money

Kirsten Bunch and Changing Careers

July 23, 2019

Transcript

Kirsten Bunch: I think the point is you don’t have to stay on the same path just because of some feeling of obligation, and also because you switch careers or because you start your own business maybe there’s– Definitely when you start your own business, there’s a period of time where you are not making a lot of money, but there’s still lots of ways to make money in this world. Switching careers doesn’t mean all of a sudden you’re not making any money.

Joe Casabona: That was Kirsten Bunch. Over the last two weeks, we discussed mental and physical health as it relates to freelancing and self-employment. To round out this trilogy of overall happiness in your career, I’m talking to Kirsten, who is a reinvention coach. She helps those folks who are mid-career but need a change. She offers some fantastic advice on how to determine if you’re ready for change and then the steps you should take in order to figure out what to do for your next career move. This is advice that can come to anybody at any walk of life, and you don’t need to be 10, 15, or 20 years into a career to determine you need a career change. We’ll get into this interview in a minute, but of course, first a word from our sponsors.

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Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today I’m excited to talk to my guest, Kirsten bunch. She is a reinvention coach and entrepreneur, and the topic we’re going to be discussing today is reinventing yourself and launching a new business if you feel stuck. Without further ado, Kirsten, how are you?

Kirsten: Hey. I’m really good, and I’m really good. I’m really happy to be here and have this conversation with you today.

Kirsten: Absolutely, thank you for joining me.

Joe: I’m excited because this is a pretty unique topic for the show, usually we’re talking about more concrete businesses ideas or services. But I think that especially in the space that my audience is in, the web development space, the WordPress space, a lot of people find their way to WordPress web development by feeling stuck. I’m excited to talk more high-level about this stuff. Why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Kirsten: Yes. Like you said, I am a reinvention coach, and a strategist and entrepreneur. By the nature of that, I help people reinvent and refresh their careers. That can mean starting a business, a lot of my clients start businesses. It could also mean switching from one career to another. It also means passion projects sometimes, people who have clients who are writing books as a way to relaunch themselves or starting film festivals in their communities. Things like that. I find that most of my clients, typically my clients are around the mid-career point where they’re looking at what they’ve done and they’re looking at the next 20-25 years because that’s let’s face it, nobody is retiring at the age of 60 anymore. Thinking, “OK. What’s next for me? What am I going to do?”

Joe: Absolutely. First of all, I don’t know if I would have the ability to retire. I mean maybe I’m about halfway there, a little more than halfway there. Maybe I will want to retire. But I feel like I’d be pretty bored if I retired at 60 or 65. But you mentioned this in the pre-show discussion too, about passion projects, and I like that. Mostly because my career manifested itself out of a passion project. I was doing web development on the side, and it was a hobby, and I liked it. Then I made that my career basically from high school, I was doing that full time– Or, I was doing it while going to school, I should say. I like that too, and one other reason I like that is because I’ve heard from a lot of people in my outer circles that they don’t have a hobby. They basically work, and then they go back to work, and helping people find and pursue passion projects is important to me because I think that you should have other interests outside of your day job.

Kirsten: I think that’s true because I think– One of the things that I coach my clients on is not everybody’s ready to jump out of their career or jump out of their job, either for financial reasons or for identity purposes. I don’t recommend just quitting your job from one day to the next unless you’re prepared for what that means, and we could dig into what that means if you want. But one way to get your toes wet is to do a passion project. It’ll help you feel better about being in a job that maybe you’re not thrilled about, because you’ll have something else to think about, but it’s also a way– Like I said in the beginning, it’s a way to relaunch yourself. I’m working with a woman right now who in order to– She’s a celebrity stylist, and in order to relaunch herself and figure out where she’s headed next she felt the urge and felt the need to write her story. She’s writing a book about the vulnerability of beauty, and all this stuff. Cool stuff. It’s a way for her to take stock of where she’s been and who she is now and where she’s going.

Joe: I love that. That sounds cool. I think it flows very well into the next question that I had for you, which is “How do you know when you’re ready to make a career switch?”

Kirsten: I think if you’re uncomfortable with what you’re doing now, and that feeling of uncomfortable-ness isn’t going away, I think you need to examine that. That doesn’t mean you need a career switch necessarily, but it means that there’s something going on. I do a lot of speaking, and I always tell my audiences I have this whole story about my own reinvention, where I ignored the fact that I wasn’t happy in the career that I was in and I was moving from one job to the next and just doing the same thing. It’s like, what’s the saying– Doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results. So what I say is that you can distract yourself from the truth, but the truth isn’t going to go away. If you feel like that’s what you’re doing, is you’re distracting yourself from the truth, that you’re not in the right place. Then I would suggest getting some help to figure that out, and not panicking. Please don’t panic. It’s OK. It’s all going to be OK, and you’ll figure it out.

