: In our beginning. It was a few months after Relay FM was founded that I was able to leave to do this full time. And that was part of the reason, and I felt like if I was in control of everything financially, it would make more sense, owning the company as well as being a host. But also I felt like I had done everything I had set out to do, like when I was running things on my own I had– We started a small network called 70 Decibels which was transitioned into 5by5 in 2012, and that was a goal. That was a goal for me that when I set out I was like, “This is what I want to do. These are the people that I want to work with.” And I achieved it. I didn’t have anything to focus on, so I decided that the best way for me to be able to push myself and to be able to get to where I wanted to be, was to go out and do everything all over again. I spoke to Stephen Hackett, my co-founder because he was– We’d never arranged anything before with 70 Decibels. It was just my thing. Stephen was instrumental in helping me get everything set up, so I went to him, and I was like, “I have this idea. What do you think?” And he was like, “I was thinking of doing the exact same thing.” So we decided to– It just felt natural that we would do it together because we have complementing skills. He’s good at things. I’m good at things. Together we’re able to build a business out of it.
Joe: That’s fantastic, and that’s something important. I talked to a lot of people, and they’re like, it’s a mixed bag of “Don’t work with a co-founder, especially one that’s your friend.” And then there’s, “Co-founders are so important,” and it sounds like you’re in the latter camp. Because you both complement each other.
Myke: Yes. I understand why some people have those reservations, but a healthy balance can help. For example, me and Stephen separate our personal and business conversations. They don’t happen in the same place. Those two things never intertwine. We’re able to keep things pretty separated, and working together at a pretty high level, we have a lot on the line for five years, and it has not affected our friendship. I don’t know if we are unicorns in that, or maybe we just took extra steps that a lot of people don’t think about. But it’s been fine for us.
Joe: Absolutely. That’s great. If you are thinking about starting a company with a co-founder, Myke just offered some really good advice. Try to keep the personal and the professional things separate.
Myke: I can’t imagine how people would want to found companies on their own. That’s a lonely endeavor.
Joe: It’s tough. This podcast is the most personal interaction I get in being self-employed on the internet. If I was starting a big company, I would definitely want somebody else to bounce ideas off of. So, when you set out to start Relay FM what research did you do? Did you know the logistics of setting things up, or were there things that you had to look into for bringing podcasts together under an umbrella and setting up a website, and things like that?
Myke: I didn’t need to research, because I was already doing it. Relay FM didn’t start from nothing, and it started from four years of knowledge in the field. I knew how to make the shows, and I knew what a system needed. We ended up working– We licensed a product which we eventually bought out and changed the entire code base of to build our [CMS], our publishing platform. But that was a real important part for us, of being able to find someone that we could work with to give us the skeleton to be able to build the system that we now use. That was very important. But honestly, I was bringing to the role my own beliefs for how something like this should be done. So, I didn’t feel like research was needed because I had a very strong vision of what I wanted and Stephen had a very strong vision of what he wanted. We made our company based on those ideals, as opposed to being like “What is the best way to growth hack a podcast network?”
Joe: Absolutely. I like what you said there, and you said that you were bringing four years’ experience. Because I might be a little fuzzy on your relationship to 5by5, I know you had shows on 5by5. But were you a deeper– More deeply involved in that?
Myke: I was running a small network called 70 Decibels beforehand, and 70 Decibels was a company that was making small amounts of money, but it was making money. We had sponsorship arrangements and stuff like that. When we joined 5by5, we moved pretty much all of our shows there, and I maintained the relationship with the people that I brought in. I was helping to manage those people even within that network. I had a small– I had an idea of what it would take to run things, anyway. I was a host on the network like everybody else, but I was also doing some logistics and administration for the people that I was working with, just so we could make sure that the responsibilities were split because it was bringing in a lot of new people at once and it seemed strange to change their main point of contact.
Joe: That makes sense. It’s almost like when Disney bought Pixar, John Lasseter was still at the helm and Ed Catmull will still at the helm for that company.
Myke: Sure. And also remember, [Slack] [inaudible].
Joe: Right.
Myke: There was no way for people to communicate with each other in the way that we think of it now.
Joe: Absolutely. That’s a super interesting point, too. I like what you said about this, because some of the best advice that I got out of college that I didn’t take immediately was, “If you want to start a company, get a job in the field and learn the ropes from somebody. Make the connections that you need to make under the umbrella of somebody who’s done it before.” It almost sounds like you did that with starting Relay FM. You had 70 Decibels, and then it was brought under the umbrella of 5by5, which is still a very successful podcast network.
Myke: Yeah. I had a sense of what I wanted, I learned from other people and then was able to combine that knowledge together into what I wanted to do for the future. So yes, I would agree. It’s difficult to start something from nothing.
Joe: Absolutely. So, you had a relationship with a bunch of hosts. You had a relationship with sponsors. I know a question that I get frequently is, “How do I get sponsors for my podcast?” I won’t put you on the spot and ask you that advice because it’s hard. Right?
Myke: You can ask me if you want to ask me. You can ask me. I have an answer if you want it.
Joe: I would love to hear your answer. Because mine was very much like, “I knew people, and they trusted what I did, so they decided to sponsor my podcast at first.”
Myke: That’s a part of the answer. One of the things about getting advertising in the podcast industry today is that the podcast industry is growing and audiences are growing with it. When I started, if you had 1,000 listeners on a show you could quite easily get an advertiser. But now you’re looking at– You want to be in the– If you have one show you want to be in the multiple tens of thousands of downloads before a lot of the traditional advertisers that you hear on most podcasts will want to consider you. If you are part of a larger organization like Relay FM, like how we do it, we have shows that vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands of listeners. We’re able to sell things at a larger scale, like in packages. But if you are one individual with your one show you need to be in the tens of thousands of downloads range before a lot of the traditional podcast advertisers will want to consider you. Because it’s a lot of work for them to put something in, so they want to feel like they’re going to get a good return out of it. But that’s if you’re focusing on the traditional podcast advertiser, which you don’t need to. It’s not what I did. When I was starting out, I contacted small companies, like companies that I believed in and companies I thought, were interesting. To start with, initially, I was doing podcast advertising for next to nothing. Very small amounts of money so I could get used to it. So I knew what the relationship would be like, I knew I would understand how to work on a contract, I would understand how to write copy and deliver that copy. Because if you’re starting out you’re asking a lot for a larger company or for any company to give you a lot of money, so I was doing it as a way to help understand. Also, when I was then going after the larger advertisers for charging what I considered to be more fair amounts at that point, I had a body of work which included advertising which I could say “Look. You can go and listen, and this is what we do.” So, that’s my advice. Don’t go off the square space if it’s your first if you’ve never had ads before. Find a company that is small that relates to the topic that you’re doing and pitch to them.
Joe: That’s fantastic advice, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s almost like you’re not charging the advertiser for the learning curve of selling sponsorships. You’re selling them because–
Myke: Exactly. Because I would say, you’ve got to be effective. If you’re selling ads, you have to be effective for the company. They’re not giving you free money, and they want people to come to their product through you and your ability to tell their story. You need practice in that. It might be a good idea to work on a fair arrangement with a smaller company and then move on from there. That’s my advice.
Joe: That’s good advice. It shows that in your experience because something that you do very well is those live reads. And it’s not just like, “Do you need a new mattress? Get Casper.” It’s like, you tell Casper’s story and your story along with it, and how Casper relates to you.
Myke: Thank you. It’s something I do genuinely try very hard with. I don’t take our advertisers for granted. They are putting food on the table of my home and many others, and I want to try and always do the best job that I can. Plus it helps that we are very choosy about advertisers. We only take advertisement from companies that we believe in the products of. We don’t take advertisement for products and services that we don’t think are valuable. Sometimes we get to try the product, and sometimes we don’t. But if we don’t then, we’ll do a lot of research into understanding if it is a good product before we will go ahead and work with that company. It’s something that we take very seriously also because we know that every time we are doing an advertisement spot, any host is, it sounds like an implicit recommendation or endorsement from the person. Even if that person is not saying so. Even if that person is talking about objective statements, they never had the product, they’re just telling you what the features and benefits are. It always sounds like an endorsement because it’s something in our brains that’s wired that way. By the way, that’s why podcast advertising is so successful and so effective. Because we know that exists we won’t take advertisement from companies that our hosts aren’t willing to read.
Joe: That is a great philosophy, and you’re right. Podcasters are big influencers. Like I said earlier, I feel like even though we have never met and this is our first time talking that’s not a tweet, I feel like I know you better because I listen to your shows.
Myke: You trust me.
Joe: Exactly.
Myke: You trust what I have to say, and I take that to be a very important thing. It’s part of what makes us successful. It’s because of the trust and the relationship that we have, so we don’t take that lightly.
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Joe: You and [Federico] have convinced me to try to do the iPad only lifestyle, at least when I’m traveling. I cheaped out on the 13 inch MacBook Pro with no touch bar, and it’s been very disappointing to me. I’m like, “I’m just going to try–” I got the 12.9 inch iPad Pro, the new one, and I’m like “I’m going to use this for travel through the rest of the year and see if I can do everything I need to do on it.”
Myke: I think it’s possible.
Joe: So, speaking of that trust– I think so too. The biggest thing for me is coding, but there are a few ways around it, and I’m not coding at the same level that I was two years ago. So I’m excited to give it a go, I have my first big trip in a couple weeks, and I’m going to leave the laptop home and bring the iPad. Cool, we’re 20 minutes in, and I haven’t asked the title question, which is how did you build it? This network? This show focuses a lot on the technical aspects, so we talked about the philosophy and the logistics a little bit, but you mentioned that you licensed and then subsequently bought out your CMS. It’s safe to say that you’re not using one of the more common ones. A lot of WordPress users and developers listen to this show, and it sounds like you used maybe a custom build?
Myke: It is custom. Yes, it’s completely custom at this point. This is the funny thing, and looking at the technical parts of this, this is why I have a co-founder. Because I am not technical, but I have some basic knowledge. It’s a Rails app. That’s what I know. But we were looking around at some stuff, and there were some options that we could go down, but then we found this product which was great, and we worked with the developer of that product for a while, and they were unable to continue with the development. We were able to buy out the license and build on the code base ourselves. At this point, we’ve rebuilt everything just because it wasn’t necessarily built for the scale that we would end up moving towards in a bunch of different ways. Stephen is effectively the CTO of our company, and he manages that stack, and we have worked with multiple developers. We have a developer on retainer right now who we work through projects with, and we also have some behind the scenes stuff which is even more behind the scenes. Like how we manage our advertising inventory and stuff like that, again we have another program that we license from a friend and we’re now looking at how we could make advancements to that because one of the problems is there aren’t off the shelf tools to manage the type of thing that we’re doing at the scale that we’re at. We have to start with something, and then eventually we outgrow it, and we decided to make the decision a long time ago that we would invest financially into those tools, so if we’ve outgrown something, then we need to build something.
Joe: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. Because if you visit Relay FM, you’ve got this joint feed that is all of the most recent episodes, you have a live stream. You stream all or most of your shows live, and then you edit later, you have the advertisers, and then you also have memberships built into that. So somebody can sign up for a membership, and I suspect there’s– Are there secret feeds for members, or–?
Myke: There sure are.
Joe: So there’s a lot going on, and what you said about the importance of investing in this software because it’s running your company is something that a lot of people in the open source space, which is the WordPress space or if they’re part of the WordPress space, needs to hear. Because it’s a lot like Android and iOS. When I was on Android, I was like, “I’m not paying for an app,” because I could get something for free. And when I moved to iOS, I was like, “I’ll pay $70 OmniFocus because it helps me.” The latter is more important there. If this is how you make your money, then you need to invest in it.
Myke: I agree.
Joe: Cool. So, it’s a Rails app. What was the biggest challenge of building out the website for you or for your company?
Myke: It wasn’t initially, but it was soon after, which was scaling. Things grew for us quicker than we were expecting. Our system couldn’t handle it. Getting the right caching and stuff in place took some time, and there was some real– We had some real problems for a while. Every time an episode posted it brought down the website if the show was big enough. We had some real teething issues that we worked out, and we’re in a much better place for it. But that was probably the hardest time of the actual building of all of our technical stuff.
Joe: Gotcha. That’s a crummy problem to have, but it’s on the list of problems that shows that you are growing.
Myke: It’s a frustrating thing, but it’s a good problem. It’s good if you can have that problem. Unless things are really bad, like if it’s so bad that you have ten listeners, but it brings down the website. That’s not so much of a good problem. You know what I mean?
Joe: Yeah.
Myke: But we were in a situation where it was a good problem for us. We did not anticipate the way that things ended up going., but we got there in the end.
Joe: Gotcha. That’s a good thing to hear. If you can share this, I’d be curious to hear what you’re hosting set up is like. If you can answer that, like if you’re working with a hosting company, or–?
Myke: We work with Libsyn. Libsyn hosts the audio files for us. Our system is built in such a way that the audio can come from anywhere, so we are not reliant on one company. That was very important to us that we would not be reliant if somebody changed terms of service or had issues or we weren’t happy with them. We use Libsyn, Libsyn are the best in my opinion. Their interface is not so great, and their interface is really bad. Their publishing tools are very bad. If you want to make– OK, not very bad. They’re very good. They’re just out-of-date from a styling perspective, and there are some companies like Simplecast that do a better job of that, but they have their own problems. I recommend Libsyn. If you are building your own website, Libsyn is 100% the place that you should be hosting your audio. Because the stats are solid, their system is rock solid. We have never ever had an outage in five years with them. They are an incredibly technically rock solid company, but their publishing tools have– They could they could use a refresh. But it’s difficult, they focus their efforts in the technical side and honestly I wouldn’t want them to do it any other way. But there are various platforms available, and this is the one that we’ve chosen to use.
Joe: I’m in agreement. I host this show on Libsyn, and my other show is hosted on Blubrry because I wanted to try them out. But I consider Libsyn an audio-only host. Like, you have Simplecast which is everything, and you can publish episodes with show notes and all that on Libsyn, but I publish the file and move that over to WordPress because that’s how my site is built. So, I agree with you wholeheartedly. The fact that Stuff You Should Know, which is one of the– For a while at least they were using Libsyn, and that was a big boon for me for when I was trying to decide the audio host.
Myke: Yeah, a lot of those– There’s a bit of a consolidation around a platform called Megaphone right now, which is making a lot of promises that I’m intrigued to see if they can actually deliver on. They are a whole platform that we don’t need. We already have our platform, and we’re happy with it as it is.
Joe: I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole a little bit, but I was introduced to them at Podcast Movement over the summer, and it sounds like they are doing some interesting things. Talking about automatic ad insertion, and–
Myke: Stuff that I’m not interested in.
Joe: Exactly. Cool. I had one more question for you, and I already know the answer to this, but do you edit your own shows or do you outsource that?
Myke: By and large I edit my own shows. We work with editors as well, Relay FM works of a couple of talented people who edit shows, but I edit my own shows.
Joe: Cool. That’s one thing that I knew I wanted to outsource in episode 3.
Myke: Why?
Joe: I was taking out [inaudible], and I’m like, “This is too much work for me.” That was part of it. I didn’t have enough chops to do it in the beginning, and I wanted to outsource it.
Myke: OK. I didn’t either, but I learned as well that I didn’t have the financial ability to be able to do anything different. But the reason that I edit most of my shows is I do believe that a lot of the show is contained in the edit and in the way that it is presented. Yes, that can 100% be handed to somebody else, but that’s not what I want to do for the majority of my stuff. And there are other things, some shows I edit for that reason because I want them to sound a specific way. For some shows, I want to be able to publish them as soon as possible, and the fastest way to get that done is if I do it, because I’m not working around anybody else’s schedule. I’m just working on my own.
Joe: That’s a good point. What do you use for editing?
Myke: Logic Pro.
Joe: Logic? OK. That’s the thing to use. I recently made a bad mistake and moved to a PC as my main work machine, and I’m not–
Myke: Adobe Audition is a very competent editing software, it’s just not the software I use. I use Adobe Audition for some other things, and I use it for volume leveling and noise reduction, stuff like that. But it is a very competent multitrack editor.
Joe: Yes. That is the case. Adobe Premier, I do a lot of video editing too, and Adobe Premiere is supposed to be the thing I’m using. I’m using Camtasia, and that’s a dumpster fire. But I’ve spent too much time trying to get parity between things I use on the Mac and then things I can use on the PC. OmniFocus is one of those things. There’s very little cross-platform tools that I like using on iOS, Mac OS and the PC, so it’s been a weird year long journey. But I’m going to buy an iMac Pro very soon to do all of that stuff. I was just curious as to what you use. I was using GarageBand originally, and now I’m using Audacity here because I don’t do too much editing, but maybe with the right tools and the fact that I know what I’m doing now I’ll give it another go.
Myke: It’s a skill to learn, it’s not easy, but it’s like anything. You can do it.
Joe: Thank you, I appreciate that vote of confidence. As we start to wrap up here, what are some of your plans for the future of Relay FM? Do you have any big things coming down the pike that you can talk about?
Myke: Not particularly. We are not currently working on any new shows actively, which is a rare thing for us. We have some stuff coming later next year, which just some changes to some stuff that exists already. Which is exciting. But for me, one of the big things that I’m focusing on right now is making sure that we have a sense of stability for the future, and how we are able to get to that position. That’s what I’m focusing on. We don’t have a ton of options, things have gone well for us. Luckily we’ve been seeing consistent growth of the company since its beginning, and it doesn’t seem to show any sign of slowing down, but we don’t have grand visions of trying to take over the podcasting industry or change it in any way. We’re comfortable of where we are right now and moving with the industry in the ways that we feel are necessary, but we’re quite lucky that our audience has a strong belief of how they want things to be presented to them. Which is similar to us, so we’re looking to stay the course for a while. We’ve always got projects, I always have projects that I’m working on, but I can’t have anything that is specifically ready to go or that I would even call something that’s going to happen in the next year. Things come and go. A lot of the stuff that we work on, a lot of the time when something it’s because a great idea happened two months before. Because we have the ability to make things happen if a project comes along, and it’s exciting to us, we will move it through until it’s completed. I don’t have anything going on right now, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t have something new in February. If that makes sense.
Joe: Absolutely. That makes sense. I like that. When you see something, it’s because a great idea happened two months before. That’s a solid pull-quote. Though I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us? Trade secrets in the sense that, any good advice around podcasting or running a podcast network?
Myke: I gave you my advertising tips, which is what most people that do this thing typically want. Outside of that, I don’t necessarily– I would say that I don’t think people need to do what I do now. I don’t think that it is a necessity to start a podcast network. I feel like that was a trend and people [inaudible] networks, but I don’t necessarily think it’s something that you need to do. A lot of the resources that a network can provide can come from different areas now. There are companies that are set up that can try and help you of this where needed, and I don’t think that it’s worth– Counting out the independent podcast, I look at a show like a podcast I enjoy called Do by Friday. They are completely listener supported, and it seems to be a wonderful model for them. What I would suggest is, don’t necessarily base your idea of what you want your show to be on the shows that you already listen to. There are many different types of things you can do out in the world, and I would also recommend from a thematic perspective, from a topic perspective, to do the same. If you want to stand out, you have to stand out. That’s a tricky thing to do, but find the thing that makes you different and focus on it. If you can’t pinpoint the thing that makes you different, you’ve got to keep working on it.
Joe: I like that. There are a lot of good pieces of advice there. “Don’t base the idea of your show on the shows that you listen to,” and “If you want to stand out, you have to stand out.” That’s reminiscent of– I did track and field. Mostly the field part, I’m not built to run fast, but our track coach said “If you want to run fast, then you got to run fast.”
Myke: That’s good advice. I mean, it’s bad advice, but it’s good advice. You can’t do anything with that, but it’s good to hear.
Joe: Right. It’s like Nike’s Just Do It. Just do it. If you’re thinking about starting a show, then start it, and figure out the way that makes you stand out. Myke, I appreciate your time today. Where can people find you?
Myke: Couple of places. If you want to find me personally, I’m @imyke on Instagram and on Twitter. But I host many shows on Relay FM, and you go to Relay.fm/shows to find those and all of the other wonderful podcasts that we have as part of our collective of shows.
Joe: Awesome. I will link all of those in the show notes. Myke, thanks again for your time today. I appreciate it.
Myke: Pleasure.
Outro: Thanks so much to Myke for joining us today. Again, I love all of the advice that he gave us. Things like how he started Relay FM and why he built the website he did, that’s always really interesting to me. And how he got comfortable with going after sponsors, and his approach to it. The thing he said that stuck out to me the most was, “I don’t take our advertisers for granted,” and “We only take ads from companies we believe in.” That’s so important. Because like Myke said, podcasters have a responsibility to their listeners because their listeners trust them. Myke and myself included, we don’t want to hawk anything that we don’t believe in. So, my question of the week for you is, are you going to start a podcast this year? And if so, what is it going to be about? I’d love to hear more about that. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, @jcasabona, or email me Joe@HowIBuilt.it. I want to once again thank our sponsors, Plesk, Castos and Pantheon. If you liked this episode, be sure to head over to Apple podcast and leave a rating and a review. When I last checked the show is in the top 25, it’s at 21 for technology podcast on iTunes, and that is absolutely thanks to you and your support. Thanks so much. I’m excited for 2019, and I have a lot of cool things in store, be sure to stick around. Of course, until next time, get out there and build something.
Vova Feldman started one of the most popular plugin marketplaces in the WordPress space. His story is one that came out of filling a need, but also a realization: while there are a lot of people selling plugins in the WordPress space, we can be doing better. He offers advice on building your business, and a community around it, and much more.