Joe: I think that’s great. Not necessarily career switches for me, but both times I decided to leave my current job they came after a longer period of “What am I doing? I feel like I’m not growing,” in one instance. I felt like I was falling behind. I felt like I was the person who knew the most, and I didn’t want to be that. I was 26. I didn’t want to be the most knowledgeable person at my company, because there’s so much more to learn there. Then in my previous job, my wife and I had just had our first child, and I was re-evaluating based on that, and the time I was spending at work versus with my family. But I like that if you’re uncomfortable with what you’re doing, you need to examine it and don’t ignore it. Moving forward in this interview, we talked about this in the -pre-show, creating the persona of somebody who is ready for that career switch. As I ask the next set of questions, maybe we can keep that person in mind. Someone comes to you, and they say “I’m ready for a career switch, I’m not quite sure where I want to go next. What do I do?” The follow-up question I always ask in this interview is, “What kind of research do you do?” So how would we figure out where to go from here?

Kirsten: Yeah, no, definitely. It’s a great question. A metaphor I like to use, and I stole this from my branding team, but a metaphor I like to use is “What car–?” If you think about cars and you think about “If you can be any car you want, what car are you now and what car do you want to become?” And it’s not “What car you want to buy,” but “What car do you want to be?” So when you think about the cars, and you think about the car you want to become, you want to think about things like the size of the car. Because that in your career represents community. Have you been working in a big company and you want to be on your own? You want some space, you want to be a solo solopreneur, and you want to explore what that is? Or have you been working on your own in a small business and you miss that bigger crowd around you? The car analogy is, “Do you want a mini or do you want to do you want an SUV? A big SUV or a van?” Then also your values come in. Do you want the gas guzzler in your career, do you want to work for something that’s not mission-focused per se, and you want to work for a big company that does something that maybe isn’t– Like do you want to work for a tobacco company, or something like that? Or do you– Is there something within your values that is pulling you, like you feel like “I want to do something about climate change.” Or “I want to do something about animals,” I don’t know, food systems. So with the car analogy, it’s “Do you want a gas guzzler or do you want a hybrid? Do you want an E-car? What are you looking for?” I think figuring out those two things, what are the values that you’re looking for in your career, your new career and what, how– Sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought. But how do you show up with– If you think about it in the sense of car, what does your car look like and what are the elements of that car? The features is the word I’m trying to find.

Joe: Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. Again thinking back to my own journey, I worked at a big university which is essentially like a Fortune 500 company without the bankroll. Then I went to a small team, and now I’m solo. I made those choices at various stages. Then I like the idea of “Do you want a gas guzzler versus an electric car?” Or “Do you want to work for a company maybe where you do a specific job, and you like doing that job, or do you want to work for someone that has a very clear mission that aligns with your views?” If you dig on what Ben and Jerry’s is doing, they have a very clear mission. Maybe that’s something that you would consider as well. I like that a lot.

Kirsten: Yeah. I think that the idea of being an entrepreneur or working for somebody else, do you want an automatic car do you want a stick shift or a standard car? Because if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s all on you. You’ve got to drive that, and you’ve got to pay attention to how you’re shifting and all of that. That’s not to say in automatic if you’re working for somebody else you don’t have to do it, but it’s a little bit more that somebody else is driving the ship and you’re steering your part of the job.

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Joe: The next question that I would have is, what am I going to do? I’ve been a web developer for 15 years, I’ve worked at– My old man worked at Verizon and before that Bell Atlantic or Ninex and Ma Bell, or whatever. He worked at the same company for his entire career. How do you figure out what to do next, as far as the actual doing the job?

Kirsten: The question I get a lot is, “How do I figure out my passion?” I’m not– Actually, I don’t know. I’m not a passion person. I’ve never really figured out my passion, and my passion has been trying new things if anything, that’s what my passion is. What I say to people is, instead of– “Forget about your passion. If you know what that is, awesome. Follow that. But don’t freak out if you’re just like, ‘I have no idea what that is.’ Follow your curiosity instead and follow the things that are catching your attention, and talk to people about them and read up and talk to people who are working in that space.” For me, my reinvention story was about becoming an entrepreneur and starting my own business. I had never done that, I didn’t– I don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs, my parents were school teachers, and I don’t know a lot of people who had their own business. I do now, and I know tons of people. But my curiosity was about “What would it be like to run my own business? What is that even about?” I think back of how naive I was a couple of years ago compared to where I am now, I’m still incredibly naive, but it can be a curiosity around a specific function, or it can be a curiosity around an issue, or something else.

Joe: I like that point a lot, follow your curiosity. It’s almost like your freshman year of college, taking a bunch of gen-ed classes to see which one you like the best before you determine your major, is what I thought there. I like that answer too, and it resonates with me in an interesting way because I knew from the age of 12 that I wanted to work with computers in some capacity. I was very lucky in knowing exactly what I wanted to do from a pretty early age. Before that, this is a little known fact, and I wanted to be a Catholic priest because I was an altar boy and that seemed like the next logical career move to an 11-year-old or a 12-year-old. But then I discovered computers and I felt like that was a lot more lucrative.

Kirsten: Yes, probably.

Joe: Follow your curiosity and figure out what’s catching your attention. I think that’s a nice takeaway.

Kirsten: You bring up a really good point about this idea of– This happens to a lot of people who are mid-career, that you’ve been on a path and I hear all the time “I’m just going to continue this because this is the way I’ve been going, and this is what I’ve worked so hard to get to.” We take time, we pay attention to our education, we build our skills, and we build our networks, and it’s a little disconcerting, or it’s a lot disconcerting if you get to a point where you’re just– It’s back to owning your truth, and you’re like “I don’t know if this is right for me anymore.” Something in your gut is telling you that it’s not right, but you’ve invested so much, so why not just continue on that path? The difference is now in this day and age, and we’re really the first generation– It’s true for men and women but particularly women, this is the first generation of those of us who are in our 40s and 50s where we have the luxury of time, and we have the luxury of technology and the way cultural norms around work– How they’ve shifted. We have the luxury to ask that question, “What else can I do?” And have a long enough runway to figure that out. Because we’re not, God-willing, we’re not dying at the age of– In our late 50s or early 60s anymore. A lot of us are living much longer. Like I said in the beginning, a lot of us want to be productive and engaged. The idea of retirement is just completely changing.

Joe: Right. The retirement age was determined based on the average lifespan. You retire, and then a few years later you’re probably not going to be alive anymore, and that’s not the case anymore. You retire at 65, and you could live another 25 years or 30 years. All of my wife’s grandparents are in their late 80s, which is not what it was like when they entered the workforce. I like that a lot. Then people who are mid-career and on a path generally want to stay on that path, and I think that’s absolutely true. Especially with the increasing cost of college, I spent over $100,000 dollars or whatever on a college degree, and now I’m not going to use that degree. That weighs on your mind a little bit.

Kirsten: Hopefully by the time you’re mid-career you’ve–

Joe: Yeah, that’s true.

Kirsten: But I know for people who are in school now, that might not be the case. They may be carrying that debt through for years and years and years. I think the point is you don’t have to stay on the same path just because of some feeling of obligation, and also because you switch careers or because you start your own business maybe there’s– Definitely when you start your own business, there’s a period of time where you are not making a lot of money, but there’s still lots of ways to make money in this world. Switching careers doesn’t mean all of a sudden you’re not making any money.

Joe: I think that’s– To drive that point home, before we get on to the title question, I read an article that I like that basically said “If you’re not willing to do something for three years, you shouldn’t think about it.” That falls in line with the idea that if you start your own business, you’re probably not going to make good money or replace your previous salary for about three years as you get up and running. You’re not immediately going to make what you are making at your old established job, so I like that. That’s stuck with me. I’m about to enter year three of my business, and things are going pretty well, not as well as I want them to be, but I’m also– I’m a millennial, so I don’t have any patience. I really like that, that change can be hard, but you shouldn’t stay on the same path because you have a feeling of obligation towards it. Or towards what you’re currently doing, I should say. Let’s get into the title question, and I have followed my curiosity. Let’s pick an example that you’ve mentioned before, let’s say I want to write a book. I’ll say a fiction book because I’ve written technical books. I want to write a work of fiction. How do I build my reinvented career or my reinvented passion project?