[Read more…] about Vova Feldman and Freemius
Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the last episode of Season 5, Episode 105. Today I’m talking with Vova Feldman of Freemius. Vova is somebody that I met at WordCamp US a year ago. So actually about a year ago, right? This is the week of WordCamp US as this episode comes out. He is an incredibly interesting person. He talked about how he started a blog with WordPress, and realized quickly that WordPress is the largest and least monetized platform. He set out to change that by building Freemius.
His story is really interesting, he offers a lot of really great eCommerce, and marketing and sales advice. And he talks about how he dog foods his own product. He built a small premium plugin that he still sells on Freemius to this day. So I think this is a really great way to wrap up Season 5. It’s been a big milestone season for the show. I’ve had a lot of fantastic guests, and Vova is high up there as one of my favorite interviews. I’m really excited for you to listen, and get in on the action here.
We’ll get into all of that in a minute, but first I do need to tell you about our sponsors. Pantheon has made this entire season possible, they sponsored all of Season 5. You’ll be hearing about them later in the show, but I do want to express my thanks to them for this entire season here at the top of the show. The show would not have been possible without their financial support, and I deeply, deeply appreciate. So make sure to listen in on their pitch later in the show.
It’s also brought to you by Creator Courses. You’ve heard me over the last couple of weeks talk about how WordPress 5.0 is coming, and the editor is changing. Creator Courses has a lot of courses for WordPress 5.0. So if you’re interested in those, go take a look over at CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg. Use the coupon code “BUILDIT” for a discount.
So that’s all the housekeeping stuff. Without further ado, let’s get on with the show.
Joe Casabona: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you do, and the idea behind Freemius?
Vova Feldman: Sure. My name is Vova, I’ve been doing startups for the past 9, 10 years. Freemius is my fourth startup, and the one that I’m most excited about. In a few words, Freemius is the easiest way to say and market WordPress plugins and themes.
In a few more words, it’s an eCommerce engine, as a service that solves all the pains for developers. So plugin/theme developers can focus on building their product, instead of taking care of all the hassle, which is around the eCommerce side, the maintainings, etc.
Joe: Nice. Very nice. That’s cool. You say you are most excited about this one. How did you come up with the idea for it?
Vova: It’s not a short story, but I’ll try to be brief. Back in 2010 I was doing a lot of things related to natural language processing, and computer vision, and something that I wanted to share with the world. Because I gained a lot of knowledge. I was looking to build a blog, and to have a blog. I was not familiar with WordPress, or any other content management system. So for me, building a blog, the idea was actually to develop that myself. Because I’m coming from a technical background.
I started to collect different components that I wanted to have in my blog, and one of the things that I realized is I would like to have that interactive, right? I’m writing something, I want to get feedback. I want to write. I knew that comments are not converting very well because people are lazy by definition. So I thought about, like, five star ratings. [inaudible]
I started to search the web, look for some widgets that I could add to the website, because back then it was the widgets era. You know, you put some JavaScript when things aren’t working, and I couldn’t find anything for five star rating. So I said, “Okay, let’s just build it.” And I built it and deployed it, and people started to use that.
Moving forward two and a half years, I sustained that project as the [inaudible] thing. After my previous company got acquired, I decided to monetize it, join with another guy. We spend about a year to taking it from absolutely free project to a fully commercial, freemium product. It took us a year, but what was really interesting to see is, after that year we managed to build this boring, subscription based business, but nothing in the product changed at all. It remained the same thing that I built in a few weekends of my spare time in 2010.
So this disproportion between the time it takes to build a product, especially in the open source ecosystem like WordPress, to turn it into a commercial solution kind of blew our minds. This is where we said, “Okay, there is a big problem, but also an opportunity in the market. So let’s try to solve that.” This is where Freemius came as an idea.
Joe: Nice. Very nice. So you created a rating plugin, essentially. For WordPress? Or you built that standalone first.
Vova:It wasn’t a JavaScript, it was a service, right? That you just inject the JavaScript, and over the years I started to receive requests from people saying, “Hey, maybe we don’t know how to take that and put it into WordPress. Because it’s still not trivial to add JavaScript into WordPress. Maybe you will build the plugin.”
After we received a few dozen of those I said, “Okay, let’s check what’s going on. What is this thing called WordPress?” And then I got exposed to this whole community, and everything. Which eventually led to building wrapping the service also into WordPress blogging.
Joe: Gotcha. So that realization kind of spawned or maybe, awoken something in you to say, “Hey, we can build a really good business off of this open source software.” Then where does Freemius come in to all this?
Vova: As I said, Freemius came after we actually turn it to a fully functional business. Actually a rating widget, like we have a bunch of extensions for different platforms. Not only WordPress, but Shopify, Wix, things that don’t have official marketplaces like Squarespace, et cetera. And we’ll learn the different dynamics, and also zone numbers from different ecosystems.
The reason we kind of said, “Okay, WordPress is a great place to start with this,” because, obviously this is the largest, right? Right now it’s 31% of the web. That’s what they say. I don’t know. And it’s the least monetized. There’s so many plugins and themes, most of them are built by developers, and many of these developers are really passionate about these side projects. They wish they could turn that into their full time gig. But they can’t really afford themselves, you know, to quit their job and see if it will work or not.
So most of them just keep maintaining that, and one day they will either move to that, or most likely, they will ditch the project. Because, you know, they have to bring food to their families. So that was the reason to start, and focus on WordPress. More than the other platforms.
Joe: Gotcha. Cool. I’m looking at the website right now. You compare Freemius to things like WooCommerce, and EDD, Code Canyon what kind of research, I guess, did you do, as you were building out Freemius?
A lot of people on the show talk about how they were scratching their own itch, which it sounds like you were doing something very similar. But as far as deciding what features to bring, and pricing model, and stuff like that, what kind of research did you do?
Vova: I would say there was like the preliminary research about where we should whether we should work on that all. Before taking the features. And for that, I started to I was not involved in the WordPress community at all. Even though I was running a company that sells to that community, I was never involved.
So I started to poke relevant people that are from the target audience. Cold emailing them, chasing them on Facebook, going to WordCamps. Every relevant event that has plugins and developers, I tried to be there in order to talk with these people, understand their challenges, their pains. And also show them an [inaudible] of what we’re thinking to build, and get their feedback. See how they react to that.
That was the initial phase. To understand whether it’s compelling to the target audience at all.
Then the second stage was kind of evaluate the potential of the market. Specifically me, okay, I’m looking to build larger things. Not small businesses, or lifestyle businesses. So WordPress is probably not the space for the plugins and things. It’s not the billion dollar market today, but it’s not far from that. Okay? It’s not real estate, it’s not automotive, and things like that. But we had to do the calculations and see there’s a big enough opportunity for us to actually step into that journey. Because it’s a long journey.
I prefer whatever business and this is something that, I had these discussions with multiple people in the WordPress ecosystem, is, it doesn’t matter whether it’s lifestyle, or a startup type business, because when it’s our baby, we usually tend to really work hard on that.
So if I’m already committing a suicide on some idea, on some company, I would rather do something that is very big, and could lead to a life changing event, and not work on something for many years and then just sell that, and it doesn’t change anything in my life.
Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor, Gutenberg, are coming! Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare, including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit Pantheon.io/Gutenberg. Let them know that How I Built It sent you. And now, back to the show.
Joe: I feel at least being in the WordPress community basically my whole life, I started in 2004, there’s a lot of, just build it and see what happens. But I like what you said, “When it’s our baby, we tend to work really hard on it.” If we’re going to put everything we have into it, then–
Vova: It better be big.
Joe: Yeah. We don’t want to end up in the same place six months, or two years from now. We want to be in a different place, because, well, we might as well have gotten a full time job then, right? If we’re–
Vova: Yep, absolutely. Probably work less hours, by the way.
Joe: Yeah, that’s exactly right. What you said about not wanting to build a lifestyle business too, right. If you’re going to go all in, then you’re not just working 9 to 5. That’s great advice. And you called people, that’s another piece of advice that comes up a lot. I’ve been hearing that a lot more lately, and I think it’s maybe something that bears repeating because it’s easy to market to an email list, or ask for a poll, but actually talking to people about their pain points forges, I think, a better connection with those people.
Cool. So you mentioned that you are a developer, you were working on natural language processing, which, in and of itself we could probably talk for like an hour on.
I’m excited to ask you the title question, which is how did you build it? Because I’m curious, do you still work with code on an everyday basis?
Vova: I do. I try to do more. Unfortunately I don’t have much of the privilege to do that, because, you know, there’s a lot of management, and marketing related stuff. This is actually something that many people in ecosystem are kind of missing, is that developing is great, and it’s fun, and you build products. But if you don’t sell it, it doesn’t matter. So yeah, I still try to develop.
And actually right now it’s kind of a period where I have more time to work, to do some development. In terms of how we built Freemius, a lot of work, many hours, and tears.
Are you asking from the technical point of view? Or–
Joe: Yeah, whatever you feel most comfortable answering. A lot of developers listen to the show, so if you want to get into dev stack, that’s great. If you want to talk more high level that’s good too.
Vova: Okay. I will try to be in between. Even though we are targeting the WordPress ecosystem, we don’t use WordPress much. Because WordPress, it was built for it’s a content management system. Yes, they’re eCommerce right now, and other things on top of that, but it’s probably not the best solution when you building something custom. It won’t work efficiently as it could, et cetera.
So we built the things ourself. Over the years, I know I’m sure every developer has this evolving library of infrastructure related stuff, just getting better and better. Like your own personal framework. So we didn’t choose Laravel, or something. I’m not sure if it was there when we started, by the way.
So it’s mostly custom built code. It is in PHP. Because, again, we’re in the WordPress space, and it made sense to kind of be in line with that. We also have components, like front end components. Like Angular.js, and Angular 5. And what else yeah, the rest and we recently started to actually use page builders for marketing stuff.
Joe: Oh nice.
Vova: It took us we wrote an article about that, I think a year ago or something. Which is actually many developers are against page builders. I was against that as well, but on the other hand, if you build everything yourself it takes development resources. When your team scales, and you are limited on dev resources the website, and the things are more marketing related. So if you can delegate that, in pretty good shape. You can’t do everything with a page builder, what you can do yourself, obviously.
But if you can do it close enough, and today’s builders are good enough to make it close enough, then it’s great. Because we don’t need to involve development in work when we want to release something on our website, right? Something which is marketing related. So I would actually recommend people to start at least check out what’s going on with the new page builders.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s fantastic advice. Because, even like, I’m a one man band. I’ve got a few things going on, including online courses, a little bit of freelance work, this podcast, and I’m a developer as well. If I wanted to develop everything myself, well, all of my time would go to development, and not to content creation.
Yeah, when I built my online courses platform I used WordPress, and LearnDash, and I vowed to put in as little code as possible. Because I wanted to focus on building the courses, and not the platform.
I love page builders, there’s one specifically that I really like. I think that’s probably a smart move. Because then you can focus on putting those development resources towards building the product.
Vova: Yep, absolutely.
Joe: Cool. So you use your own PHP framework, you mentioned Angular do you have a development workflow of use GitHub, or testing platforms, or anything like that?
Vova: We use Bitbucket for the private stuff, because it’s free. As a startup we try to save money. We also have GitHub repositories for the public stuff. We don’t really use any code before it goes through code review. It’s super essential. Everyone makes mistakes, okay. Our developers review my code, we have to do that process.
Also we do automated testing that we’ve built. It’s actually relatively new. When I send you, it’s about a year. But we didn’t have that for a while. We did have like a sequence of tests that we run through every time before we release something. Which took us about a day of testing, and we spend probably a week to automate the whole process. Right now it reduced from a day to 20 minutes of testing. That’s pretty amazing, saved us a lot of time. And it’s great because we always just can extend that. We can test more use cases, and regression tests, whatever we need.
We using something it’s called Catalog Studio. I don’t know if you heard about? It is based on Selenium, which is like the infrastructure for all the testing. I think it’s built with Java. So Catalog has it’s like [inaudible], it’s an eclipse environment, custom environment for unit testing. Not unit testing, for testing. It’s a free project, I think it’s open source as well. It’s pretty awesome.
Joe: Wow, that’s great. You mentioned, I think, something that more people need to hear. Which is, when you test something it took about a day. It took you a week to set up automated testing, and now that testing is down to like 20 minutes. I suspect that automated testing is probably more thorough than QA, human-based QA testing, right? Because you mentioned like regression testing, so you could probably do things like that feature that worked before this new thing you built? It’ll be tested after the new thing you built.
I know that I’m not the greatest tester in the world. I test the things that I just built, and I have a good understanding of, when I’m working with a team, what I’ve built, but not necessarily what they’ve built. And so, automated testing alleviates all of that. So you probably have better testing, and it takes less time now. Does that sound right?
Vova: Yep. I think the key is actually to build a sequence. And be consistent, that every time before they release, to go through the whole sequence. That’s the first phase.
And later if you have the time, the resources, to prioritize that actually build that to run automatically. And our sequence is pretty complex, this is why it took us more than usual. If your plugin, thing, whatever, product, is simpler, than it may even be less than that. Because it provides you like a chronic section that you can use, and you can click record, and do a bunch of things, and add a bunch of asserts. Right? To say that this is the expected element to show up on the screen, or something, and it will just record it. So you don’t really need to right that down.
In our case, it was more complex because it was actually involving sending emails, and fetching the data through SMTP. So it’s checking database related stuff, so it was a little more advanced than just clicking things on the user interface, and checking if it works as expected. But it can be easier, depends on the product.
Joe: Gotcha. That’s, I think, very valuable advice. I really like that. It’s very cool to hear about stuff like that. Cool. So we talked a little bit about your dev stack, about some automated testing we’ve got about 10 minutes left here. I’m going to ask you just a couple of questions I really like to ask, which are what are your plans for the future of Freemius? Are there big features that you could talk about that are coming down the pike? Or things that you’re thinking about as, maybe, seeing plugins online evolves?
Vova: Sure. So actually we just released pretty huge feature. We haven’t announced that on our blog yet, or email about that. It’s only we have a Slack community where we share things first to them. So they’re already using that. It took us almost three and a half years or a little more than that, to release a user’s dashboard.
So, the way we built Freemius is that we tried to put everything possible inside a WP-admin dashboard of the users. Or customers. Because we believe that that’s the comfort zone of the users. That’s where they’re seeing, and they don’t really need additional interfaces, right? So, if you are purchasing for Freemius, you were basically, as a customer, managing your account directly through the WP-admin of the plugin, or whatever thing.
After three and a half years we learned about various use cases why an external user’s, or member’s dashboard, right? This is the usual terminology is actually important to have. Because, for example, just a few use cases, if I already uninstalled the plugin, it means that I don’t have a way to cancel my subscription right now. Which usually you’ll buy support tickets. Or, there are a bunch of more different use cases.
But we just released this fully featured, user’s dashboard that any of our customers can easily embed inside their website. It’s responsive, and everything, and it’s pretty advanced. So you as a user, or as a customer, can manage everything directly through that dashboard. Update your payment methods, move from one subscription to another, move licenses from one place to another. So that’s pretty big for us. We’ve been working on that for a while.
In terms of looking for the future, I see Freemius as a solution that resolves all the pains of plugins for the developers. I want developers, and I think that’s what the developers really want to do, is focus on their products. They don’t want to deal with marketing, they don’t want to deal with eCommerce maintenance. They don’t have, many times, the knowledge in user experience. They don’t want to talk with designers. They are not best in design, etc.
They are really good at building their specific product and functionality, and this is what we want to solve. It means three components. First of all, the eCommerce side. So this is something that we’re already solving. I think we have the most advanced product, in terms of the feature set, or the most feature reach, and it’s also coming as a service. Which means that you don’t really need to deal with maintenance. If there’s a problem, you tell us, we release a fix, and it’s out there. You don’t need to wait for some version to release, or something. So the eCommerce headache is something that we’re solving.
The second layer is actually about pricing the business aspect. Okay, developers, many of them, they don’t have the knowledge, the experience as and one of things we’re doing is we’re proactively trying to help our customers. We actually treat them as our customers, as our partners, because our business model is a revenue share. So we have a selfish interest to make them more successful, right? They make more money, we make more money. It’s very simple equation.
When we see things where they can get better at, maybe they can change the pricing a little, or something, we get involved. Proactively try to help them to get better. So this is the second layer. The third layer is actually distribution, which means bringing them the customers and users. Right now we’re not playing in the distribution world, we’re more about the advising, monetization thing. And the technological solution. But we also want to get into the distribution, which means bringing new customers. There are many ways to do that. We going to launch a bunch of exciting stuff on 2019. I can’t talk about it yet, but that’s the goal basically.
Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor, Gutenberg, are coming! Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare, including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit Pantheon.io/Gutenberg. Let them know that How I Built It sent you. And now, back to the show.
Joe: You mentioned your business model was a revenue share, which is a “very selfish business model.” I think that’s a really great business model, because it makes you more invested if I’m thinking about selling a couple of my own plugins very soon, and Freemius is, I know it’s revenue share, so they are more invested in me selling more, right? As opposed to I mean WooCommerce is a free plugin, right?
I love WooCommerce, I use it for my online courses, but the first thing they do is hit you with, “Oh, you should install Jetpack,” and then when you install Jetpack it brings you to a big sales page, right? Like, I’m using a platform where I’m trying to sell, that is now actively selling to me. And I understand why. But this business model is more like, “We’re going to help you sell, because we’re going to make more money in the long run as well.” Like you said, it feels more like a partnership.
Vova: It is. You actually mentioned the difference in the business models. If we can look at that, every company have slightly different KPIs. The way WooCommerce is, or EDD, are making money is by selling add-ons, right? They’re all focused on efforts is to make sure that new people will buy their add-ons, and you will keep renewing their add-ons. So as long as you do that, they don’t really care what’s going on behind the scenes. Whether your business is successful or not. I’m not blaming them for something, it’s just very different business model.
On the other hand, if you will not make money with Freemius, it means that we are not making money for you. Which is a problem, right?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Right. It’s the difference between a business doing just enough to see enough value to keep paying for the add-ons, versus a business helping my business actively grow. Because we essentially grow together.
Vova: Yep.
Joe: That’s great. On that note, I’d like to ask you, maybe my favorite question, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?
Vova: Trade secrets. I think if you want to build a company, there are many aspects that you need to focus at. But over the years, what I’ve found is the two that are very important is first one is, I think it’s called in English, dogfooding, right?
Joe: Yeah. Dogfooding.
Vova: You have to use your own, to be your own customer. Or user. Because, if you’re not using your own product, you don’t have the right intuition. Where to steel the wheel, or the ship. Because you are getting hopefully you have users, and customers. You know, there is so much feedback. Many of the feedback is conflicting as well. This is why it’s really important to be your own customer.
And the reason rating widgets is still alive, and when we want to experiment something, we first do that on rating widgets. So we don’t need to reach others. So we try that, it’s working great, we can deploy it for the others. If it doesn’t, we move on.
The second one is community. I think many people talk about that in all spaces, but community is super important. Actually it’s, like if you have a competitive product, and you have a stronger community, you are probably going to “win.” Okay, so I’m putting quotes here, “win,” I’m not sure if it’s the right word.
WordPress is a great example for that. WordPress is a mediocre product, let’s be frank about that. But it has amazing community, and that’s the only reason why it got to 31% of the market. Because if you put it to someone’s hands, like you give Wix, or Squarespace to your mother versus WordPress, they will choose the other solutions. They won’t go to WordPress. But the community, and the things that going on, and the fact that the community is actually involved, in some way, in the future of the product it feels like, you know, like there is a collective mission here. You are part of something that is bigger than you.
People are really engaged into that process, into the project. And if you manage to build that around your company and product, most likely you will succeed. It doesn’t have to be with that specific product, but you will have the community that will help you to steer the ship toward the right direction. This is something, two things that I think are really essential to build a successful business.
Joe: Yeah. I love that. “WordPress is a mediocre product with an incredible community,” might be pull quote–
Vova: I love product, okay? Sorry, I love WordPress.
Joe: Yeah, we both love it, but I mean you’re absolutely right. My sister-in-law said, “I need a website,” and I said, “You should use Squarespace, because I don’t have time to hold your hand for the WordPress stuff.” And then when she was ready to kind of grow I was like, “Alright, let’s talk about using WordPress now.” But just starting out, I knew that she would be able to build her own site much faster. And then when I had time, and when she was ready, we talked about using WordPress.
So that’s fantastic. If you want to build community, you need to dogfood your own product, you need to use it yourself. And you need to build a strong community. Vova, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?
Vova: You can catch me on Twitter, it’s @vovafeldman. Just like you hear it. You can also email me. It’s vova@freemius.com. I always happy to help with pricing, business side of things. You should also check out our blog, freemius.com/blog. The sole focus of the blog is the business side of the WordPress, and plugins, and things, economy. We cover literally everything.
Also, we are open for guest posts from other product people, to share their experience about different, unique, knowledge stuff. So feel free to email me, or catch me on Twitter. I’m available.
Joe: Awesome. And I will put all of that, and everything else we talked about in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.It. Vova, thanks again for joining me. It was a real pleasure talking to you.
Vova: Thank you so much, Joe.
Outro: Thanks so much again to Vova Feldman for joining me on this, the last episode of Season 5. Episode 105. I really appreciate his time, and his advice. I think he had a lot to offer. Especially when it comes to things like pricing, and having a good mission. And thanks, once again, to our season long sponsor, Pantheon. They’re doing great things over there at Pantheon and you should definitely check them out.
Thanks again to Creator Courses. If you want to learn about WordPress 5.0, whether you’re a user, a freelancer, or a developer, check out the courses over at CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg. My question of the week for you is somewhat related to Episode 103’s question, which is, what is preventing you from selling a premium plugin? Freemius focuses on that. And so, my question this week is, if you are selling a premium plugin, what platform are you using, and why?
You can let me know over at @jcasabona on Twitter, or joe@howibuilt.it. If you liked this episode, you can go over to Apple Podcasts and give us a rating and a review. Season 5 has been the best season yet as far as growth, and I appreciate that. And that’s for all of the people who are listening, and leaving ratings, and review. I really appreciate that.
If you want to join in on the conversation in the off season, you can get more How I Built It over on our Facebook page, which you can join at HowIBuilt.it/Facebook. For that, and all of the show notes from this episode, you can go to HowIBuilt.it/105.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next season, get out there and build something.
Liam Martin is the founder of Time Doctor. In this episode, we talk all about how he founded the company, from idea to how it’s grown to the massive user base it boasts. We also talk about how long it takes for companies to become overnight successes, and how to set yourself apart from other services.
[Read more…] about Liam Martin and Time Doctor
Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 102 of How I Built It. On today’s episode, I talk to Liam Martin, the founder of an app called Time Doctor. I tried Time Doctor out in preparation for this episode, and I’ve got to say it’s great if you are trying to manage the time and reporting for big teams. Liam will talk all about how he built this, how he was fulfilling a need that he saw in the market, and how he grew Time Doctor to be what it is today. The growth stuff is especially interesting to me, and the information that he provides about things like remote teams. I know a bunch of us are working on remote teams now. It’s a great all-around episode. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. We will get to that in a minute, but first I do want to tell you that today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon, you’ll hear all about Pantheon later in the episode, and I want to tell you about a few courses that I’ve been working on over the past year. It’s all coming to a head. WordPress 5.O is either, as you listen to this, coming out or is already out.
There are big changes in WordPress 5.0, specifically around the editor. If you are interested in getting educated about those changes, maybe you’ve heard of Gutenberg, that is the new type of editor that is in WordPress 5.0. I’ve got four offerings for you if you are interested in learning about Gutenberg. If you go to CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg, you will see those offerings. There’s a user course if you are a content editor curious about how the new editor works, there is a course for freelancers where if you are working with clients you will not only learn how the new editor works but also how to navigate those waters with your client. It has workbooks and email scripts and checklists, and things like that. There is a theming course as well, and if you are a theme developer and you need to prepare your theme for Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0, there is a course that will help you out.
Finally the fourth offering is licensing, so if you work at an agency or if you manage a ton of clients and you want to get them trained quickly, if you work at an organization where everybody uses WordPress, and you want to get them trained quickly, you can license the introduction to WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg course. There is a flat fee you can host the videos on your own website, and they’ll automatically get updated. It’s a single lifetime price, so you can check that out. Once again that link is CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg. That’s it for the housekeeping stuff, why don’t we get on with the show?
Joe Casabona: Liam, how are you today?
Liam Martin: I’m pretty good. How are you, Joe?
Joe: I am fantastic. The weather’s finally getting nice here on the East Coast, and I love being outside. Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate you taking the time. We’re going to be talking about Time Doctor which looks cool. I know a lot of my listeners are developers or business owners, and they’re interested in keeping things and making sure that they’re spending their time wisely. It looks like your product does that, but why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Liam: Sure. My name is Liam. I live in Canada, and I travel three to four months out of the year, and we have two companies. We have Time Doctor, and Staff.com, both of them, in essence, do the same thing but one is for enterprise, and one is for SMBs. What the software does is it measures the efficiency of remote teams. We have employees in 28 different countries in our company, and I’m currently tracking a task of “Podcast with Joe,” and I’m measuring exactly how long that particular task is taking. Then I can compare that to the other Podcasts that I’ve done and figure out how efficiently I’m completing that task, like how much time I’m spending on Skype and on Gmail and then comparing that to other podcasts that I’m doing. It is focusing you on becoming more efficient. Most other tools on the market measure how long you’ve worked, and we think that that’s stupid. We tell you what you did while you were working.
Joe: That’s great. One of the things about time tracking, I’m so bad at time tracking because there are some things that I haven’t built properly into my workflow. Sometimes I’ll move from task to task, and I’ll forget to do something and hit the right button, or whatever. That’s cool. How did you come up with the idea for Time Doctor? I’m especially interested in this because tracking remote teams is becoming more and more important as more and more companies are going remote. It seems like it could be difficult. The last time I was on a remote team we had to be sticklers to make sure people were putting their time in, especially because a lot of our time was billable to the client.
Liam: For sure. The way that we came up with the idea was I was running an online tutoring company at the time, and one of the big problems inside of the business was I would bill the student for 10 hours and then the student would come to me saying, “I didn’t work with my tutor for 10 hours. I worked with them for 5.” I’d have to go to the tutor and say, “Did you work with Jimmy for 10 hours?” And the tutor would say, “Of course I did.” I’d end up having to refund the student for 5 hours and pay the tutor for the full 10 hours, and that was destroying the business.
Joe: Sure.
Liam: I was speaking at this conference in Austin, Texas called South by Southwest. If anyone has heard of it before it’s basically spring break for nerds. It’s super fun, lots of different technology companies that show up in Austin and eat barbecue and talk about technology. I met my co-founder Rob, and he was running a remote team as well. He said, “I’m starting this little alpha product which can measure precisely exactly what’s going on with your remote workers, and more specifically, the breakdown of where they’re spending their time.” So I could then go to that student and say, “Jimmy. He did work with you for 10 hours. He worked with you for 10 hours seven minutes and thirty-two seconds, and here’s everything that he did.” To very clearly make sure that’s locked in. So that was a huge “Aha” for me, and I thought to myself, “Man this is going to blow up my tutoring company if I had this product.” But it hadn’t been built yet, so I joined up with Rob and made my focus on that. Sold off the other business and six years later we’re here.
Joe: That’s incredible. It sounds like with a lot of good businesses, and there was the need and there was the timing, and then there was the universe bringing you and Rob together to do this.
Liam: I personally believe that if your product isn’t scratching your own itch, you’re at a real serious disadvantage. You can build a product that you don’t necessarily use like I was talking to somebody last week who I’ve been mentoring, and they are building software for salons to be able to schedule when someone gets their haircut. And I said, “Have you ever been a hairdresser?” “No.” “Have you ever run a hair salon?” “No.” “OK. Then you’re at a real disadvantage because you’re not living and breathing that every single day, and you can do it, but I would suggest you don’t. Focus on something that is important to you, because you’ve got to put in five to ten years of your life before you start to get traction. There are the Slacks of the world that explode, but fundamentally you’re putting in five to ten years of your life into this, so you’d better be pretty passionate about it because it’s going to suck around year one, two, three. And if you’re really bad, year four, five and six of the product.
Joe: Absolutely. Having that passion is important. I recently read a quote from Walt Disney that was, it was something to the effect of “We don’t make cartoons to make money. We make money to make more cartoons.” And I like that. If you’re in it just for the money, then you’re either some savant that’s good at that stuff, or you’re not going to make it. You’re not going to survive. Aside from that, I have a software engineering background, and we always talk about bringing domain knowledge to the project that you’re developing and knowing how the product and knowing how the business runs is important.
Because like you said, if you’ve never run a salon before how do know what people who run a salon need? I love that about scratching your own itch. It’s apparent I’m an online teacher, and it’s clear that the people who developed the online software that we use at the college are not teachers, because everything is difficult to use. But that’s cool. As you were working with Rob to develop out Time Doctor and come up with more features, did you do any research? Because time tracking apps are a dime a dozen. They’re the ones that people who want to build an iOS app, that’s one of the first ones that they can build because it’s relatively simple. But you’ve got some heavy duty features here.
Liam: We focused on the one core feature which was website and application tracking, which at that point we were the first company that ever did that in the space. We realized that was a major differentiator. I generally feel you need to be exponentially better or exponentially cheaper than your competitors. If you want to enter a market, you should do one of two things. You should either be ten times cheaper or 10 times better. If you can’t do either of those things, don’t enter the market. You could, and maybe you’re going to be a number two or a number three or number five in the market, and there’s probably a lot of money there if it’s a multi-billion dollar market. But fundamentally you’re not going to be number one because there’s no huge strategic advantage. For us, we put all our chips down on that metric, saying “People don’t just want to track time.
They want to see what websites and applications and mouse movements and keyboard movements are associated with that activity, that you can build deeper data analysis and figure out what people are doing. Not just how long they’re working, but what they’re doing, and how efficiently they’re working. That paid off for us. I would say anyone else entering the market, really focus on that. That was– By the way, that was not easy. That cost millions of dollars to develop just the beta to be able to get that up and running, and the first one through the door is always ten times more expensive than the second or third or fourth person through the door. The innovators are always the one that end up paying more to be able to push that, but you also get 6 to 12 to 18 months of free open, clear market, where you’re like “Shit. You’re the only thing that’s doing this, and everyone else is not doing that particular feature, and that’s a game changer for me.”.
Joe: That’s incredible. You mentioned either blow the doors off the features or be a lot cheaper. I’m looking at your pricing page, and you’re not obnoxiously expensive either. $9.999 per user per month, that’s reasonable enough for me to say, “If this thing could show me that I can save even one hour per month, that’s like my hourly rate in a year.” It’s absolutely justifiable costs for a tool that not enough people use.
Liam: We had a client recently that had 22,000 employees, and their analysis came back saying, “We increased phone call efficiency,” because they’re a call center, “By 6%.” Our software increased the amount of phone calls they were making by 6%, which was their core metric. And I said, “How much money does that work out for you?” “It’s like $22 million dollars.” I was like, “Cool I’ll take half of that.” Forget the cost of the software, and I’ll take the $10 million dollars. So that’s the other part too, is create value and document that value. If you can quantify value people, then it’s easy, because you’re like “I increased your dollars by 6%. Do you not want to increase your dollars by 6%? Because if not, I’ll go. But if you do, then let’s do a deal.” And that’s what you’ve got to get to.
Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor Gutenberg are coming. Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare, including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit Pantheon.io/Gutenberg. Let them know that How I Built It sent you. Now, back to the show.
Joe: When you’re doing an e-commerce website it’s easy to create value. You say, “I’m building you a thing that will maybe make you $2,000 a month, so if you pay me $10,000 for it it’s paid for in five months.” If you can relate it somehow to that and say, “This is going to save you time,” Or “Make you $22 million dollars.” It’s an easy sell, which is fantastic. For me, if I were to look at the data, I’d see a lot of me doing a thing and then I see Facebook. I do a thing, and then I see Facebook. That would absolutely shame me into being more productive. The Facebook icon showing up all the time, or whatever.
Liam: Right.
Joe: We’re about halfway through, which is when I like to ask the title question which is how did you build it? You hooked up with Rob who said he was working on a prototype. Did you do any development, or were you driving more of the user requirements sort of thing?
Liam: No. Rob was managing the development side of the business, and then I was managing the marketing and sales side of the business. How we built it, I went out into the market. I understood the market quite well, and so did my co-founder Rob, we both had remote teams, which as we said before is critical in trying to figure out how to build a product like this. If you’ve never built a remote team or been in a remote team, I highly suggest you do not build a product like this because you are not going to succeed. We were able to understand that market, and honestly, the first part of the business was me calling up all of my friends that were looking for this solution that I’ve had conversations with in the past saying “Man, I wish that this solution, I wish that this thing did that.” That’s the core of where all of our first customers came from.
Then it was just going into grinding. The core product was Built at this point, we had only had websites and applications in time and a little task manager. All these other features weren’t Built but then it just came into, “OK. We’re getting traction.” I remember our very first month we did about $6,000 a month which was awesome for us. We were like, “Holy crap people are paying us for this thing,” which was amazing. Then we said “OK. We’ve got something. Now let’s build it out.” It was blogging, it was paid ads, it was social media, and it was all the stuff that people do to be able to get there.
Joe: Nice. The first thing that you said, you talked to your friends about things that they wanted. Completely rings true to a previous episode in this season with Chris Lema where he said, “Don’t build the thing that you think people want, find out what people want and build that. Build to the user’s story or to the user’s problem,” and it sounds like– First of all you experienced the problem firsthand, which is what you’ve been saying this whole time, but it sounds like you went the same route. You were like, “What are the pain points and how can I make them better with this project?”
Liam: I also took another little extra step. If people go down that route and they talk to their friends about a product and say “I’m thinking about building this product. Do you think that’s a good idea?” Your friends will be like “That’s a great idea, you should totally do it. It’s amazing.” I’ll have that conversation, and they’ll say, “This is amazing. This is great. How much do you think that I should charge for something like this?” “You could charge $50 a month per user. It’s amazing.” “OK. How much would you pay?” “I would pay $50 per user per month.” “Cool. You want to give me that money now, and I’ll build it?” That’s where it gets tense. Because everyone wants to be supportive of you, but until you get some money that’s when things completely change. That’s important for people to understand if people say “You should build it,” but yet they’re not going to pay you, and you’ve identified that there’s a problem, you have a problem. They’re not telling you the truth.
Joe: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s easy to yes ideas to death. “Do you think this is a good idea?” “Yeah” “You think it’s a good idea, so why is it a bad idea?” But asking people to put money where their mouth is different.
Liam: Open up your wallet. If you can’t open up your wallet, consider that they’re saying “Yeah, it’s a great idea.” but in reality, it’s not good enough for them to buy it. Therefore you should mark that down on your survey as that person doesn’t want that product. Or at least, the pain isn’t deep enough that they’re willing to pay you now.
Joe: Absolutely. And going back to timing, it could be that eventually, they’ll figure it out, but if you don’t get enough of those “I’ll give you money right now,” then it’s hard to make a viable product.
Liam: Absolutely.
Joe: I want to call back to something that you said earlier, which was you mentioned that it took millions to build. I’m curious about this. I talk to people mostly in the WordPress space and feel free to answer as much as or as little as you’d like. But did you go for any venture capital or angel investments?
Liam: No. My co-founder and myself had previous exits before that point, so we did self-funded. I wouldn’t say– it was technically bootstrapped, but it’s quite disingenuous to say it was bootstrapped when we had put about half a million dollars into the business to get to that beta in which we were generating income. We put in about half a million dollars into the business, and that came back to us, and I believe we were break even by the end of that year.
Joe: Gotcha. Cool, that’s super interesting. People here bootstrap, and they assume sleeping on couches and eating ramen until you’re profitable or whatever, but–
Liam: I went from a six-figure personal salary to $28,000 a year, and that was my own money by the way. I didn’t pay myself out of the business for 2.5 years. I cut myself down to $28,000 a year because I understood that to build this asset I needed to take all of my money and put it into this business, and then have what’s left over to deploy into staying alive for 2.5 years. That to me is something that a lot of people are not willing to do. They’ve got golden handcuffs. They say, “Man I’m making $180 as a dev. I don’t want to be paying myself $25,000 a year.” Then you’re not cut out for entrepreneurship.
Joe: Right, absolutely. Yes.
Liam: It’s just not going to happen, and it’s not going to work out for you. If you wanted me to go back to $25,000 right now, and you said “You’re going to increase the speed and you’re going to double the growth rate of your business.” Done. Because I know that 5-10 years later when we’re doing $100 million a year, I can sell that thing for half a billion dollars, and I’m good. It’s discipline. It’s all connected to discipline. There’s a lot of guys that want to do it, but they don’t want to leave their $180,000 job which is super frustrating.
Joe: Totally, and I don’t know. Maybe enough people don’t care to know about how it’s the hockey stick graph for entrepreneurs. You’re low for a while and then eventually you can rise quickly when the rise happens, but there’s going to be a long time where you’re low on that graph.
Liam: Everything is like that. I’m right across the street from Shopify’s headquarters here in Canada.
Joe: Nice.
Liam: Shopify is 18 years old, as a company. They’re an overnight success, in quotes. That’s what Toby the CEO always talks about is, “We were as we were a total 18-year overnight success.”
Joe: Absolutely. I had no idea that Shopify was around for 18 years.
Liam: Who knew Shopify 10 years ago? Nobody knew about it, but they were eight years old as a company. Think about that and know that everyone goes towards the Slacks of the world, and honestly the Slacks the world are just Slack. They defy– there’s a couple other products in the SaaS space. Even ClickFunnels as an example is doing incredible numbers, that’s in the marketing space but something like a Slack. It’s very unique, and it’s very rare, and in reality what happens to most businesses is that most businesses on average that are successful grow 40-60% year over year if you’re in the top tenth percentile of growth above $10 million dollars. Just telling you the hard truth. That’s great growth, and you should be happy of that, and don’t get distracted. Keep going on that trajectory. Even right now if you’re doing $10-20,000 dollars a month in monthly recurring revenue, and next year you do. $30,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue. You’re alive, man. You’re able to eat off of that and keep going because that’s going to turn into $100,000 in a blink of an eye. You have to sit down and work for thirty-six months to get it to where it needs to go.
Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor Gutenberg are coming. Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare, including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit Pantheon.io/Gutenberg. Let them know that How I Built It sent you. Now, back to the show.
Joe: Early in Season 1 I talked about the Olympics were happening, and we talked about how we see the gold medalist Olympian, but we don’t see their entire life of working towards becoming that gold medalist. Michael Phelps– Well, Michael Phelps is maybe a bad example because he seems like he was built to swim. But Shaun White, he wasn’t just born an Olympic gold medalist. He worked hard to be an Olympic gold medalist, and I see a lot of similarities there, which is cool. A great nugget for people out there, Shopify is 18 years old. It’s a legal adult here in the United States.
Liam: It’s got a driver’s license, it can fight.
Joe: It’s ready to go.
Liam: It’s a big boy.
Joe: Awesome. We talked about where Time Doctor has been and a little bit about the origin story and the initial features. What are your plans for the future?
Liam: For us, it is the majority. Where we’re putting our chips down, to be honest with you is artificial intelligence, so we can predict with about an 89% accuracy rate whether someone is going to quit their job six months before they do. Based off of all of our website application mouse movement and keyboard movement data, because it creates a whole bunch of metadata connected to you, and then our machine learning algorithms can take that data and tell you, “This person isn’t happy with their job, and it’s because their manager is not nice, and you need to replace that manager. Or you need to move that person.” That’s where we’re moving, and it connects back to the exponentially better or exponentially cheaper.
Don’t do a “Me too” feature, even if it fails, don’t do the “Me too” features because those won’t result in exponential growth. Only a new feature that has not entered the market, that’s the only thing that you can do to 10-20x your growth as a business. So that’s what we’re putting our resources. We have the largest second by second work database on planet earth, which is why we can do this. For us, it’s been interesting. I’m a sociologist by training, all of my degrees are in sociology, and I feel like we’re doing sociology at a completely different level because I can very quickly analyze a million people’s work hours and figure out what’s going on and why. How do people in the US work in comparison to Canadians? What’s the difference between those two groups? That kind of thing, we can see that type of data, which is exciting to me.
Joe: That’s incredible. I think about when I was ready to quit, not my most recent job but the job before that. My most recent job was like I had a kid and I was working the agency life, and I was like “I can’t do agency life with a newborn.” But the job before that, it was a six-month grind. I realized one day I was unhappy with my job and my productivity noticeably dropped for the same reasons that you cited. It’s interesting, and I’m going to keep an eye on that because AI is the new hotness or whatever. But there are a lot of cool applications, like this–
Liam: Crypto. Crypto was the new hotness a year ago, and now it’s crashed. There’s always the new hotness. But artificial intelligence is something that’s here to stay. I honestly believe that it will completely change everything that we do both in our personal and our work lives, and people that are not investing heavily in it are going to be left behind. Even if we put all of our future of the business and it completely fails, and the business fails, what I would have personally learned about it will set me up personally to build the next company and understand that company and understand that problem perfectly. For us, we’re at an interesting crossroads where the cost of a AI is going down. The cost of building AI this year is going to be 50% cheaper next year. It’s going to be a continuous process like that. That’s going to be a huge movement for us moving forward. We’re very bullish on artificial intelligence.
Joe: Absolutely. I should say that the video for this is not going to be released, but I used pretty heavy quote fingers on “The new hotness” there. Ten years ago when I was doing my master’s thesis, I did my master’s thesis on predicting traffic patterns with a small subset of data before Google Maps was doing it. The first Android phone had just came out at the time, so I was using that phone and going on trips and seeing if I could reasonably predict when there would be traffic. That was me as a student with a limited data set, but I was able to do it for the roads that I knew properly. I was able to do it fairly successfully. With more resources, and like you said the cost of AI going down, it’s going to be an interesting few years where we see an explosion. I’m excited to see where all of this goes. As we close out the show, you have already given us a ton, but I do like to ask if you have any trade secrets for us?
Liam: For you guys? I don’t know. I have trade secrets that I could give away, but at the end of the day work. Work hard at whatever you’re doing, and whatever you’re doing today. If you’re working on a business, do this. You’re either listening to this podcast, or you’re listening to it on the bus, or you’re listening to it at work. Just work an extra hour today. Just do that. That’s all I ask for, one extra hour of work. That will get you farther than any trade secret you could possibly think of because if you do that tomorrow and you do it the day after that, and you do it the day after that, you’re going to succeed. Even if you work twice as hard you will never go backwards, the worst you can do is stay in the same position you are now. Whereas thinking about how to get forward is smart, working smart is great, but I work super smart, and I also work hard, and I’m coming for you. So, do that. Just work harder.