Kirsten: If it’s about writing a book, writing a fiction book, I don’t work with people who write fiction, so it’s a little bit of a difficult scenario. But let me talk it through. With writing a book, there are a lot of book coaches out there that can help you write your book. If you have no experience writing at all, I would say start with taking some courses where you’re writing within a group, and people are giving you feedback. I know Gotham– I forget what it’s called, but it’s like Gotham Writers or something like that in New York that has a lot of online courses, and they’re always really great. But I think the thing is that if you want to write you’ve got to write, and that’s like with anything. If you want to start a business, you’ve got to start a business. You’ve got to take action. That’s true– You could give me any scenario, and I would say, “Take action.” If you want to write, start writing. Stop talking about it, and I think there is a big– Don’t stop talking about it, but put action behind the talk. I think there’s a lot of people that are always like, talk talk talk. “I’m going to do this,” and 10 years later, you see the person and you’re like “Are you still talking about this, and you haven’t yet done it?” I think whatever it is that you want to do, follow your curiosity, and take action.

Joe: Nice. Don’t just talk about it, actually do something. If you want to write, you’ve got to write. I love that. I had a track coach– I was on the field part, I didn’t do much track, but I did the field part. Our track and field coach [Mr. Diebold], on the first day of practice, said to the runners, “If you want to run fast, you got to run fast.” Then to the shot putters, “If you want to throw far, you got to throw far.” I remember that, and I’m like, “I want to throw far.” I think that’s a great piece of advice, something that I’ve heard a lot, and going back to your initial point, start talking to people. Take some courses to set you on that path. Let’s speak a little bit more generally now, as far as reinventing goes. Take some courses, and is the first step figuring out your first step? Is the first step in reinventing your career, figuring out exactly what you need to do?

Kirsten: Yeah, no. Not necessarily, because some people don’t know. A lot of– Some people say “I know this doesn’t feel right, what I’m doing now, and I want to figure out what else I’m doing.” If I say to them, “Just start taking action or figure out your first step.” They’ll be like, “I don’t know what that is.” Then they’ll run around in a circle, and that’s– You get dizzy. I think that one of those– As I said in the beginning, it’s like owning your truth. What is it that you’re experiencing now that doesn’t feel right to you? Looking at that, and it does help a lot to get some help by maybe there’s an HR person in your company that also has coaching skills that could help you talk that through. I think there’s a sense of vulnerability there, you have to be willing to own your truth and– I keep saying that, but in talking to people about it I wouldn’t go and announce it in the company newsletter that you’re seeking your next career necessarily, but if you have trusted people where you are, have a conversation about what it is you’re trying to figure out. Get some help thinking that through, what is it that doesn’t feel right? What is it that–? In some ways, it’s simple. A lot of us know what we want to do, we’re just afraid to admit it to ourselves because we think we’ll fail or we think it won’t work, or we think we don’t have what it takes. Or my favorite is we think we need to spend two years gathering every single piece of information and listening to every podcast and reading every book until we make any steps towards that direction at all. You’re not going to know if it’s right or not unless you at least start taking a little bit of action.

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Joe: In the context of doing things online as a software developer, “Iterate quickly” is “Do something, see if it works out, you can always adjust it later.” Right? This is not like building a skyscraper where we need to make sure all the plans are exactly right before we start building. This is more malleable than that. I’ll link to a previous guest, Scott Bollinger, that basically talked about that. “Launch as soon as you can, because you don’t want to spend two years throwing yourself into this thing and realizing that it’s not the right thing to do once you start doing it.”

Kirsten: Absolutely. I talk to people about having– People have college funds for their kids, they have retirement funds. I talk to people about having reinvention funds. The reality is because of the way, as we talked about because people are retiring later and because of the way we’re working now, the reality is that you’re probably going to reach a point in your career where you’re going to look to reinvent yourself. Whether that means starting a business or switching careers, isn’t it wonderful to have a fund that you can pull on so that you don’t have to be so stressed out about your reinvention? Because a lot of the times– You probably know this as an entrepreneur, it’s hard to know what to spend money on. That fear of, “I only have– I have no money because I didn’t plan for this. I don’t want to hire this web developer to help me,” or “I don’t want to hire this coach,” or “I don’t want to hire this bargaining person because I’m going to go into debt.” But if you have that reinvention fund, it makes it a little bit easier, and it makes it a little bit more– It takes the fear away a little bit.

Joe: Absolutely. Even as somebody who does run their own business, you should– I got some great advice from a friend Jen Bourne who said that you should have a rainy day fund. Take some part of the money you make every month and put it into a separate fund because you’ll probably have that feast and famine. There’ll be good times where money is coming in, and there’ll be slow times, so you need to manage that a little bit. So, “Have a reinvention fund.” I think it’s The Richest Man in Babylon, have you read that book?