Joe: That’s fantastic for two reasons. It’s much better than the advice that you get from the Gary V’s of the world, which is “Work 16 hours a day and sleep for 2 hours a day.”
Liam: It’s going to kill you.
Joe: It’s going to kill you, right. Work one extra hour.
Liam: Yeah. See how it feels.
Joe: You could easily do that, and if you use Time Doctor you’ll see that you blow an hour on social media anyway.
Liam: Absolutely.
Joe: Liam, thanks so much for joining me. I know that there’s a couple of things going on. Where can people find you?
Liam: If you want to try a trial of Time Doctor you can go to TimeDoctor.com, it’s a free 14-day trial. If you want to find me then, to be honest with you, Instagram is a place where I’ve been spending more and more time, so if you type in my name, you’ll find me. We’ll probably have that in the show notes. I’m interested. I’m very interested in that. Also too, if you want to see me and you’re very excited about seeing me, I’m going to be in Bali. Usually once a year I’m down for our conference called Running Remote. If you’re serious about building remote teams, it is a treehouse made out of bamboo that holds about 400 people, and this here we have Joel from Buffer. We have Amir from Doist, and we have GitHub we have GitLab, we have Atlassian. They’re all coming together because they all run massive remote teams, and it’s something that I’ve wanted to put together for the last five years, and now we’ve finally got to do it, and it’s my passion project as well. So, if you want to see me in person, you can fly down there, and we can hang out. If you say, “Joe sent me,” then we’ll definitely have lunch together.
Joe: Awesome. Man, in a treehouse in Bali. That sounds fantastic. And you mentioned Amir. Amir was a guest on the show, so I’ll be sure to link his episode in the show notes. A lot of really good advice there too if you want a little preview. Liam, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.
Liam: No worries, Joe.
Outro: Thanks so much for joining me today, and thank you to Liam for his time and fantastic advice. There is a lot for a lot of different people in this episode especially if you’re trying to manage remote teams. Or if you are trying to get a handle on where you spend your time.
The question of the week is, how are you tracking your time? Are you using a tool or are you not tracking your time? Are you eyeballing it? Do you sweat where you spend your time each week? Let me know by emailing Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona.
This episode once again was brought to you by Pantheon, and I appreciate them and their support for this entire season.
They are helping you prepare for Gutenberg, so if you go to Pantheon.io/Gutenberg let them know How I Built It sent you. If you want to prepare for Gutenberg, again, you can go to all of the resources that I have available over at CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg. All the courses, the site licensing, and things like that. That’s it for this episode. If you want to find those resources or any of the show notes that we talked about, you can go to HowIBuilt.it/102. If you liked this episode, head over to Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a rating and review. It helps people discover the show, and I’m appreciative to those who rate and review the show, and for everybody listening. Thanks again, I appreciate you. Until next time, get out there and build something.
John Doherty is the founder of Credo. I met John at CaboPress, an incredible business mastermind week, and we got to talking about the marketing and SEO side of things. Know I don’t know much about that, but Credo is definitely something that can help me in a unique way. In this episode we talk all about the importance of finding the right people to help you in your business.
Question of the week: Have you ever had a business coach or mentor? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.
Intro: Welcome to episode 91 of How I Built It! In this episode, continuing this SEO miniseries, I talk to John Doherty, the founder of Credo. I met John at CaboPress, an incredible business mastermind week, and we got to talking about the marketing and SEO side of things. Know I don’t know much about that, but Credo is definitely something that can help me in a unique way. We’ll talk about how in a minute, but first…
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Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is John Doherty of [Hired Gun LLC] and founder of Credo. John, how are you?
John Doherty: I’m doing well Joe. How are you today?
Joe: I am fantastic. It is towards the end of March as we record this. I’m hopeful that it will get warmer. I’m on the East Coast, the northeast, where it’s always cold. I’m not sure where you’re located.
John: I’m in Denver Colorado. Actually it’s funny you bring up the weather because it was 67 and sunny and gorgeous here yesterday. And then at about 6:00 PM last night it started dumping snow. So, Denver gets some crazy bipolar weather around this time of year, basically through May. But we’re starting to get little buds on the trees. I’m hopeful that spring is going to pop through and it’s going to get hot as anything.
Joe: Very nice. When I worked at Crowd Favorite, I heard from a lot of my Denver co-workers that they basically have to leave with a coat, and then it would be shorts weather by the afternoon. And that’s very interesting to me. I think I’m very much like, when I get one nice day, it has to be nice the rest of the year now. It has to just be nice until November.
But I guess if I wanted that, I could move to maybe, Cabo. Where we met, at Cabo press. And that’s how we got connected. Today you’re going to be talking about Credo, a product or service that you’ve created. So why don’t you tell people about who you are what you do, and how you came up with the idea?
John: for sure. Credo is, I think the best way to describe it, is a productized service. Which I realized actually when we were in Cabo. I did think that I was building a product company, and then I was sitting at dinner one night and I went to the product dinner, and one of the guys there was like, “Are you building a product or service?”
I was like, “Of course it’s a product!” And then a couple hours later I was like, “Shoot. You’re right. It’s a service.” So that was mind blowing on the first night. But basically, what we do at Credo is we help businesses that are looking to take their business to the next level. Through SEO, Content Marketing, Facebook ads, PBC that sort of thing. We help them connect with the right agency or marketing provider for their specific needs.
So there are a lot of people out there, the Growth Geeks of the world, where it’s people that come and they say, “I have $200 dollars and I need four blog posts a month written.” That problem is solved. But the people that are like, “I have $3-$4,000 dollars a month to spend, I have a team in place internally. And we’re really looking to scale this thing and hire the right person. But we’re an e-commerce company, we need SEO and Facebook ads.”
At Credo we know who’s good at that stuff. We know he does amazing e-commerce work, e-commerce SEO and Facebook ads for example. And we can connect those two up, then we help the business with reviewing proposals and basically following through until they feel comfortable and confident making the right decision for their business. So we get paid by the agencies and the consultants.
Joe: Nice. Very nice. And that’s interesting. When we were in Cabo I was trying to figure out what exactly my niche is, and how do I really understand my audience. I know you gave me some really good advice about the Facebook Pixel. But as a one-man band, especially, it’s a very hard thing to manage. I almost need to remember, “Set up my social media for this episode. How do I even Facebook ad? I don’t know how to do that.” So I mean, if you’re not ready to take on an employee to do that full time, then this sounds like a great service for you.
John: Totally. It’s that, and then it’s also the companies that we’re best at helping to find a provider Are companies that most of them are around like $1 million plus a year in revenue, so $80-$90K a month in revenue, and we can help ones that are smaller than that, but they have to be really focusing on growth and focusing on marketing. And I’ve found it works best when there is someone that is basically heading up marketing that’s not the founder.
Because founders have so much going on, founders are also really afraid to pull the trigger on any real budget. And so when you have someone that really understands marketing and owns it and is focusing on it, that’s when it’s best to work with a consultant or an agency. Especially on the strategy and services side.
Joe: Nice. That makes even more sense because they know what they need right. I’m not just walking in cold and saying, “I’ll take one of the social media, please.”
John: Totally. And as You said, exactly. “One of the social medias,” like, what are you talking about? And founders, we’re so busy. We have so much going on. You’re recording podcasts, you’re editing them, you’re publishing them, you’re promoting them, you’re doing all that stuff. If you’re building a product you’re also probably writing content, you’re building the product, you might be coding. There’s all this stuff going on.
I’ve been building a team to help me out with a lot of that stuff over the last six months, basically since Cabo. But there’s so much going on that it works best when you have someone that’s really focused on doing it, and their full-time job is doing marketing, producing content, promoting etc. And if you don’t have the budget, or I worked in-house for some big companies where I had to say six months ahead of time who I wanted to start hiring six months from then.
And when you’re trying to move fast, you can’t wait six months. You have you have to get it done then if you’re trying to move fast. Often You have marketing budget to spend on an agency or something like that, but you can’t open up ahead. So that’s when an agency can be perfect to engage with, even short term, until you can hire someone.
Joe: Gotcha. That sounds great. And it’s already giving me stuff to think about. Because doing the podcast, making my courses, doing whatever else I do. I want to make sure that I’m doing this right. When I went out on my own, I thought I was doing it right because it was just like, it was my side gig first. And whatever income that was generated was good enough for me.
And then I went out on my own, and I thought, “I actually need to generate real income here. And what I’m doing isn’t cutting it.” for extra income it’s fine, for like my full-time, “got to support my family” income, I need to do something a little different.
So there’s definitely a lot of things to consider there. And it’s also really hard to keep up with. I like to ask this question, But I feel like we’re going to get a pretty good answer from you. No pressure. What research do you do to stay on top of this stuff?
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John: Oh man. That’s a great question. I’m a professional marketer, right? I’ve been a marketer for about a decade now. Agency side, in-house, running my own company. So I’ve specialized in search engine optimization for a long time and then I’ve done a lot around content and that sort of stuff. Now I’m really getting deeper into marketing funnels, e-mail funnels, that sort of stuff. And basically the way I do it is three different ways.
One is Twitter. I carefully curate who I follow. So I have about 500 people that I follow. I have high 20,000 followers, but I only follow about 500. And that number has actually increased a bit recently because I’ve been following different types of people. Product people, more General Growth people, more of these funnel hacker people. Simply because I’m trying to learn more there. The second one is podcasts. Listening to things like Mixergy is really good. Smart Passive Income has some really good stuff in it. CreativeLive by Chase Jarvis is another one that I listen to that’s really good.
And then I follow a few specific newsletters, Hiten Shaw has a really good one, Product Habits. Grow.co has a good weekly newsletter that comes out. Those are some of the places I basically try to find, just like Credo. There’s so many people out there that say that they’re an expert. But a lot of them actually aren’t. There’s a lot of noise in the space on trend to provide the signal to the digital marketing world, of who is actually good. Same with content.
I’m trying to follow the high signal to noise people, and the newsletters are not sending me something every single day. I don’t need a growth tip Every single day. Give me like the six best articles from the past week around products and growth and revenue generation. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what actually helps you build your business, as opposed to just getting overwhelmed with all these like little tips and tricks and hacks.
You actually need that strategy. And then you could find, and You can learn the tactics, and you hear the hacks all over the place. There’s no shortage of those. You actually need to know how to put together the strategy first. So that’s what I try to get to.
Joe: Absolutely. I mean, if all you do is hacks, then eventually you’re going to chop off your arm.
John: Exactly.
Joe: It’s like how in math class. The teacher teaches you the long way, and then they teach you the shortcut. Because you need to understand the process before you can actually do the shortcut. So I love that. Studio Neat has a really good newsletter for me, it’s two guys, they send one link each that they like and then a picture of something they’re working on. It’s easily digestible and for somebody who’s trying, we’re both trying to read and consume and learn a lot, stuff like that is excellent.
So that’s awesome. I want to touch on something you said about a lot of people saying that they’re experts out there. When I was, I’ll say I was a kid, but I was in college. I was like, “SEO is easy. I’ll just write the HTML markup and boom, SEO.” And a lot of people feel that way. People feel that way about WordPress. “Making a website is easy. Just WordPress and done.” So how do you cut through the noise and put yourself out there as a signal?
John: That’s a great question, and you’re absolutely right. I think a lot of actual experts, I’m guilty of this myself. I had a friend the other day basically tell me that she was trying to do something new with her site, trying to change some form styles and that sort of stuff. And then she wants to do a paid course. She was like, “Restrict Content Pro and WP Simple Pay, and you’re on WordPress already,” and shout out to Phil Derksen and Pippin there.
But I was like, “Just use these.” And she’s like, “Wait. What are you talking about?” And I’m like, “Oh right. There’s no ‘just’ there. This is old hat to me.” But I think there are a couple of things there. One is when someone is an expert they are going to say stuff like that.
Where it’s, “Just use this,” and “Use that.” You might not have any clue, but they’ve gone in and done the work. Otherwise they might be like, “What about this? What about that? You could do this thing.” And there is all that ambiguity there, but they can see the full range and know what’s actually good there.
Joe: Right. They can pull from their experience to give you a guided answer.
John: Exactly. And then the big thing is I think showing their work. So going back to math class. I was always told, “Show your work.” I hated showing the work, I was bad at it. I got terrible scores in math because I hated showing my work. I was like, “No. I can’t do this in my head and this is the answer.” And they’re like, “Yeah. But how did you get there?” And I’m like, “The way you told me to in class. I just did that in my head, not on paper. I don’t want to write that out, I have bad handwriting.”
But it’s something that I’ve really learned recently is if you’re an expert and you’re trying to show someone that you are actually an expert, you have to show your work. You have to show a proof point, a case study for everything that you’re claiming to do. So if you want to grow your membership site through SEO, do X Y and Z. “Oh, by the way, here’s a membership site that I helped do this on.” I think actually showing your work, and then if you’re looking for an expert, find the people that are actually showing their work.
That’s legitimate stuff that they’re being open about it. So I think that’s really key there. Find those that are willing to teach, and those are the ones that are actually the experts.
Joe: Awesome. As an online teacher I’m really liking that you’re saying that. But it’s true. It’s so funny because in the last maybe, 10 years, 15 years there’s been such a shift from like, “You can’t see what I’m doing. Just know that I’ve done this, and you can’t see what I’m doing or how I’m doing it.” And now it’s, I mean maybe it’s just in the WordPress space. But I feel like It’s a lot more widespread than that. Like a GitHub account is really important.
But it’s like, “This is what I’m doing, and how I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it.” The guys at base camp, a little bit smug as they may be, are very open in the way they do things. And they’re clearly doing something better than me. So maybe it’s not undeserved, but they’re very open about running their business. And Pippin who you mentioned, he’s one of the most open people about his business that I know.
He’ll talk about the decisions he’s made, and why and how it’s affecting his business. It’s no secret why he’s an expert in our field, because people see what he’s doing, and they see his success, and they know why he’s successful.
John: Totally. And I think that that is carrying over to some other industries. I think it’s starting to come around in the SEO world. The Digital Marketing world. You still get the “make money online” people that are very close lipped and all of that. I tend to be very transparent and very open. Some people say I’m bragging, but it also works. I’m showing what I’m doing, I’m showing the results and that builds trust with people.
I’m honestly not trying to brag about it. I’m just saying, “Hey this works.” Like, “Learn from this.” I come from a family of educators. I want to teach people. I love teaching. I think that is coming about, and I think it’s very important as well for people that have built something of value to also show how they got there.
Joe: Awesome. I love that. So moving from the research and the signal versus noise, which I guess ironically is the Basecamp blog. I guess I’ll ask you how you built Credo? Or we could talk about how you build a strategy for somebody. So I’ll give you some time to mull that one over.
But I started this podcast, I want to get back to the root of this question. I started this podcast because I was talking to other people about starting my own online courses, and I was like, “I should record these conversations.” And it was like a mini-mastermind. Do you mastermind with Anybody? Are there people that you bounce ideas off of?
John: I had some people that I bounce ideas off. I don’t have an official mastermind, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing. Connecting with other peers and such has been a focus of mine for the last six months.
Joe: Nice. Very nice. And do you find that stuff helps? Being a fairly solo entrepreneur, you’re building a team, but I don’t know if you work from home. I know I work from home, I’m a solo guy. Just talking to people once or twice a week has been great for me. I miss having co-workers in that regard.
John: Yeah. I definitely find that is something that I need. I mean, even if you’re building out a team. The thing is, being an entrepreneur, even if you’re not a solo entrepreneur doing everything, but you’re a solo founder. No one else within your company understands what that means. Even if you’re really good at giving people the full scope of, “This is what’s going on, and this is what’s happening in the business,” which I’m really bad at that, by the way. And that’s something that I’m working on as a founder and as a CEO.
Because I have employees. But they’re never going to understand the emotional stuff that you go through, and the emotional challenges that happen there. Where it’s like, “Stuff is a little slow right now.” And that happens every single year, because it’s this time of year and everyone is super busy, they geared up at the beginning of the year, and they’re going to rework their strategy middle of the year, and then end of the year they’re going to be thinking towards the next year.
But March and April is a little bit slower. I know that intellectually, but I feel it deeply emotionally. They don’t feel that, because it’s not their baby. I definitely find that useful, and find it useful to have other people to commiserate with where they’re like, “Yeah. When I go through slow times I struggle, and I wonder if I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And I wonder if I’m delivering for my clients what I need to be delivering.” So I found that super helpful.
And honestly, I’ve just found it helpful to build out levels where I have some people that basically I mentor. Very unofficially, but people I help with their business because they are just getting going. Then I have other people that are about at the same level as me, been on their own working for themselves, building a company for the last two to four years, really. I’m about two and a half years in.
And then I have people like Chris Lema and Dan Martell, and people like that, that I consider my mentors. That are numerous steps ahead of me, three or four or five steps ahead of me. And they for some reason graciously give me their time and I can ask them questions, every now and then they’ll meet up with me, every now and then if we’re in the same area. And I can pick their brain for an hour or so. Those are the ones that really take it to the next level. But you have to have all those different levels there.
Joe: Absolutely. So you touched on the empathy factor, that’s something that’s not impossible for somebody who’s not in the same position, but it’s very hard. Because I have found that people who are not in the same position think that either, I’m extremely poor or I’m very wealthy. And that’s like, neither one of those is true. Like, “You have your own business. Are you rich?” And I’m like, “No. I’m not at all rich.”
So the empathy factor is very important, and that was another big thing I got from Cabo Press, because I had just gotten out of a very slow period where I thought, like right after I went out on my own, I was like, “I have absolutely made the wrong choice. I have a five-month-old. I’m not making any money.” And Jennifer Bourn gave me incredible advice on that. She was like, “Yeah. The summer is slow. Save a portion of your income and be ready for that slow period. We go on vacations because I know there’s going to be no work, and I don’t want to panic about money.”
Jennifer Bourn is a very successful person by most people’s accounts. So her telling me that made me feel a lot better. The empathy factor is so important, and having mentees and mentors. Mentees I think keep you grounded, because you’re remembering what it’s like when you first started. So you can empathize with the new person which is very helpful in my online courses. And then Chris Lema is an excellent person, he always offers great advice. Shawn Hesketh has been a personal mentor to me quite a bit. We’re in a similar field, and I’ve learned a lot from him. But all of that is very important.
John: Totally. And let me give one more piece of advice there. Beginning of 2015 my business had grown to a certain point. I think we’re doing like $12-$13K a month in revenue and I was at a breaking point. I was like, “I cannot do anymore.” Like, “I do not know how to take this thing to the next level. I’m overwhelmed. I’m working way too much.” I had just moved to Colorado and wanted more balance in my life, a bit more time. And I actually went and hired a business coach. I still work with them.
I pay him a couple grand a month, we catch up a couple times a month. And he has helped me out a ton with getting clarity about who I am as an entrepreneur, what my skills are, the roles I need to hire for, the highest leverage. He’s always really good at being like, “Is that thing you’re working on the highest leverage thing that you could be doing?” so it’s a combination. And I always push back, I’m like, “Long term I think it is. Short term, it’s not the thing that’s going to double my business next month.”
Which if you’ve been in business for a little while, you know that there’s really nothing that’s going to double your business next month. But it is good to constantly have that push of, “Is this the highest thing you think you could be working on? Or do you actually need to push that off until Q3?” And having someone like that, that you’re paying, because then the mentors, like Chris etc. And I know Chris does consulting and coaching as well, and so does Dan, but neither of them is my coach.
But having someone that you’re paying that basically you’re paying them for their advice, and then you also know you’re going to get their advice consistently. And basically, they know that like, if they’re not helping you grow your business you’re going to stop paying them. So they’re also incentivized to help you out. They don’t go three weeks without getting back to you. Versus when someone e-mails me and they’re not paying me for something, guess what? They go to the back of the line behind the people that are. I think that’s something that a lot of people should consider. Getting an actual coach. I think more entrepreneurs need an actual coach.
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Joe: especially the people who are moving from freelance to entrepreneur. Because I freelanced all through high school, all through college, a little bit after grad school. And There are two things you said. I never saw the value in paying for something that I could do myself. I never wanted to invest because that was money out of my pocket. But it’s an investment. And then the other thing is what you said about, “Is that thing you’re doing the best thing, the high leverage thing?”
Because I can totally empathize with the freelancer who just takes any job because it’s money in their pocket, but over the last couple of years I got to work with Brian Richards and a bunch of other really smart people. And we talked about how, “If you’re taking just any old job, that could be costing you money in the long run.” You’ve got to do the thing that’s best for your business, even if it doesn’t mean immediate money in your pocket.
Both of those things are Just fantastic advice for really growing your business and taking it to the next level. If you don’t want to scrape by all the time, then What are you doing in your business? It’s very stressful. So, cool. We are almost coming up on time. We’re like 20 minutes in and I haven’t even asked you the title question yet.
So here’s the title question. So much good advice in this episode already. How did you build it? You said Credo is a “productized service” so maybe, how did you design that service? And how do you build out that service for, let’s say, we have a sample client?
John: It’s been through a lot of trial and error. My site is all built on WordPress. I’ve been developing on WordPress for a long time. WordPress plus paid memberships pro, and GravityForms, GravityReview. Some of those different plugins. And I put all of the tools that I used to build a Credo on GetCredo.com/recommended-tools. But basically, how I went about designing the product, the company has been through a bunch of different iterations.
Started off with me betting out every single project and then emailing friends, and then basically when they closed it. You’re emailing friends, “Do you want to talk this person?” when they closed it, then I’ve got a commission. To basically a fully functioning marketplace without processing payments, where a project would come in and we’d set it live on the platform, add a custom e-mail system that would e-mail it out to people, that did that kind of work within that budget.
That it pasted based off of how many leads they had received that month, or contacted. If I had a contact cap for each lead of four, if that wasn’t reached in four hours, it would e-mail a couple more. Basically the number left times two. Super complicated stuff that never really worked well. And so my developer and I recently just blew all of that away, because I basically realized it didn’t make sense to have people– and at that point agencies were, and consultants were paying basically on the number of leads they want to be able to contact each month.
Which didn’t really makes sense for a couple of reasons. One, I wasn’t playing the quantity game. I’m playing the quality game. These are these are not the $200 dollar a month, “I need four blog posts a month,” sort of crap. It’s, “I need a super expert, an SEO expert that I can pay $5 grand a month to grow my business that’s already at $2 million, and I want to take it to $5 million a year.” So It didn’t really make sense for someone to be paying the same amount for a $1 thousand dollar a month lead or a $5 thousand dollar a month lead. Plus those leads weren’t closing, they weren’t closing for the agency.
So basically, I then pivoted again, just before Cabo Press last year. So in September of last year I launched an annual plan, so I have a directory, and then I have about 15 agencies I work directly with. They pay us per month and they also pay us a commission in perpetuity on the work that they close. And we help them close that work. So basically, it’s a productized service, basically we’re a regeneration agency for marketing agencies. So it’s meta as anything.
People on our preferred plan are basically our clients. I think of them as our clients. I do my own SEO consulting as well. Those are my clients. Our preferred agencies on Credo are the agency’s clients. So basically the way we do it, is when a business comes in and says, “We’re an e-commerce company,” or let’s say you’re a membership site. A Membership site and you’re doing $1 million a year in revenue, let’s say, and you want to grow it to $3.
Or even $500K and you want to grow it to $1 million. But you have so much going on. You submit our form, schedule a phone call with us, hop on the phone with my customer success person, she talks with you about who you are, what your business does, how you make money and what you need. What you’re looking for. And then once she gets all that together, she puts together what we call a project description. Which is basically six to eight sentences about what you need.
All those things that she just went through with you, you approve that on the platform so that’s built out, and then she sends that project description to agencies or consultants that do that work. Once they accept it we make the introduction and then we follow up a week later, make sure everyone got to connect. And then once you have proposals in hand we hop back on the phone with you, review the proposal, say “Do you have a good understanding of this from this agency? I didn’t see this from this agency that we talked about.” So we help that client get to the point where they still make the decision, they sign the contract directly with the agency of their choice. But we basically help them get to the point where they’re confident that they’re making the right decision.
Joe: That’s incredible. So you’re providing a network for your clients, where you’re saying, “These are the people I know. This is who I think will be a good fit for you.” But I think the big value add is the last thing you just said, “We review the contracts or the proposals with you.” Because that is an overwhelming process. Because everybody says, “This is a standard contract.” Is it a standard contract? I don’t know what that contract looks like everywhere.
So just like having somebody who sees proposals like that all the time, and saying, “This is probably not great for you,” or, “This should be included. This has been included other places.” And I feel like that’s a huge value add, and something that takes a long time of trial and error or hiring an expert who knows that stuff and who has seen it through experience.
John: It’s a value add on both sides as well, because it’s a value add to the agencies because we’re reviewing their proposals with them, and also giving them feedback. I had one agency recently that they were sending through basically a Google doc of their proposal, and they had awesome stuff in there but they’re going up against this agency that was super polished.
And so I went back and told this agency, I was like, “You might only be three people, and talk about being a micro agency of experts, but you need to up your brand a bit.” And we talked through that, and he came back two weeks later, and he had completely redone that. So that’s huge value to him. And then on the client side, I mean we’re not giving legal advice.
But I’m saying like, “We talked about X Y Z, we talked about Facebook ads.” They don’t mention Facebook ads in this proposal at all. Like, “What’s going on there?” Or if it’s a bigger agency, and they said, “We’ve worked with the big agency in the past and didn’t really like that because of the account manager set up,” and then we introduced them to smaller agencies because of that, when they come back we still ask, “Do you have a good idea of who’s actually going be working on your project?”
Because there are definitely agencies, and this is the right fit for some people, where there’s an account manager and like four different teams with junior people working on your project. But For certain businesses you need a ten-year veteran directly working on your project, not some junior person that they’re farming out work to. So we really help them think about those questions, and then go back with better questions. And we don’t hear the phone calls that they have with the agencies and all that.
We’ve had the initial contact, and we’ve seen the proposals and we get some other bits and pieces throughout. But the hardest part is actually helping someone pull the trigger, and a lot of businesses will get scared off. Like, Joe, if you were trying to grow this podcast and you wanted someone to help you out with promotion and all that, and someone comes back. Even if you know that you have $2,000 dollars a month to spend on marketing, someone comes back and proposes you to spend $2,000 dollars a month with them for X Y and Z. You’re going to be scared. Right?
Joe: Yeah. That’s More than rent.
John: You’re going to put it off. You’re not going to respond for a little while. We can actually help the agencies close more work because we’re also keeping the client involved. We keep you involved., “I know you got proposals from this agency and this agency, let’s schedule a cal. Let’s hop back on. Let’s talk through your fears.” all that stuff.
Joe: Right. Because in my head, I just see the money flying out the window. Oh my God, that is more than I pay in rent per month. But you’re saying, “That $2,000 dollars a month, can make you $5,000 dollars a month,” or whatever.
John: It’s that investment mindset that we were talking about just like five minutes ago.
Joe: Yeah exactly. And the bit you said about providing value to agencies too, because there have been proposals I’ve sent out that I’ve just gotten a “No,” and then I haven’t gotten a reason why. You can now provide, maybe not the reason why, but at least feedback to say, “This is where you can do things better.” And that is so important because that feedback means that I’m not going to lose the next one for that mistake.
John: Exactly.
Joe: You’re just helping everybody. This is fantastic.
John: Trying to.
Joe: We are totally, slightly over time. That’s OK. You’ve answered your question about transformations. So do you have any big plans for the future, or anything coming down the pike?
John: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, a few things. I have a couple of new offerings that I’m planning to launch soon. Actually, by the time this comes out One of them should be launched. But I’m not going to say what it is yet, in case it’s not. But basically What I’ve realized is everyone always says, “Focus on one offer, one model,” that sort of thing. But I also believe that there are a lot of ways you can provide value to people.
So I’m looking for a few different ways to diversify our revenue streams to help us invest back into growing the company. The lead side is good, I’m doing more affiliate stuff. I have a couple of other paid offerings I’m going to be launching as well. So that’s the future, and then as I said, I’m really trying to learn to be a CEO and not just an entrepreneur and a solo, lone wolf, Do-it-yourself kind of person.
I’m Really trying to hire good people to take Over stuff that I’m not amazing at, like operations. I’m good at sales But I shouldn’t be hopping on the call with someone that has $1,200 dollars a month to spend on Facebook ads. I can pay someone who is much cheaper than me to do that. Who can do it just as well if not better. So that’s really where my company is going over the next year.
Joe: Nice. That sounds fantastic. Well I’m very excited to see how that works out. When this episode drops I’ll look for that new feature.
John: I’ll send it to you.
Joe: Awesome, sounds great. So my final question, my favorite question. Do you have any trade secrets for us?
John: Trade secrets? Let’s see here. I think when it comes to growing your company, one of the trade secrets that I always like to tell people is, and I don’t know that’s really a secret. But when it comes down to marketing it’s all about, who is the person that you’re trying to serve and how do you serve them best? People talk about their personas. So you have a persona, for me it’s marketing directors, for example. I have to get down deep into, “What are their fears? What are the things they’re struggling with?” All that sort of stuff, to really know, “What is the offering? How do I message it to them? How do I get in front of them?” I think this is something that I personally have missed for a long time. Like I was saying at the beginning, tactics and tips and tricks are all a dime a dozen. You actually have to get down to the strategy.
I feel like I’ve I built my business backwards, like starting on, “I could drive traffic to these pages, and write content or whatever.” But now really, if I’m going to get to the next level, I have to actually think about, “What is the longer-term strategy of my business?” And actually getting down into, “Who is my customer?” So get down into, if you have a business that’s doing okay, but you really want to take it to the next level, you really have to go back to, “Who is my customer? Who is my audience, and what do they really need from me?” And that’s going to drive your future decisions. As opposed to, “I want to build a product. I want to build a membership site.” No. You want to serve this audience, and what is the best way to serve them? Is it a product? Maybe. Is it a membership site? Maybe. Is it a podcast? Maybe. Your audience can tell you that.
Joe: Awesome. That’s fantastic. And it goes right back to the empathy factor, you understand what your customer needs and then you can build around that. Very cool. John, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.
John: Yeah. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on, this has been fun.
Joe: Absolutely. Where can people find you if they want to learn more?
John: The best place to find me is my company site. GetCredo.com And the best place to connect with me personally is on Twitter @DohertyJF.
Outro: Thanks so much to John for joining me today. He offers a lot of great advice and works hard at his craft. You can tell by the way he talks how passionate he is, and that shows in a great product (or productized service)!
And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon, Traitware, and GravityView. Their support is deeply appreciated.
The question of the week for you is have you ever had a business coach or mentor? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.
For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/91/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it. And until next time, get out there and build something!
Evan Calkins created Hoban Press & Hoban Cards after he bought his first letterpress machine. He’s a master of his craft and I was really excited to talk to Evan because I’m very interested in that creaft. He creates fantastic looking business cards and sationary, and even did my cards! We’ll talk about what it’s like doing a highly specialized thing in the real world – a physical product, and hear some good stories along the way.
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Hey everybody! And welcome to aniother episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Evan Calkins from HobanPress. I was really excited to talk to Evan because he does something I’m very interested in: letterpress. He creates fantastic looking business cards and sationary, and even did my cards! We’ll talk about what it’s like doing a highly specialized thing in the real world – a physical product! – but first, a word from our sponsors.
Sponsors: This season of How I Built It is brought to you by two great sponsors.
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And now, on with the show.
Joe: Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Evan Calkins of Hoban Press.
Evan, thanks for joining me today. How are you?
Evan: I’m doing well. It’s amazing. Great to be here.
Joe: Yeah. Thanks so much for being on the show. I am a big fan of your work. I’m about to get my second round of business cards from you guys.
Evan: Appreciate it.
Joe: Before I guess I weigh too deeply into that, why don’t you tell everybody who you are and what you do?
Evan: Yeah. Like you said, I’m Evan Calkins. I now run a very, very tiny letterpress printing shop out of Chehalis, Washington. And yeah, I got into that a few years ba- … actually, I’ve been doing letterpress printing for six or seven years. It started as a hobby and then it kind of shifted into a business, which I think happens a lot of times for folks. They start out with a hobby and then it kind of works its way into a business. So yeah, and I have a website. We pretty sell all of our orders through our websites. And yeah, so that’s what I do.
Joe: Cool, very cool. And one more fun fact about you as we record this, is you’re working your way driving across the country, like a road trip, right?
Evan: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. My family and I, my wife, my 11-year-old daughter, we’re driving across the US. We’ve taken a year. And we have a Volkswagen Vanagon.
Joe: Nice.
Evan: Yeah. We’re just driving across the US trying to go to pretty much all the major cities, see all the states. And I’ve kind of set my business up to where I can be traveling and I can be working from the road, which doesn’t really sound possible with letterpress printing, because it’s such a hands-on thing, but I have a couple amazing employees that help me out, so it’s been great.
Joe: Awesome. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. We talk about digital nomads, and obviously I can do basically everything I need to do from my laptop, but you work in a more physical product space. What’s a challenge of being out of the office for that long?
Evan: Yeah. The challenge was initially I taught myself how to letterpress print, so I got a big cast iron letterpress, which is kind of a story in and of itself, but then I had to sort of pass on these things that I learned to an employee of mine, which was one of my good friends, and then I hired another employee. So over the course of the last six months before we left on this trip, I had to set up the business to where they could do everything in the shop. And so there’s a lot of training, a lot of teaching. And then right now, I’m just on the road doing emails, doing sales, growing the business, doing marketing. I do a lot of design work that’s surrounding the business, so people will have me design business cards and logos and things like that. I do a little web development and stuff, software development on the side, as well.
So yeah, it’s been a really cool project, sort of experience to work on the road. Trying to find Starbucks and reliable WiFi to work out of has been interesting. It’s been a lot of fun, though.
Joe: Awesome. Yeah, so for any of you completely web-based people who say you can’t take a week off because you think your business will crash and burn, Evan is out of his office for a year in a place where he actually does physical things. So if you stop listening at this point, that is the takeaway.
Evan: Exactly.
Joe: But you should not stop listening, because there are a bunch of questions I’d like to ask you. And so the first question I have for you is, so you do business cards and you do letterpress. You said you’re self-taught. I guess how did you come up with the idea or more since I don’t think you invented letterpress, what made you realize that this is a good business to get into or a business you wanted to get into?
Evan: Yeah. So I think the best way to talk about this is maybe to tell the story from the beginning and how I acquired my first letterpress. So I’ve been involved in design, in web design, for a long time. I’m kind of self-taught, like a lot of us are. From my teens, I was working in Photoshop, and I’ve always had a passion for sort of typography, minimalism. I’ve always appreciated those type of things. I’ve always appreciated really good print work and I’ve loved to flip through magazines and admired the typography and things like that, so that’s kind of where it started.
And a long time ago, I really wanted my own letterpress-printed business cards, because at that time always viewed letterpress printing as sort of the pinnacle of printing. If I could get ahold of some letterpress cards, I feel like my business would just skyrocket, because everybody would appreciate them. So I searched for a print shop around my local area. Nobody, of course, did letterpress printing, because it’s a very old art that was taken over by offset printing. And I had a really hard time, even in bigger cities around me, finding somebody who could do this locally.
So I thought, “Why not I research it and figure out how these things are made, because I know they’re being made.” So I did a lot of research. I went on a lot of forums online. There’s a forum called Briar Press that’s an amazing forum for letterpress printing that’s been around for many years. There’s a lot of older letterpress printers on there sharing their knowledge and freely giving tips to continue the craft. So I started there, started doing research, and I figured, “Man, I need to get ahold of one of these old letterpresses. You can’t just go down to the store, go down to the local Staples and buy a letterpress. So you have to do some research.
So what I did is I sent out an email. I live in Western Washington. I sent out an email, pretty much all the print shops I could find on Google from Portland to Seattle. That was kind of the corridor that I live on. And the only email I got back was from a little print shop in my actual hometown, which is a very small town, on Interstate 5 there. In basically an email I asked folks, “Hey, do you have any old printing equipment laying around that I could either buy or have or come by and look at?” So this print shop emailed me and the woman said, “Yeah, I think I have something like that. Come take a look.”
So I went down there to a little basement of theirs, and sure enough, there’s this amazing letterpress. It was a 1902 Chandler & Price letterpress that weighs about 1,500 pounds.
Joe: Wow.
Evan: It’s made of cast iron. So I was able to acquire that from her. I disassembled it, cleaned it up, and that’s how I started with letterpress printing. And I took it to my garage and I just basically taught myself how to print. And yeah, that’s how I started. At least that’s how I started onto the hobby of letterpress printing. It turned into a business I think because I started printing cards for friends and families, and people were like, “Well, let me pay you for these.” And so I just continued to do that. And yeah, that’s kind of how it turned into a business.
Joe: Awesome. So I mean, it sounds like there was a lot of research involved just all around, like finding the machine. Lucky that it was in your hometown, right? I imagine it probably wouldn’t be very cheap to pick up or ship this machine to you, right? Can you give me an idea of how big it is?
Evan: Yeah. It’s pretty big. They are very difficult to ship, and this being in a basement, we had to actually disassemble it in the basement, sort of haul it out piece by piece with a … I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an engine hoist that grabs hold of engines that you work on. So we used one of those, because nobody could … I can’t just get like five or six guys to pick up the pieces. They’re fragile, they’re cast iron, so if they fall, they break easily. So yeah, it is hard to acquire these things. You can find them on Craigslist and things like that, but it takes a lot of skill to get them out of wherever they are. So yeah, that was sort of an adventure in itself, just getting the letterpress into my garage, yeah.
Joe: Man, that’s wild. And so now you have this machine. You started doing letterpress business card and things like that for your friends, and they wanted to pay you. At what point did you decide, “All right, this is a viable business for me. I think enough people are willing to pay me to do this”?
Evan: Yeah. So at the time I was working for my local county, actually, as a software developer in their IT department, and so I was sort of moonlighting on the side, sort of half moonlighting, half doing this as a hobby. And since I was a web developer, I figured, “Well, why don’t I just make myself a very simple site, throw it up.” And that’s when I got the idea to make these very simple what I call calling cards. They’re sort of distinguished themselves from business cards in that they’re very simple, very typographic, and they’re mainly meant to have your name on them rather than a business name. And you know what I’m talking about.
So what I did is I worked up six templates. There were just six options that you could have. It was a one-page website. There wasn’t even an about page, a contact page, just one page with these six templates and a PayPal button, basically, to check out with.
And so I threw this up, and I had a little bit of success with it. I was surprised that I got some organic Google traffic from just having this simple one-page layout. But really what kicked off the business is that … I don’t know if you know who Kevin Rose is. He’s an investor, Silicon Valley investor, and he started Digg.
Joe: Digg? Yeah, yeah.
Evan: Yeah, the original digg.com. I was listening to a podcast he was doing at the time, and he mentioned somewhere in the podcast wanting cool business cards. In I was like, “You know? Why don’t I guess what email address his is, and just send him and email and tell him I’ll make him a free batch.” So I guessed his email address and sent him this email, and like within five minutes he emailed me back and was like, “Dude, I would love for you to make me cards, and I’ll pay you for them.” And so I made him these cards, I shipped them to him, and he actually Tweeted out my web page, and that’s kind of what kicked off my business is reaching out to this influencer and then them making a Tweet, and that’s kind of how I started.
Joe: Man, I had no idea about that. I’m so glad that you told this story, because that’s awesome. I tell a lot of people, “How do you get sponsors and how do you do this?” And I’m just like, “I just ask. I just ask.”
Evan: Exactly.
Joe: And the fact that you just acted on that and were like, “This guy is an influencer, he wants cool business cards, I can do that,” that’s amazing, which is really cool. And as far as your templates go, I’m looking at them right now. I’ll link them in the show notes. I think the trade card … I don’t think. I’m looking at my business card. It looks exactly like the trade card. So that was the one I went with.
So why don’t you tell us maybe a little bit about your process, right? ‘Cause again, we talk to, or I talk to a lot of developers and people in the software space. I’m venturing more into the physical realm of things. I talk to Brad Dowdy, The Pen Addict from Nock Co., and things like that. And so what’s the process for creating a business card, or maybe just the general letterpress process? How does that work?
Evan: Yeah. So back in the old days, they used what was called movable type. It was a set of … basically a font, right? It was lead, and you were only able to print with the lead type that you owned, right? So maybe you’d owned five or six different fonts in different variations. Maybe you had some italics and different sizes, point sizes of that font.
The way we print, we don’t set type like that anymore. We make a plate. So what we do is we start with a design first, so depending on if I have a custom card that somebody submits to me or one that I’m designing, I usually lay it out in Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator. And then once the design is finalized, we create a actual physical letterpress plate from that file, which is sort of a raised … all the surfaces that get printed are raised up out of the plate, and then we adhere that plate to our press with a special aluminum base that we use on our press.
In the industry, there’s something called type high. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that term before, but it’s an old term meaning the height that lead type were from the base of the press. And so what happens is we use this aluminum base. We stick the plate on, and that makes a perfect type high base for us to print the cards on. So once we have that, we make a plate for every color that’s used on a card. So like your cards that you got are just one color, so we just have one plate, but if they had two or three colors, we’d have to make a separate plate for every one of those colors. So if anybody’s ever done screen-printing, they know of kind of that process. You have to make a separate screen for each one of the colors that you’re doing.
And then we used really nice 100% cotton, really toothy, textured cotton paper. And so we cut the paper to size and then we hand-feed those through the press. So if somebody orders 500 cards, we’re physically hand-feeding those 500 times through the press. If they have three colors, we’re physically touching those cards 1,500 times. So it’s a very time-consuming process, which is one of the reasons why it’s expensive compared to conventional printing methods.
So yeah, that’s the basic process that a card goes through.
Joe: Wow. That’s wild. And I’ve got to say, yes, it is time-consuming and it is a little bit more expensive, but in my opinion it is totally worth it. I’ve gotten so many compliments on my cards that I got from you guys, ’cause I had a double, I had it pressed on the front and the back the first batch through. So I got comments on the thickness and how nice it looked. In the meantime, between the time I placed my second order and the time I should receive them, which will be in probably a couple of weeks, I got cards from moo.com that I designed, so I controlled the font and everything like that, and they just, they look like what I paid for. And that’s not a knock against MOO or anybody who gets their cards from MOO, but after having these beautifully letter-pressed cards, it’s kind of hard to go back to more conventional kind of looking cards.
Evan: Yeah. It’s funny, because I end up … when I talk to folks about what I do, you come across people, “What do you do for a profession?” And then I start telling them about letterpress printing and the cards I make, and maybe I’ll give them one of my cards, and then they make a comment, something like, “Oh, I need to get cards from you.” And I ask them what they do, and they say, “I’m a real estate agent.” And I ask them how many cards they give out, and they’re like, “Oh, I set a batch of 500 on my desk and I give out 50 of them a day.” I usually end up talking that person out of ordering cards from me, mainly because that’s sort of not the use case. It can be, I guess, but that’s not really … it’s not cost-effective. It would get pretty expensive if you’re giving out 50 cards a day.
So I usually end up talking them out of it, or I talk them into ordering a very small amount of cards from me, maybe 100 cards, and then supplementing their existing maybe MOO cards, like you were saying, and you feel more free to give out those MOO cards. You feel more free to maybe waste some, put them on a desk.
Joe: Totally.
Evan: And then you can save a really nice batch of your 100 letterpress cards for maybe some special interactions that you’re having, maybe a special meeting. I think that’s a really good use case. Even Vistaprint, sometimes I encourage people, “Why don’t you go but 5,000 cards on Vistaprint. It’s not a big deal. It’s a tool, a business card is a tool, and I try not to get too sort of uppity on letterpress printing, but I think it serves a specific use case, if that makes sense.
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Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, to equate that to if somebody comes to me and they say they need a website and it’s just a standard kind of brochure site and they don’t have a huge budget, I’m like, yeah, go to Squarespace or Wix or whatever.
Evan: Exactly, exactly.
Joe: I’m primarily a WordPress developer. I’m not going to tell you that you need a $5,000 WordPress custom website if you don’t. So it makes perfect sense. There’s kind of a place for each type of these things, but man, it’s … I’ve got to say, I guess I can’t say everybody, but most people who have gotten my card has commented on it in some way. I think it does create a memorable experience. So I’ll give one out at conferences where people are meeting a million people, but mine will be the card that stands out.
Evan: Exactly. Yeah, they’re kind of like little pieces of art, which I like to describe them as. And people feel bad almost if they … I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen, but I hear from customers a lot where you’ll give a card out and the person will actually want to give it back, because they, like, “Don’t waste this on me.” But it’s just a funny thing that happens. But yeah, when people receive them, they seem to want to kind of treasure them or keep them, which is really cool to hear. And I totally get it.
Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, so actually, on your site you do have a reference to the movie I’m about to reference. Everybody’s like, “Oh, man, this is like an American Psycho card,” right?
Evan: Exactly. Oh, man, that’s funny, because the longest time I held off making an American Psycho Paul Allen card. If you’re in the letterpress printing, it’s so worn out. You hear it so much. To somebody who’s not, it’s like, “I’m going to make this comment under your Instagram photo about the American Psycho card.” It’s just funny, because if you’re in my shoes, you’ve heard it a million times. And so I’ve held off making one of those cards, but I finally did, and it’s been one of the biggest hits on Hoban Cards is that Paul Allen card, which actually I redesigned because I didn’t like the original card. So I took the same format of it and used a different font and kind of did my own spin on it.
Joe: Man, that’s awesome. 40% of the people I give the cards to are like, “Man, this is like …” I’m like, “Yes.” Cool, very cool.
So it looks like kind of looking at the cards that you have on your site, you have all different types of layouts, fonts. You have a really thin font, I see?
Evan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: And you mentioned that you do kind of custom stuff, too?
Evan: Sure.
Joe: Are there limitations to letterpress or are there things that are maybe extremely hard to do? If somebody wanted to get a letterpress business card, what would you recommend?
Evan: Yeah, there definitely are limitations, more than any other type of printing, actually, especially modern printing. One of the limitations is that letterpress printing, unless you really have some different type of equipment and techniques, it’s hard to spread a lot of ink over a large amount of surface. So a lot of people come to me and say, “Hey, can I have one entire side of my card black and then the other side white?” And that can be done with certain letterpresses, but letterpress printing was originally meant to print type. It wasn’t meant to print graphics, necessarily. It can print little wing bats and things like that in the early days, but it was mainly meant to print type. And so that’s kind of what I’ve chosen to do.
There’s a lot of letterpress printers out there that you can find, you can go to their websites and they just have amazingly intricate work. And it’s amazing and I love it, but that’s kind of not what I’ve chosen to do. I’ve kind of chosen to keep to the typographic nature of letterpress printing.
So yeah, spreading ink over a large surface is a limitation. Obviously you can’t reprint solid colors one at a time, so you can’t do a lot of gradients, and so you obviously can’t do photos. So it lends itself just intrinsically to minimalism, I think. And so I want to really take hold of that.
And something designer that I’ve always loved to do, and especially as a web designer, is designing within your limitations, right?
Joe: Yeah.
Evan: When you’re a web designer, you have … more so in the old days when you had very specific browser widths and heights, you had a very specific thing you had to design within. And so I’ve embraced that with what I do with making these calling cards. You have a very limited canvass you’re working on, but I love it. I love the challenge of trying to make it as clean and minimal as I can, but not boring. Does that make sense?
Joe: Yeah, definitely.
Evan: So yeah, I think I’ve kind of answered your question. I kind of like the limitations and I kind of embrace them.
Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And the thing that made me think of that was my good friend, Brian Richards, from WPSessions, also cards made up by you guys. And it’s funny that you mentioned specifically the solid color, because I think, if I recall correctly, he wanted that done, so he had I guess it was maybe a teal, closer to green, with his logo on there. But I definitely bounced ideas off of him for the second round, because my logo has two colors in it, and then if I did black, that would be a third color, and so you’re able to simplify. Again, I’m very excited to see my cards.
Evan: Cool. Right on.
Joe: That’s fantastic. So we’re coming up on time somehow. But there are a couple of more questions I did want to ask. Maybe these can be more rapid-fire questions. And the first is, how did you come up with pricing for this sort of stuff? Is it based on design, complexity, demand? It’s kind of easy to slap any old price on software as long as people are willing to pay that, because you don’t have the … You have to factor in support and things like that, but you don’t necessarily have to factor in materials, for example.
Evan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s a lot more overhead and things to consider than when you’re just making software for people, for sure. So you have the type of paper you’re using, the thickness of the paper. I’ve mentioned the number of colors. Obviously the quantity of cards. The number of colors dictates how long they’re going to take to print, and obviously a quantity will increase the length. And so over time, what I’ve done is I’ve created a big spreadsheet that me and my employees can refer to, to price cards. Yeah, and so it all comes in, and it’s just something we’ve worked out over time. I think that initial website I was talking to you, when I had six templates, I just kind of guessed at it, and then we’ve kind of tweaked the prices from there. So yeah, that’s kind of how we’ve done it.
Joe: Cool, very cool. As a quick aside, since you keep mentioning the website, and this is mostly a WordPress audience I think I know the answer to this, but what are you using to power your website?
Evan: I’m so glad you asked. I’ve listened to several of your podcast and I know you’re pretty WordPress centric, and I wanted to hear what your reaction was when I tell you my site is Drupal.
Joe: Wow, awes- Well, so I was investigating before, and that’s what I thought. I mean, it’s a beautiful website.
Evan: Thank you.
Joe: And Drupal is maybe the second largest competitor to WordPress. Was there a reason that you decided to go with Drupal over anything else? I won’t specifically say WordPress, but you have an online shop, so maybe Shopify or something like that?
Evan: Yeah. Actually, I tried out a bunch, and before I had a CMS to manage my store, it was actually just a very static website that I built, like I said, with sort of PayPal buttons and stuff like that. That worked out. It just didn’t scale to the demand, obviously, and I wanted something a little bit more complex. And so I did a bunch of … I tried WordPress. The reason why I went with Drupal … I think WordPress aesthetically as far as the code goes was a little bit more down my alley, how they managed themes. I’m a designer. I like to get into theme code and make my own themes and something like that. WordPress was a little more clean to me, but the reason why I chose Drupal was because of a feature called views. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Drupal, but there’s a module, a very popular Drupal module called views that lets you basically build your own pages out of any data that’s in the shipbuilder. So you can easily just grab anything you want and create these very complex views.
Because I wasn’t too keen on actually getting in and building my own modules for Drupal and doing that stuff but I still wanted to create, have my hands completely on not only the layout but the data, I ended up choosing Drupal. And I had to do a lot of … not a lot, but a couple months of YouTube videos training myself to use Drupal and things like that. And right now I’m super stoked on Drupal. There’s a lot of things that’s terrible about it, but I actually love the fact that I can spin up a new page and work with the data how I want. It’s just how my mind works, you know?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely.
Evan: And of course, there’s just endless amount of modules, and the community’s huge. And there’s help and Drupal developers, if you need to hire them, all over the place.
Joe: Nice, very nice. And what you say makes perfect sense. I think maybe the biggest pitfall of WordPress for me is how they handle data. Everything is just a post and it goes into the post table. That could be handled a lot better, I think. But there’s a lot of technical debt now associated with that particular database architecture. I mean, I haven’t really touched Drupal, but what you said there just kind of makes me want to open it up and see what’s going on there.
Evan: Yeah. I think if you’re a designer and you’ve done a lot of front-end design but you also understand how a database works, Drupal’s an amazing tool for you to get in and to be your own developer. What I call Drupal is you have to be a configuration developer. I mean, there’s some configuration of WordPress, but it’s just like everything you’re doing is on user interface configuring things, which feels kind of messy and dirty, but it works out in the end.
Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. Cool. So we talked about creating letterpress stuff and how that worked. We talked about how you acquired your letterpress machine and pricing and your website now. So I guess I’ll end on the two questions I always end with, which one, do you have any plans for the future, and two, do you have any trade secrets for us?
Evan: Yeah. Plans for the future, I am trying to understand marketing a little bit better with my business. I’m really trying to figure out clever ways to market Hoban Cards, because I think a lot of people like the product and I’m kind of adverse to using slimy marketing techniques and stuff like that, and so yeah, plans for the future is just growing it. And as much as I love actually doing the letterpress printing, I love kind of taking this tiny little business and seeing what I can do with it.
So just expanding the site, making more designs available. I think I’m going to expand my stationery offerings, ’cause right now I have calling cards. We also do sort of stationery and stationery sets, where you have a matching calling card. And I might try to expand, too, writing stationery. Maybe get ahold of some of The Pen Addict guys and figure out what papers are good to use of that.
Joe: Oh, man.
Evan: Yeah. So that’d be a lot of fun.
Joe: Awesome. Well, if you need somebody to test anything that you’re making, you let me know, ’cause I am … I don’t know if a lot of people know this about me ’cause I’m so embedded in the tech world, but I’m a huge stationery nerd.
Evan: Awesome.
Joe: I have tons of fountain pens and things like that. I very much love the analog world as much as the tech world. But sorry to-
Evan: Yeah. We should team up and do a little testing. I’d love to create some cool, not so much notebooks, but little personalized pieces of writing stationery, just like old-school writing stationery. So that’d be a lot of fun.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Cool, very cool.
Evan: Yeah. So as far as a trade secret, there’s many technical trade secrets I could share as far as letterpress printing goes, but I don’t think I could explain them well, and they probably wouldn’t be applicable to your audience.
But I think more generally a trade secret would be to I think try to be clever with … like I was talking about how I originally sent that email to Kevin Rose. And when I emailed out all the print shops in my area asking for … just try to be clever with how you’re getting into your business and what your passion is. Try to do things a little bit differently than everybody else around you is doing them. And I think just to be honest. Don’t try to make any shortcuts. Be honest with your marketing and how you present yourself.
As far as marketing goes, I’m just kind of getting into the looking more into marketing, and there’s this temptation I think to subscribe to all the SEO Newsletters you can and sort of try to hack the system as much as you can. And I think the more that you’re just doing what you love, that you’re honest, you’re putting out good content, you’re just going to rise to the top organically. And then just, yeah, find a niche you love, and do it.
Joe: Awesome. I love that. That sounds great. I try to do the same thing. I don’t really like the … you know there’s like the expiring sale and stuff like that that you see on … like the perpetual sale on websites all the time and other kind of not lying, but kind of disingenuous. And so I like the be honest, be clever sort of takeaway.
Evan: Yeah, cool.
Joe: Yeah. So thanks so much for joining me today, Evan. Where can people find you?
Evan: Yeah. People can follow me personally on Twitter, if you want, at Evan Calkins. And then you can check out my … My calling card website is hobancards.com, so it’s H-O-B-A-N, card.com. I’m sure you’ll link it up. And then my custom stuff is hobanpress.com. So I kind of have two areas of the business where I’m doing custom stuff, so if you want your logo and maybe you have your own design that you want printed, you can hit me up there.
Joe: Awesome. Yes, and I will definitely link all of those in the show notes.
And dear listeners, I’m giving you a call to action. I mentioned one pop culture reference on the calling cards page. I just noticed at least another one, so you should head over there and see how many pop culture references you can find.
Evan: Pretty much all the cards have a pop culture reference. So if you’re into TV shows, then go check it out.
Joe: Thanks again to Evan for joining me today! It was incredibly interesting to hear about how he got his equipment and his start. Letterpress is a tricky business and he does it really well! Be sure to check out his work at hobancards.com.
And Thanks again to our sponsors – make sure to check out Liquid Web for managed WordPress hosting. I use them on all of my important sites – they are that good! They are at buildpodcast.net/liquid. They’ll give you 50% off your first 2 months just for being a listener! If you want to save your clients (or yourself) money through recovering abandoned carts, check out jilt. They are over at buildpodcast.net/jilt. Finally, be sure to check out WordSesh. An incredibly affordable, 12 hour online conference with some of the biggest thought leaders in WordPress. get your tickets at buildpodcast.net/wordsesh.
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And until next week, get out there and build something.
Nicole Kohler is a Growth Marketer at Automattic; most of her job revolves around building and publishing content for her team and her main product, Jetpack. So in this episode, I talk to Nicole about Content Strategy. This is something I struggle with, and usually just publish when I think of stuff. Nicole provides us with some great advice from her time at Automattic, working with both the Jetpack and the WooCommerce teams!
Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Built It! Continuing our series on How You Build a Business, today I get to talk to Nicole Kohler about Content Strategy. This is something I struggle with, and usually just publish when I think of stuff. Nicole provides us with some great advice from her time at Automattic, working with both the Jetpack and the WooCommerce teams! We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsors…
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And now…on with the show!
Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built it, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Continuing with a little theme that we have for building different building strategies, today I am talking to Nicole Collier, who is a growth marketer at Automatic about building a content strategy. I’m very excited about this. Nicole, how are you today?
Nicole: I’m great. How are you?
Joe: I am fantastic. So I’ve got to say that I’ve always … Perhaps this is putting the cart before the horse. I’ve always taken a field of dreams approach to marketing. Whereas, I build something and I assume that people will come because it is good. But I’ve learned over the last year so that that’s not the right approach and I think that your experience doing content marketing for Automatic could probably help both me and the listeners improve their marketing strategy.
So first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Nicole: Yeah. Sure. So I’ve been with Automatic for about two and a half years now. I actually joined with the WooCommerce Team. I joined six weeks before the Automatic acquisition so I had really good timing. I joined to work on content strategy, specifically as a writer initially. So I was working on all of our blog posts and then over time I started working on more of our strategy. I started working on our email strategy, general marketing, copyrighting, etc. etc. Six months ago, I actually changed teams, so I am now working on Jetpack. As a growth marketer, I am responsible for our content strategy, our overall brand messages like how we communicate about our features, our new features, what we’re releasing, and then sort of the copyrighting within the plug in itself, the copyrighting on our website, etc. etc.
So content is a big part of what I do. It’s a big, I would say, obsession of mine. If you see me speaking at a Word Camp, it’s probably related to content in some capacity. Either like how to do better content with Jetpack or content for your WordPress site, something like that.
So that’s a bit about me, professionally. Personally, I love dogs. I’m obsessed with Pokemon and I’m on Twitter a lot.
Joe: Nice. Very nice. Who’s your favorite Pokemon?
Nicole: Raichu. I have a Raichu tattoo. So folks who see me in person, don’t hesitate to ask.
Joe: That is fantastic. One of the original 150. I don’t know. I think I maybe … I feel like I’m a little bit older than you, but I know that I was there for the original 150 and I was like, “Newfangled Pokemon, whatever.”
But that’s awesome. So something you said there is that you focus on the email marketing and blog posts, but you also focus on copy on the website and within the plug in. Can we just touch on that real quick because that’s really important, right?
Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s something I didn’t do a lot of with Woo. Now that I’m in Jetpack, I’m learning how important those little touch points are and how much of an impact just like one little line of copy can make. A little nudge to upgrade your plan. If we word that, I don’t want to say incorrectly, but if we word it a certain way versus a different way, it can have a huge impact on conversions on whether or not people trust us. Getting to work on that is really exciting.
Joe: I always feel like … I’m most a developer by trade or at least I build things. Whether it’s my online courses or a plug in or something like that. Copy is always an after thought for me. I’m pretty keen on the error messages. That’s been a crusade of mine to give users good error messages, but the nudges for upgrades or even like the way that you word directions or what a feature does can, like you said, have a really big impact on conversion. Because if you’re not communicating that, if you’re not speaking your user’s language, then there’s going to be a disconnect.
Nicole: Oh, yeah. It’s something that I’m trying to get more involved with. Every time that we are about to have a release or about to add a new feature to Jetpack, I’m trying to get in there and take a look at the copy. As you said, make sure that we are communicating something clearly. So if there is an error, are we telling people what to do next? Are we telling them what’s causing the error? Big error messages are horrible. So what causes error? It’s not your fault. Maybe it’s like a temporary thing on the host side or maybe it’s something wrong with the plug in and you need context about … Contact us, excuse me, about it. So clarity is definitely something I’m trying to work on.
Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. Now, so again, I’m just going to talk about my experience, which is I don’t really know what’s the best way for me to figure out if my copy is connecting, right? I can try different things. I can say, “Okay. I had a bunch of sales after I made this update, but was it because of the update or was it because I was running a discount?” What’s the best way for me to kind of figure out and make sure I’m getting the right connections to the visitors to my website?
Nicole: There’s a couple of different things you can do. The first piece of advice I would give you is only test one thing at once. So if you are running a sale, like you just said, don’t go into that sale expecting to pull concrete results about the success of your copy out of the sale because people are more likely to be drawn to your site from the major discount or the buy one, get one free plan, whatever it is that you’re doing than your copy. So if you want to test new content or new copy, try to test that on its own.
As far as testing goes, there are a lot of tools out there that let you maybe test to versions of a page against another, build dedicated landing pages. You can do that in WordPress or you can do that with different tools. You can get heat map tools out there to see how far people are going down pages. Whether it’s an a version of a page versus a b version, or just your site in general. Then you can just try different versions of social messages. So if you have a tool like Buffer or you’re using Jetpack’s publicize feature, send out multiple tweets or multiple Facebook messages to the same piece of content and just use the built in social analytic tools, I guess I’m trying to say, to see which of those messages got the most people clicking.
So there’s a lot of different ways that you can test depending on what it is you’re trying to test. Whether it’s a social message or home page, blah, blah, blah. But definitely I would emphasize only test one thing at once. Because if you’re trying to test a home page and social messages and a sale and copyrighting in your plug in at the same time, you’re just not going to get a clear results from that.
Joe: Right. Right. Gotcha. Throw a bunch of darts at the board at the same time and you don’t know which is going to hit the best. So you mentioned that you had … I don’t know if you said this on the pre call now or the actual interview, but in case you didn’t mention it in the episode. You mentioned that you had moved over to the Jetpack team and you have more experience now kind of building that strategy, maybe not from scratch but you definitely have more of a hands on approach to that. Jetpack is a well established plug in. So what kind of research did you do to set out and map our your content strategy?
Nicole: Yeah. So a little bit of background, when I joined WooCommerce, I joined at the same time as Aviva Pinchas, who worked originally as our sort of brand strategist, marketing strategist. She had a big, a really, really big hand in creating the WooCommerce content strategy. When I switched to Jetpack, we didn’t have any content strategy. There was nothing. So it was just like we put up blog posts when we have a release and we think we have something to say. So it was just like, “Oh, boy.”
SO some of the research that I was doing wasn’t necessarily research but more of like the experience I had working on WooCommerce and what I learned from Aviva and what she had done. So that played a really big part in it. Knowing what another Automatic product had done to be successful. So talking about your own features, kind of like owning the message about yourself. I took that over. But then I did a little bit more research on what are these other security plug ins? If you want to call Jetpack a security plug in, which it kind of is. What are these other security plug ins talking about? What topics are they talking about? What’s important? So kind of like researching their content. What kind of content are they producing? Are they doing long form, are they doing short form? What social channels are they on? Where are they successful? Kind of since it is a WordPress product, doing a little bit more research in the WordPress environment, I think is the word I’m looking for.
So what is the general sentiment right now about Jetpack on like WP Tavern, on other sites and digging into the comments, which is not my favorite thing, but making myself do that. What are people saying right now? What their gripes? What information are they not getting that we could be providing? In some cases, I was finding things that we were not talking about that kind of bled over into docs, like things we were missing in docs. So around the same time that I started, we had a guild forum of mostly happiness engineers to work on Jetpack docs. So it was kind of like a happy coincidence that we also have this happening at the same time. It’s not like just me working on all the written stuff. But it was a lot of research in the kind of like internet spear that Jetpack is in. So like security, products and WordPress products and seeing what people are saying about us right now.
Joe: Gotcha. So it’s interesting that you mention that you feel that Jetpack … Well, you say that Jetpack is a security plug in. It certainly offers that. It offers like the security aspect, the backups aspect. It also offers a whole lot of stuff. Did you find or do you find difficult crafting a clear message because of that? I’m not trying to nail you to the wall with this question. I’m just very curious about this.
Nicole: Oh, no. That was like my big fear coming in is that I would find it very difficult to come up with a concise statement, summarizing the importance of Jetpack. So the first few events I went to I was trying a couple different things.
The most common question we get at Word Camp, specifically is what even is Jetpack because I’ve heard of it. I have no idea what it does. So we’ve kind of summarized it as Jetpack is a WordPress toolkit that lets you design, grow and secure your site. That seems to be working really well. People are just like, “Oh, okay. So how does it do that?” Then we can go on and talk about the features that do all that or the features that they’re most interested in. So if someone says, “Okay. Well, I already have a security suite I like. How does it help me design my site?” Or, “Oh, I don’t have any security tools right now. I just got started. Tell me more.” Then we can talk about backups. We can talk about brute force protection.
So that has been working pretty well. I think that tag line is somewhere on the site now. So yeah. You didn’t catch me off guard with that at all. It’s something I’ve been working on actually.
Joe: Nice. That makes a ton of sense. It’s very concise and then, like we said earlier, you’re speaking the user’s language because now they can say, “Oh okay. How do I do that?” Whereas just saying like, “We’ve got the publicize module.” Like, “Okay, what does that mean? What’s a module?”
Nicole: Yeah. We’re trying to avoid using those words. I’ve heard people at camps go like, “Oh, it takes the features from WordPress.com and puts them in a plug in.” It’s like if someone just viewed WordPress and they’ve used WordPress.com, they’re going to be like, “Okay. What are those features?” Like you said, “What is a module?” In the past, even I’ve been at camps and been like, “Oh, Jetpack has a bunch of cool features and they make your site awesome.” It’s the worst description ever. I think that’s what we’re trying to get away from, especially in our content is just talking about Jetpack as a bunch of features. It’s so much more than that. It can be custom tailored to your site and to your business and your specific needs so that’s what we’re trying to get across.
Joe: Absolutely. That’s awesome. Then the other follow up question I kind of had was about the .com/.org site. You have Jetpack, you connect it to .com. Do you find that that’s … First of all, I should say it’s a very easy process, right?
Jetpack makes it very easy to do all that. Do you find that that has to be part of your messaging or is that just … I guess what I’m trying to say is do you find enough confusion around that that it should be part of your messaging? Or is it just like, “Well, to make it work you do this one, two, three, and you’re done.”
Nicole: So we’ve gone back and forth on this. There’s like two sides to this, right? We don’t want to slip this phrase about you need a WordPress.com account in there because people were going to be like, “Wait, what? Why do I need this?” That brings up this whole new conversation. At the same time, we don’t want to be dishonest about the need for a separate account because then if someone’s setting it up and they assume it’s one click and you’re done, they might be thrown off and too many logins is definitely a problem that we’re all faced with. So the way that I am trying to talk about it now, and again, it something else I’m sort of testing out is if it comes up, I’ve had someone just directly ask me recently at a local meet up group, “Why do I need the .com account?” Some of our features use the .com servers for hosting to speed things up. You just need to connect to .com to utilize those features. If you don’t connect, you can’t utilize those features. That seems to help.
Being up front about why you need that second account, showing them the connection flow if they’re very curious, that it is one click, and then having more detailed documentation about here’s how the process works, here’s how you can disconnect, here’s how you can troubleshoot the connection, which is something, again, that our quill guild has been super, super great about. They are fantastic people working on these docs.
So it’s been a little tricky. Like I said, I’ve kind of gone back and forth about being too honest or not talking about it a lot, but I think we’re figuring it out.
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Joe: That’s fantastic. It sounds like it really comes down to … I mean, you’re out, right? Your boots on the ground here. You’re talking to users. You’re talking to user, right? That’s maybe some of the best research that you could do to see what their pain points are.
Nicole: Yeah.
Joe: So we’re about halfway, a little more than halfway, and I haven’t asked the title question yet. So if I want to build a content strategy myself or let’s talk about Jetpack, how do you build it? We talked a little bit about research and talking to users, but what does that look like? Do I blog first? Where do I even start?
Nicole: Ah. I think something I was actually thinking about yesterday, coming into this recording, one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about content marketing is that you have to talk about topics like other than yourself. So you have to start with this sort of top-of-funnely content that you just sort of link to your brand, right? So for Jetpack that might look like, “Here’s why security is important for your site,” or, “Here’s why you should have professional WordPress themes,” or, “Here’s why WordPress is the best platform.” Then just at the very end have like one call to action for Jetpack. I think that the assumption is that you can’t directly talk about your brand to have successful content. I’ve seen that for so many companies that start content marketing. They avoid talking about themselves until the very end of their content. They have this little call to action saying like, “Oh, by the way, we do this.” That may get them a lot of interest from search engines, like that topi-funnel content might be super popular, but it doesn’t put someone in the right mindset to convert at the end in most cases.
So something I learned for WooCommerce and that I’ve carried over to Jetpack is to sort of … I think I said this phrase earlier, to sort of own the conversation about your brand. So content marketing for us has always looked like we’re going to talk about Jetpack. We’re going to be the experts on Jetpack because we are the experts on Jetpack. So we’re going to talk about, “Here’s how you successfully use our product. Here’s why you should use our product. Here’s some tips for making it easier or taking your site to the next level,” and then like maybe have some content that gets people in from search engines, that topi-funnel type stuff. So like, “Yeah, here’s why WordPress security is important.” But then also give them related reading that is further down the funnel. Like, “By the way, yeah, we do have this thing and here’s how you can find out some more about it,” rather than just trying to sell them when they’re not ready for that.
Joe: Gotcha. Which you can do with Jetpack.
Nicole: Oh yeah. Absolutely. But like I said, it’s a huge misconception that you can’t … A, that you can’t talk directly about yourself and sell yourself in your content. B, that you have to start with this unrelated content. I think if people are … First of all, people are coming to your site to learn about you and read about you. If you’re not serving the people that are already on your site, that’s a big miss. Secondly, I think if you are only producing content that’s going to get people from search engines and then not giving them anything else to read and just putting calls to action to buy at the end of that, it’s like a super short funnel that just ends in the brick wall or something.
I was thinking about that yesterday. I wanted to bring that up. I think it’s really important to think about how you own your own messaging.
Joe: Man, that’s going to be my big takeaway now, right? I mean, my blog is mostly tutorial stuff and yeah, I can get away with that a little bit because I’m teaching people and that’s what my product is, right? It’s my online courses. But I’m not telling people why they should learn from me. So they’re not getting that. What you said made me think of this anecdote. This actually happened at my wife and me. We were meeting up with a friend of my wife. She had worked the night shift, but because of scheduling, she just decided we would meet him after work.
So we go to grab brunch at this place and he walks in with a notepad. He framed the conversation as, “Hey, I would love to catch up with you guys. You were just recently married. I’d love to catch up.” He walks in with a notepad. He said his friend might be joining us. He sits down and I said, “Is this a sales conversation? Are you going to sell us on what financial planning, that’s what you do?” “Oh, well, it doesn’t have to be like that.” I’m like, “We’re not interested.” That made the whole rest of the brunch like awkward because he’s like, “Let me just text my buddy and tell him not to come.” I was like, “Why would you …” The old bait and switch after my wife just worked 12 hours? I’m like, “C’mon, man.”
It’s an extreme example of what you said, but it’s true. I wasn’t in a position where I wanted to be sold to. It was a Sunday morning. I just wanted to have brunch. He’s like ready to come at me with financial planning, which we didn’t even need.
Nicole: Yeah. No, it’s super true though. If you’re in a position, if you’re reading something online about how to make a great brunch and you get to the end and it’s just like, “Buy a skillet.” You’re like, “It’s not why I came here.”
Joe: I have a skillet. I want to make a good omelet or whatever.
Nicole: But if you end that piece of content with, “By the way, did you know that you can make really great brunches in a skillet? Read some more about that.” That kind of leads you further down, and that’s kind of what I’m talking about. Not ending your content in a brick wall. I’ve never used that phrase before, but I’m going to use that from now on. That’s good.
Joe: I love that. It’s absolutely true. On the same token, you walk into a car dealership knowing you’re going to be sold to, right? So you’re mentally prepared for that.
So you mentioned that you do a lot of testing, right? So I like to ask has the product gone through any transformations? That’s the canned, scripty question that I ask, but in this case, I want to ask were there things that you started off with in your content strategy, which I guess actually, let me back up. Is there like a possible way to do a list, like one through five, these are the things that we’re doing for our content strategy, or is that too boxed in? If I want to start today, do I come up with topics and then blog first? Do I phone, email list, right? What’s that look like? Yeah.
Nicole: Oh, that’s a good question. So number one, start writing. You can’t get any results. you can iterate on anything. you can’t test until you actually have content to test against, until you have content to like pool email subscribers in against. You actually have to start producing something. Kind of along those same lines, I taught a writing class the last two years at the Automatic grand meet up, which is our meet up where every … Since we’re all distributed, everyone meets up in person. The very first lesson that I taught in that class was kind of like accept your mediocrity. Not that you might be a mediocre writer, but if you’re new to content strategy or you’re new to content marketing or if you’re business is brand new, accept that your first few posts might suck. You’re not going to get any comments or people might hate them. But you have to do something. You have to put something out there. So yeah, number one, start writing.
Number two, I do think building an email list of some kind is really important because you can get those people coming back to your content, you can send them content in the future, you can send them maybe sale’s pitches or something. But start doing it. Even if you’re not actively using it. Passively start building that email list. Jetpack has a subscriber option that you can let people just sign up on this sidebar or widgetized area. You can use that if you’re not ready to pay for Mail Temp or use like Mail Poet or another service.
Number three, start researching. Start looking at your competitors, start looking at other people in your spear. Whether that’s like other plug ins, whether that’s other WordPress companies, whether it’s other business, whatever it may be. See what kinds of content they’re doing. Look at their comments, look at their shares, look at their social media profiles. Obviously don’t copy them, but see what’s resonating with their audience because you’re probably going to have very similar results. Take note of what kinds of content they’re doing. If they’re doing customer stories, if they’re highlighting feedback, if they’re highlighting their successes, how well are those types of things going over? If they’re highlighting their successes and they’re not going over very well, maybe don’t talk about yourself as much. Maybe talk about your customers more. Kind of depends on the industry.
Four, start testing content. This can be really vague, right? This might mean just publishing a bunch of stuff and looking at Google analytics and seeing well, this type of post got more time on page versus this type of post. This type of post got 28 comments and this type of post got zero comments. Maybe testing is not the right word, but actively start watching and picking out the successes versus the failures or the sort of in between stuff.
Then I would say number five, I wouldn’t actually do this fifth, somewhere in the middle. Try to set up like a content calendar. Try to hold yourself to a standard of publishing even if it’s only once every two weeks, once a month. Get your topics planned out in advance. Know what you’re going to publish when. Know who’s going to be working on it. Know who’s going to be responsible for every single bit of the stuff. Maybe this isn’t the first thing that you would do or the third thing or even the fifth thing, but do it at some point so you can be responsible so that someone can be responsible and that you are definitely publishing a flow of content and that something is nagging you, right? So if you miss a deadline. If I miss something on CoSchedule, I get an email. I get something that’s like, “Hey, you didn’t do this,” even if it’s just like I’m a day late on getting something to our editorial team, right? It helps. It does. So yeah, those are my five things.
Joe: Awesome. I love that. I’m going to link in the show notes to the interview that we did with Nate Ellering from CoSchedule to learn about CoSchedule because it’s a very nice content scheduling tool. I mean, another thing about content scheduling is that if you are building things like … It allows you to kind of create the story you want to create, right? You’re not saying, “Oh, did I write about this already? Should I write it? Do I need to follow up?” You can kind of put that in the schedule, see what you’ve done, see what you then need to do. So I love that. So now back to the transformations part, right? Is there anything that you set out, maybe you like scheduled a piece of content that you realized, “Oh, well, this isn’t really working for looking at our analytics. This is no longer what I want to do.” How do you kind of change things up in the middle of your content strategy?
Nicole: Yeah. Just talking about something that we had at Woo. So we did a lot of these customer stories where we would spend … I mean, these were the most time intensive posts that we did, right? So we would spend several hours interviewing someone who was using WooCommerce. Some of them I think we did on site, some of them we did on Skype, some of them we did on Zune or Google Hangouts or something with multiple people versus one person. So we would interview people, find out how they were using WooCommerce, learning about their business, learn about their aspirations, and then write up these really, really long, involved posts anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words. I mean, really huge meaty pieces of content. They did not seem to be resonating with our readers, even though we felt like they should be the most successful pieces on our blog.
This was about a year and a half ago, I remember posting something internally like, “Look, our customer stories, they’re not failing, but they’re not doing what we think they should be doing. Why is that? What’s going on?” So that was definitely one of those stop, evaluate everything things and figure out what can we do to make these pieces of content successful or what can we test to make these pieces of content successful? Because we felt like they were so important, right? Like showing other people how they can use WooCommerce, highlighting people’s successes with our product, and ultimately, we just came up with a list of five things we wanted to test over the next few posts. So making them shorter, having less storytelling, having more quotes from the business owners, focusing more on WooCommerce and less on the business, focusing on the business and less on WooCommerce.
I think that’s kind of the key is if you find something that’s not performing the way you think it should, don’t give up right away. Just look at it and kind of think of what could I change in the next version of this that might make it more successful? But then also look at how are you handling distribution? Are you actually promoting that content a lot? Are you putting paid promotion behind it? Could you put paid promotion behind it? Try to evaluate all the potential touch points, right? Email, social, paid ads, blah blah blah. Evaluate everything. Be very critical.
Joe: Awesome. Yeah. Again, that makes a lot of sense because the follow up question that I thought while you were saying this was am I going to have immediate success with … Let’s say I publish this blog post that I think it going to be amazing. I actually did very recently called like What HIPPA Means to Web Designers. I was like, “This is going to get like a million shares.” It didn’t. Does that mean that I did something wrong? Does it mean that it never will? What’s evergreen content, that’s a thing that I’ve heard about. What does that mean in the scheme of content marketing? Am I playing the long game here or are there ways to play the short game?
Nicole: Content marketing is absolutely a long game. Man, one of my annoyances is that I worked at an SEO Agency for a little while, and one of the big things that the team I worked on did was try to create content that would go viral. We were successful several times, but that viral piece of content was viral for a week, right? Then after that, no one cared about us anymore. So like, yes, you absolutely can create viral content and your content marketing can be super, super popular for a short amount of time, but it doesn’t do anything for you. We didn’t even get clients from it that I’m aware of. I don’t want to bash what they were doing at all because they were super, super good at it. But what did they even do for you?
So yeah, it’s absolutely the long game. Just because your piece didn’t garner a lot of popularity right away doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, especially because content takes a long time to generate attention on search engines, which is really where a lot of content marketing is going to get people from. Something might get shared on Facebook on someone’s wall immediately and no one will see it, but then someone will get to it … An influencer will get to it three months later when they actually find it on Google, and then they’ll share it on Facebook. That’s when it has its big amount of success.
So I think you definitely have to realize that you’re playing a long game. Evergreen content also is definitely a thing. If you’re writing about a topic that isn’t happening in this specific moment, if your write … Like security for WordPress, for example, like something that we write about is always going to be a thing. So any content we create about that is going to be evergreen.
I hope that answers your question.
Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, going back to this HIPPA article, people aren’t going to be interesting in HIPPA until they come across it, right? Not all web designers need to know what HIPPA is. But if somebody gets a medical client and they’re like, “Oh, by the way, you have to be HIPPA compliant.” They’re going to be like, “What’s HIPPA compliant mean?” Like you said, it’s definitely a long game.
So we are coming up on time and I haven’t asked you my favorite question yet. But I do want to ask one more. It’s around plans for the future because you say it’s a long game, is it like a forever game? Am I just going to be like content marketing this thing for the rest of my life? When am I done? How do I know if I’m done? Things like that.
Nicole: So I don’t necessarily think it’s … I can talk. I promise. So I don’t necessarily think it’s a forever game. There are some people and some brands who will find that content marketing just like genuinely does not work for them. It could be because of their audience. It could be because of the products they’re selling. They’re a bunch of different reasons. They may work on it for a little while and just like get no comments, get no interaction, get no shares, get no leads from that content, but then find that they’re publishing videos like how to videos and getting a ton of engagement and a ton of sales leads off that. They may find that their social messages are getting them a ton of engagement and a ton of responses. They may find that direct mail or something is getting them a ton of leads. They may be like, “Okay. So I’m getting tons and tons of success elsewhere. These channels are highly successful. Content just isn’t going to do it for me.” I think that’s a, that speaks to the importance of multi-channel marketing and trying multiple things. But b, it also says that just for some people content marketing because of your audience or because of your products may not necessarily work and it’s okay in that situation to … YOu’re not giving up, right? You’re folding a non-successful, non-viable method of reaching customers.
You also can re approach it later, right? There are plenty of industries where customers were not looking online for products five years ago, but they might be doing that now. So maybe now’s the time to revisit content marketing or revisit social media. So no, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a long game, but it is something that you probably, potentially should try.
Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, just to drive home to point of you’re not giving up, right? I mean, you don’t want to keep … If I started a pager business in 2005 and was like, “It’s going to work one of these days.” I mean, I’d just be wasting time and money. I’d be like, what’s his name, Duffy from 30 Rock. That was the inspiration of that. So…do you have any trade secrets for us?
Nicole: Oh. I don’t know if I have any trade secrets. I think a lot of what I know and talk about is public knowledge. But I like the phrase, “Don’t read the comments.” But I like to take that one further, which is, “Don’t read the comments if you haven’t eaten lately because you’ll respond really badly.” One of my major responsibilities at Woo and not so much at Jetpack because we have a team that handles comments is like was to respond to comments, especially on our release posts. We would get hundreds of comments on these posts and some of them were not great. There were people trying to stir things up. Imagine WP Tavern just toned down a little bit. So that was the release posts comments.
My advice for dealing with comments and you could probably take this as a trade secret is to always put yourself in that person’s shoes. Imagine the worst possible day that person could be having and why they’d be motivated to make a comment like that. No matter how nasty it is, no matter how frustrated they may seem, no matter how illogical it may see. Because we did people commenting and being like, “I can’t login to my site.” It’s like this has nothing to do with the content of this post, but like image what drove them to that level of desperation to make that comment on that post.
So rather than being snippy and being like, “Go contact support,” I try to put myself in that person’s shoes and then leave. Again, it maybe not necessarily be trade secret. But I’ll always make sure that I wasn’t replying to comments on an empty stomach because then I wouldn’t be that helpful.
Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. My brother said I don’t get hangry. They say I get “hustrated,” right? I’m not like mean and mad, I’m just like, “UH. Everything’s annoying,” when I’m not in the mood. If you still need to … If you feel the need to write out a snarky response, open up NotePad or whatever and just type it out. I do that with Tweets. I must have drafts of like a bunch of like stupid responses in TweetBot because I type it out and then I’m like, “Is it worth it?” No. It’s not worth it.
Nicole: There’s only one time that I’ve posted a snarky response to a WooCommerce comment. I will own up to it. I posted it on Twitter. Someone asks why we didn’t warn them that we had a major update and I kid you not, the plug in update thing had a bar in red above the notification that said, WooCommerce, blah blah blah, is a major update. I mean, it was in red. Highlight in yellow. I took a screenshot of that comment and a screenshot of the thing and put it on Twitter. That is the one time I had a snarky response. I felt bad about ti later, but I was also like, “Come on. We did warn you.
Joe: Abstrusely. That’s exactly right.
Nicole: Yes. I feel horrible that your site broke and I’m very sorry about that. But don’t say what … It was right there. It was red.
Joe: We tried with everything we do.
Nicole: We tried.
Joe: Yep. So it does feel cathartic for like a minute. It’s a lot like Chinese food. It feels really good and then later you’re like why did I do that? I feel terrible.
Nicole: Oh yeah. Yep.
Joe: Awesome. That’s going to be the tagline for this – “Snarky Comments are like Chinese Food.”
Nicole: I love it.
Joe: Awesome. Nicole, thanks so much for your time today. I had a really great time. I learned a lot. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?
Nicole: So right now I am occasionally blogging on Jetpack.com/blog. You can keep up with my adventures and my word Camp talks at NicoleCKohler.com or follow me on Twitter @NicoleCKohler
Joe: All right. Easy enough. I will link all of those in the show notes too. Thanks again so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time.
Nicole: Yeah, thanks, Joe. I had a great time.
Outro: Thanks again to Nicole for joining me. I know after this interview I started to put my own strategy in place, and hopefully this has inspired you to do so as well!
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Next Week, we’ll talk to Jen Jamar about a Marketing Strategy for your business. This is another great conversation that I couldn’t enjoy more. Jen’s worked with some great clients and has some fantastic insight on how you can market yourself and your product. SO until next week, get out there and build something.
Continuing our series on How You Build a Business, today I get to talk to Sara Dunn about niching down. She’s been pretty public with her process, starting a YouTube channel to discuss her decision making. I loved chatting with her about this because it can be tough and scary to decide to limit your potential client pool, but I think Sara is doing it the right way.
Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Built It! Continuing our series on How You Build a Business, today I get to talk to Sara Dunn about niching down. She’s been pretty public with her process, starting a YouTube channel to discuss her decision making. I loved chatting with her about this because it can be tough and scary to decide to limit your potential client pool, but I think Sara is doing it the right way. We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsors…
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And now…on with the show!
Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It the podcast that asks how did you build that. Today my guest is Sara Dunn. Sara, how are you?
Sara: I’m doing great, Joe. How are you today?
Joe: I am fantastic. We are recording on Star Wars Z. I am wearing an R2D2 t-shirt, and in T minus two hours, I will be seeing The Last Jedi, so I couldn’t be more excited. This is like my last work thing before I knock off for the afternoon.
Sara: That’s perfect. Sounds like a perfect day.
Joe: Thank you very much. I am very excited about it, but we’re not talking about Star Wars today. We are talking about you and your business, and your recent decision to niche down. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you do, and how you came to this conclusion.
Sara: Sure. I will try to keep it to the shorter version. My name is Sara Dunn. I operate a micro agency, which is a remote group of four coworkers. I’m located here in South West Michigan, and I have coworkers throughout the country. I’ve been doing web design and development for clients for about five years now, and we generally have worked with a very wide variety of clients. Kind of the, if you have a checkbook and want to hire us, we are your agency, which I have discovered in the last couple years, is not a very powerful or particularly interesting position to be in, in business. It was about two years ago, actually, that I first started throwing around the idea of specializing. By that, I mean becoming more well known for something more specific rather than just we’ll make you a website.
I don’t know how deep you want me to get into it now, but I have been very actively pursuing this for about eight months, and creating content around the idea of a web agency that wants to specialize. Just recently, I have finally landed on something that feels good to me as a specialty for my business. It’s a really exciting time for me, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show and share a little bit more about where I am right now.
Joe: Yeah. Absolutely, and this is a great thing to talk about, I think, because I think a lot of freelancers probably fall into that same position. I certainly did when I was freelancing. If somebody said, “Hey, I need a website,” I’m like, “All right. Well, if you’re willing to pay how much I’m charging, I will make that website for you.” I carried that mentality over into the product space where I’m like, “Well, it seems like people want a course that does this, so I’ll make this course.” But this is a whole another show. That’s a terrible way to sell products, right? You don’t see Nike making like a printed pictures of whiteboards, right? They don’t specialize in whiteboards. This is, I think, a great thing to talk about. What did you decide to specialize in? You’ve made that public, I believe, right?
Sara: Yes, I have. If I could, I’d love to tell a little bit more of the story of how I arrived there. It was about eight months ago, that I think was really the height of my frustration with where I was in my agency. It wasn’t that we weren’t getting work, it was that we weren’t getting work that I really found fulfilling. I was occasionally losing prospects or projects that I really wanted to agencies that were more specialized and did a better job at conveying their value proposition, and how they were experts in a certain field. It was earlier this year that I said, “I have got to figure this out.” I knew that there were other freelancers and small agencies out there that felt the same way. I felt like there wasn’t a lot of content around the idea of niching down as a web developer.
I actually created a video, just me talking straight to camera, and I held on to it. I recorded it in mid March (2017), and I held on to it for almost a month, just kind of embarrassed that I had it. But it was my husband who really encouraged me to post it online, on YouTube, and start to share a little bit more actively about the process and the struggle of specializing and trying to find a certain area that we wanted to become an expert in. In April, I did. I actually posted it online. Shared it on Twitter, and started a blog that’s been about weekly where I do a video, and also write a blog post about where I am in my journey to specialize.
Here we are eight months later, and I have to be honest with you. I thought it would happens so much faster. Like, “Okay, I’m really focusing on this. I’m talking about it every single week. I’m totally going to figure this out in a week or two,” and it didn’t happen. Nothing that I came up with felt right. It didn’t feel good. I wanted to really have that moment where something just felt like, “Oh, I think that’s the right choice. Yes, this is a specialty of a kind of work or a kind of person that I want to work with week in and week out.” As much as I tried to analyze every piece of it, none of it came through analysis. Nothing really happened for about seven months. It was just me making videos every week, going, “This is what I’m thinking about, but I still haven’t figured it out, so sorry if you’re watching this.” Bless anybody who did watch those videos, because I didn’t get much of anywhere for a while until it was a couple months ago, I met someone at a conference who’s quickly become a good friend of mine.
She is a high end wedding and event planner based in Chicago. As soon as we met, she said, “Sara, I’ve got a question for you. Can I ask you about SEO?” I said, “Sure, that sounds great. What can I tell you?” She said, “I had my website redesigned a couple months ago, and while I used to rank right on the top of page one for Chicago wedding planner, I have fallen off the face of the earth. I am down to like page six or seven for this very important keyword, and my traffic is totally tanked because of it.” I said, “Let me look at your site. I want to know what’s happened,” and I got into it, and about five minutes of looking around, I realized that her web developer knew nothing about SEO. They had inaccurately represented themselves as someone who did, and they made so many basic mistakes. It had cost her significant leads in business. In a job that is her livelihood.
I was actually really offended by it. Because I felt like she had been so misled. I made a video about that and started helping her out. It was pretty quick, and pretty clear that I realized this was very interesting work for me, and I loved it, and I would do it for free all day long, and I wanted to do more of it. Just a couple weeks ago, I made it official, I put out a video that I am going to focus on SEO and SEO optimized websites for the wedding industry. Professionals who sell to brides and grooms like planners, florists, photographers, caterers, those types of businesses. Here I am finally.
Joe: That’s fantastic. I mean, the journey is super important, right? I always ask about research, and you can throw a dart at a wall and say, “Oh, I’m going to specialize in construction website,” which is what I did when I was … I was going to say a kid, I guess I basically was, but in my early 20’s, I was like, “I want to specialize. I want to niche down into construction sites.” I didn’t know anything about construction sites. It just seems like construction people have money, like that was the thing in my head.
Sara: Oh my gosh, I love that.
Joe: Right? But what’s super important when you choose to niche down, or niche down, I think there’s like, I always say it both ways, is you should have what’s called domain knowledge, right? Which is knowledge of the industry you’re specializing in. It seemed like working with this person in Chicago either helped you gain or helped you realize that you have that knowledge and that passion. Is that accurate?
Sara: Yeah, it is. Actually, I have found, and I was surprised by this, I was telling myself that I had to choose a specialty where I had a ton of experience, and a ton of that domain knowledge. That was actually slowing me down and holding me back, because I haven’t had a consistent pattern of past work within the same industry. When I looked at past clients, nothing really seems like the right choice, and that’s why I think I was so stuck for a while. I actually don’t have a ton of experience in the wedding industry but I know that there is such a need, and I know that my skills can make an immediate impact there, and they already have for a couple of people that I have helped out for free. That’s what I found as far as the amount of expertise required.
Joe: Awesome. Then, of course, as you do more, you’ll get more experience, more domain knowledge, which is the important thing about niching down, right? Because without specializing, you have four sites that are different, completely different, and you basically have to start from square one every time. But with specializing, you’re starting from square two or three, or depending on the client, right?
Sara: Yes.
Joe: Cool. Plus, like SEO is, I write search engine optimize HTML…I don’t know if I should say publicly. I think I do. But there’s a whole industry based around that. Rebeca Gil was my second guest on this show, and she talked about her course and how she built the whole course around SEO, because it’s so important, and doing it right versus doing it wrong has severe ramifications for the client.
Sara: Yes. I think Rebeca is a genius and she’s taught me pretty much everything I know over the past couple of years, so I am super indebted to her.
Joe: Awesome. Yeah, she is fantastic. I will link her episode in the show notes if you haven’t listened to it. I strongly recommend it because she’s fantastic. Now, as you’ve decided on your niche, you’ve helped a couple of people out already, now that you know exactly kind of you know who you want to market to, what kind of research are you doing for both getting those clients and the services you’re providing those clients?
…What kind of leg work are you doing to get people in that industry, and then help people in that industry.
Sara: Sure, yeah. What I want to find out first, and one of the first things I did when I thought about this is a possibility, is I wanted to find out who are people in this industry listening to when it comes to marketing, and SEO, and anything else that brings them business. The first research I did was into who were the thought leaders for wedding professionals. One of the things that indicated to me that this might be an interesting direction to go in is that I actually found it interesting to listen to who they’re listening to. I enjoyed content that is going around in the industry, and that again, makes me feel like these are people that I want to hang out with. That is the biggest research I’m doing, is finding out where my potential client are getting their information. That’s been really fun, and it’s been easy because I can just quickly talk to people I know within the industry and say, “Who are you listening to? How do you find out about this or that?” It’s been a lot of personal directory search, and just some Googling around.
Joe: Man, that is … Before you answer the second part of this question, that is fantastic advise. Never would have dawned on me. I am very much not a marketing person, or anything like that. I’m a developer, I take a very field of dreams approach to things, like if you build it, they will come. But finding out who your clients listen to is great, because then you can, I mean not parroting back with the thought leaders are saying, but you can build on top of that. They’re being told they should do this, I can help them do that, right?
Sara: Yes.
Joe: I think that’s my big takeaway from this episode, and we’re like half way through. As far as the second half of that question, what kind of research are you doing in order to help people within the wedding planning industry?
Sara: Yeah. I think my next step, and I don’t know if I’d call It research, but in order to do outreach and provide services, what I did was actually create a separate micro site all around this specialty. This was something that I debated a lot. I got some advice early on that when I specialized, I should just make a page about it on my existing agency website, because the site already has domain authority and some SEO value, and it’s been around for a while, and actually decided not to follow that advice. I love the idea of having an entirely separate domain, and a very small site that is 100% focused on this service and this vertical, so that when someone goes there who is the right client, all they see is information that’s pertinent to them. They really get that immediate feeling, “Wow, Sara is super specialized and knows exactly who I am and what I need.”
To me, this also is a slightly lower risk strategy. If this doesn’t work out, I’ve got this all on a separate site. I haven’t taken over my main agency site with this specialized information. I can just delete the thing and say, “Well, I tried. On to the next thing.” I don’t intend to do that but inside, this is a very risky decision, so I had to make some decisions for myself that lowered the perceived risk that I was feeling. That separate site does that for me. That has been my first step in pursuing this direction, is to have that separate marketing site.
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Joe: Got you. I mean, that makes sense, right? If I want to spin by bar into … If I had a bar, and I want to add a kitchen to it, I might just rent a kitchen space. I’m to going to put like a professional grade kitchen on my bar. What if nobody wants food at my bar. I mean, totally not the same thing because spinning up a website is easier than building a kitchen, but it’s the same idea. You’re not going to get rid of your entire agency site for this right off the bat, and correct me if I’m wrong here because you’re certainly the expert in this topic, but there are SEO benefits to having a domain, let’s say, one of the keywords you want to rank in it, right?
Sara: Yeah. Definitely. There is a definitely a benefit to having content that’s all focused around a certain topic area. The fact that I’m going to write about mostly SEO related topics on this site is going to help us build topical authority around SEO and around the wedding industry. It’s going to look highly specialized to Google, too, which is something that Google does like.
Joe: Awesome. Yeah, it’s like going to a department store for a suit versus going to a tailor for a suit, right? A tailor specializes in making suits. If you haven’t noticed, I’m big on analogies.
Sara: I love it.
Joe: Awesome. Research aside, I know that you mentioned that you blogged this whole journey. Did you talk to a lot of people, or do you have a core group of people that you consider your confidants, that you would bounce ideas off of?
Sara: Yeah. What was funny was when I first started thinking about specializing, before I even started the video series, I would ask anybody who would listen to me. Like, “Hey, oh, what do you think about specialized agencies? Have you ever tried to specialize your agency? Blah, blah, blah.” I’m sure I drove people crazy, which is one of the reasons that I was just like, “I’ll just make my own site around this, so I could leave people alone, and just share what I’m thinking.” I have definitely collaborated with a small group of friends that I found through the Genesis office hours community. The old slack group that Carrie Dils, and some friends that I’ve grown from there. There are a lot of people in the industry that I’ve bounced some ideas off of and who had really supported me in just being there and being like, “You got this, you’ll figure it out.”
Joe: Man, that’s fantastic. I want to phrase this the right way, because well here, I’ll tell another similar story. The wedding industry is like a billion dollar industry. Getting married, I got married in 2016, and I was astounded by just how much everything costs, or the fact that a part bus costs more if you say it’s for a wedding. I argued with the limousine company about that so hard, until somebody explained to me why. I just wanted to know, why are you charging me a premium? There’s a lot of money in it.
One of the things I thought when all of my friends were getting married, is I’ll build websites for people who are getting married. That is not a good niche to get into because people who are getting married don’t want to spend a few thousand dollars on a website, because they’re spending lots of thousand dollars on other things. Was that a consideration when you were deciding to niche down? Obviously you want to do something you love and you don’t just want to follow the money, but you have a business and employees to support so you want to make sure that the way you’re specializing, there is demand and money in that field, right?
Sara: Yes. Yeah. It has to be a concern. There, of course, are specialties you can get into where people would love for you to do services for them, but they don’t have any money to pay you. That is definitely part of the consideration. I thought about things like bakeries, and other businesses like that but I realized how many cupcakes someone would have to sell to make back the cost of my services. It was a lot. When I look at the wedding industry, however, if I am able to help a wedding professional to book one or two extra jobs, it’s likely that they have made a return on the investment that they’ve put into working with me. There is value there. I do want to caution though, I, like you, consider it specialties just because I thought there was money there. I actually did a very short stint doing Facebook ads for chiropractors, which was pretty successful in getting a lot of interest and getting people willing to hire me. But it was something that I wasn’t particularly interested in. I only chose to do it because I thought there was money there.
After working on a few of those projects, I said, “I just don’t enjoy this work and this isn’t something that I want to do day in and day out.” That was something that ultimately wasn’t successful as a permanent niche for my business. There has to be that balance of work you enjoy, and work that people are willing to pay you for.
Joe: Absolutely. Right, there probably is money and working with a chiropractor certainly isn’t a pain in the neck, but you have to … Sorry everyone. But you do have to love what you do. I love what you said about projecting value. How many cupcakes does a bakery have to sell for my services, versus there’s pretty immediate value to a wedding planner. If I get you one or two more clients, you’ve paid for me. It’s the same thing with offering a coaching program. You’re paying me $1,000 but that first job that you’re going to get is going to make you a thousand more dollars than you would have thought. That is an excellent way to look at it. I would strongly urge anybody who is considering niching down to look at it that way too. You definitely need to project your value. The title question is, how did you build it, and let’s make it talk about the website that you created for your niche. Was there anything special that you decided to do for your specialized website versus just your general agency website?
Sara: Sure. Yes, absolutely. I think the biggest consideration in how I built that micro site was to make sure that I only launched it with things that were absolutely necessary. I have a big vision, of course, for what I would love this site to grow into. I’m a web designer, I know how I would love it to look. I know how much content I’d love it to have, but I really just wanted to get something launched so that I could put out my shingle and say, “This is a market I’m looking to work with.” The most important thing I did was cut back my big list of nice-to-haves and say, “What do I need just to get this launched?” There are few things I said no to. I said no to custom design. I went to studio press and this site is almost entirely one of their themes straight out of the box. I only customized a couple fonts. It serves my purposes very well. It looks very professional and no one who is a potential client for me is going to look at that and go, “Oh, I’ve seen that theme before.”
That is something that I used, and that was a good choice. I also launched it with just three pages. It’s got an “About” page, a “Service” page, and a “Contact” page. That was my minimal content. I actually had to talk myself out of designing it with a blog section on the home page, because I said, “You know what, this doesn’t need a blog post right away. I’ll add that back in when I’ve written a few but that’s going to slow me down from launching.” Really, the only technology here is WordPress on Flywheel hosting, the Genesis Framework, and a Studio Press theme, the total build. Writing the content probably took me about three hours. Building the site probably took me three hours or less. The thing was out there and I was able to share it. I’m really happy with how that turned out.
Joe: Man, I love that. Now, you specialize in SEO, are you also a web designer? You can make your own custom themes and stuff like that?
Sara: Yes. Now, I used to do all of the design and build myself, and thankfully I’ve hired people that are better at design and better at development than I am. At this point in my web business for clients, I don’t do either of those pieces, and I am mostly lead strategy. But yes, I can do all of that if needed, and I did all of this site by myself.
Joe: Got you. I ask because I am also a developer. I’ve written books and have courses on how to make WordPress themes, and so when I created my online courses site, it was a very hard decision for me to say, “I’m not going to custom build this theme,” because I felt like a fraud, but my focus was on the content. That’s what you’re saying too. Your focus was on something very specific that had nothing to do with syncing 20 or so hours into building a custom theme.
Sara: Right. Totally, not necessary. Just to get the idea out there, to test the waters.
Joe: Cool. That’s awesome. I will link to StudioPress. I actually just this week, as we record this, started using my first one, which is Academy Pro for the relaunch of my online courses site in 2018.
Sara: Oh, that’s a great theme. I can’t wait to see what you do with it.
Joe: Thank you very much. Now I’ve got some pressure on me.
Sara: It’s gorgeous straight out of the box, so I think a win no matter what you do with it.
Joe: It’s so good. It makes just enough of the decisions for me, and I don’t have to worry about a whole lot of things. I’ll certainly link those in the show notes. Now, as we record this, this was a recent decision, we kind of talked about your journey as far as the transformation to choosing your niche goes, but what are your plans for the future? What is six, 12 months down the line look like?
Sara: Yeah. I’m trying not to put too much pressure on it, and say, “Oh, in six months, I want to have thirty clients within this specialized niche.” I have found through that process of the eight months of trying to figure out a specialty that great things don’t necessarily come to me when I force them. I really just want to continue to build content in the future around this niche. I’d like to start writing really good, weekly content and sharing it via Facebook and Instagram. I think it will be very sharable within the industry with other people sharing it out. I think that that is really going to be my main driver of outreach, is content, and I might even consider some low budget Facebook ads just to get the content into the right hands and in front of the right people.
I’m also actually starting on a couple projects that I’m doing for friends of mine within the industry that I’m doing for free. I recorded a video about this, this week, that it doesn’t sound very fun to do free work, but in this case, I think it’s really necessary.
I want to build up some really good case studies and have those on my website showing some significant ranking improvement, and also so that the friends I have, if I do a great job for them, I’d love for them to spread the word. The future to me looks like content building, authority building, and friendship building within the industry. I’m happy to report just from getting the word out there that this is the kind of work I was interested in. I actually got a referral from another person who does SEO. Said, “I have a client, I think, would be good for you, and I’d like to make an introduction.” I have already booked work within this specialized industry just by hanging my shingle here and talking about it.
Joe: Man, that’s great. That’s the due to the network that you’ve built up before this. Being so open and creating really good content about it. I love that. You mentioned that doing free work doesn’t sound great, and it’s something that a lot of freelancers might rally against, but when I want to learn a new skill as a programmer, it’s pretty easy for me to just, if I want to learn view, I’ll just write a simple view app. I actually have an app that I iterate on every time I want to learn a new skill. You can’t really do that with SEO, right? Because you’re just talking to yourself about, “Hey, what do I think a wedding planner or a photographer for weddings wants, how do I prove that it’s going to rank better?” You need to do real tangible stuff to get real tangible results.
Sara: Yes. The problem with SEO, and this might be a separate discussion, but there’s so many people that have done a bad job and made a bad name, so I really need some positive case studies behind it.
Joe: Yeah. I mean that’s absolutely true. SEO does get a bad name because everybody says they can do it. “Oh, just give me $5,000 a month and I’ll make sure you’re number one in Google.” You absolutely do need good testimonials, and you need results. “This website started here, after I was done with it, it’s now up here. After X amount of time,” and things like that. Being as open and honest as you can, especially with SEO, and in our field is very helpful, because people view us as just, “Well I’m going to tell you to do something, and then you’re going to sit in a room and do it, and then it’ll be done.” But there’s a lot of communication that needs to go on.
Sara: Yes, you’re absolutely right.
Joe: Cool. I’m going to end with my favorite question, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?
Sara: It’s funny. I don’t really have a lot of secrets given that I have been making a, what I hope is an open and honest transparent video every single week for about eight months. I will say that I hope that I will discover more secrets through the process of specializing my web agency. I had desperately hoped that I was going to come up with some sort of process that would make this easier for other people, because this decision to specialize a niche down in services is such a scary choice. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do this, and hopefully I’m going to come up with this formula that other people can follow to find the right niche.” That totally didn’t happen. It totally just fell in my lap due to one relationship that I had, and one situation I encountered, and no amount of analysis or research got me to the right place. No trade secrets. I’m not sure there are any, but I will continue to share openly about how this goes, and anything that I determine might be a best practice in the future.
Joe: That’s great. That is different from any other trade secrets that I’ve gotten on the show, so I love that. I will say that while there are no secrets, I think the big takeaway is keep your options open and have conversations with people. Because that’s how a lot happen.
Sara: Yes. Outside of the web design industry also. If you just hang out and talk to people in WordPress and ask them what they think, they might not always have the answers. I was actually at a women’s business conference when I met this person, put this all into motion for me. If I hadn’t been having those interactions across industries, I might not be here yet. Yeah, just get out there and talk to people and make relationships as much as you can.
Joe: Man, that is … See, I don’t know who I’m looking at. That’s a great trade secret right there. Get out of the industry, out of the echo chamber. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?
Sara: Thanks for having me, Joe. I share all of this on my personal blog. That’d probably be the best place to go if you’re interested in specializing information, and that’s Sara-dunn.com. I’d love to connect with any of your listeners on Twitter, and my handle there is Sara11D. If anybody’s in Instagram, that’s my favorite place to hang out, so I’m there at SaraDunn11.
Outro: Thanks again to Sara for joining me! She’s fantastic to talk to and offers lots of great information. A transparent process can be SO helpful to new freelancers and agency owners.
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Continuing our series next week, I’m talking to Rian Kinney about the legal side of starting a business – specifically copyright and trademark. I heard her on Office Hours speaking about contracts and really wanted to get her on the show. It’s been one of the most educational interviews for me, so be sure to tune in! And until next time, Get out there and build something!