Kirsten: No.

Joe: It’s about investing, but the lesson is really good. You take 10% of your income no matter what, and you put it somewhere. You take that, and you invest it in whatever you think you should. This was written a long time ago, so it talks about investing in a farm or whatever, but reinvention fund means you’re investing in yourself. You’re taking that 10% for your future self to help reinvent yourself.

Kirsten: Absolutely. Investing in yourself as one of– It’s a big thing. We’ll invest in our kids, and we’ll invest in our homes. But when it comes to investing in ourselves, a lot of people give a pause around that. They feel like, especially people in mid-career who are just like “I spent my money on my education,” right?

Joe: Right.

Kirsten: But the reality is that it doesn’t stop, the idea of– Sorry. Investing in yourself is lifelong. You’ve got to keep doing that.

Joe: Absolutely. As we wrap up, I will point to one more book that I think drives this home, especially for entrepreneurs. That’s Profit First, which talks about taking 5% of the money that you make there and just put it in a– That’s your bonus, otherwise you’re not getting anything out of the business. You’re working harder than you would in a full-time job, and you’re not getting anything from it, so as we record this I just used my Profit First money to buy this beautiful fountain pen that I wanted for a long time. It’s the Sailor Pro Gear, I don’t know if you’re into fountain pens, but it’s a very nice pen. I had the support of my wife to buy it, of course, but I feel like I’ve gotten something out of the business this quarter because it’s something I’ve wanted for a long time.

Kirsten: I love that. I think especially as new entrepreneurs we are– Gosh, the money thing is so hard. I love the fact of just buying yourself something nice even if it’s– go and have a spa day or buy yourself a nice pen, or whatever.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. Get something out of your business that you maybe wouldn’t get out of the full-time job, and along with that proper money management is important. I think your point about the reinvention fund and reading Profit First, manage your money, and that gives you freedom. I think that those are very good points to take away. Let’s– I usually like to ask you what your plans for the future are here, but we haven’t talked specifically about you that much. Why don’t we get an idea of what you would do for somebody, for our persona that we’ve created as far as guiding them, and what your plans for the future are?

Kirsten: Sure. I think I understand your question.

Joe: I threw like two or three in there.

Kirsten: OK.

Joe: It’s– What do you do currently and what do you hope to do in the near future?

Kirsten: Got it, yeah. Like I said, I’m a reinvention coach and strategist, and I help people figure out their next act. My book is called– I have a book that came out last year, it’s called Next Act: Give Back and it’s not about volunteering, it’s not about giving money. It’s really about how you give back to yourself, how you give back to the dreams that you had in college to do something that you wanted to do, and you got carried away on a career track that has been good or bad depending on your situation. But now it’s time to reassess what you’re doing, and for me, I continue to work with people who are at that point of their careers where they’re asking “What am I doing here and what else could I be doing, and what’s next?” That work isn’t going to change, because I absolutely love that work. This is what lights me up, and I get up excited, and I’m excited every day to work with my clients and see what they can do. For me, what I’m doing now is focusing on how to be a better business person, and how to learn how to be a better entrepreneur. “What do I need to learn?” Which is tons of stuff. I’m working with a branding agency right now to make my brand a little more polished, and I guess more official-looking. One of the things that I found when I started was that I was talking to too small of an audience. So I’ve expanded, and I’m working with a branding agent to expand who I’m talking to with my messaging. The future really is “How do I help more people, and how do I make more money helping more people?” Basically. That has to do with group programs, retreats, things like that. For me, everything has to be fun, otherwise, I don’t want to do it. I can’t force myself to do things that aren’t fun. So, that’s where I’m headed.

Joe: I like that a lot. “For me, everything has to be fun.” In both of our situations, we’re probably not just happy with the paycheck, I need to be fulfilled by my work, I want to be able to do things that I enjoy doing, and everything has to be fun. So, cool. As we wrap up here, I do like to ask my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us? You’ve given us a lot of really great information so far, is there–? What’s maybe the one big takeaway that you want listeners to have?

Kirsten: I think the one thing, and I don’t know if it’s a trade secret, but the one thing that I have learned is that you can’t do everything by yourself and you’ve got to invest in your business. That may mean taking on debt, and if you’re a solopreneur that could mean borrowing money from people or having credit card debt, or there’s other ways to take on debt. But you are not going to grow unless you’re investing in yourself, and in what you’re trying to do. For a long time, I sat and didn’t want to spend any money, didn’t want to invest in myself. I tried to do it myself and what you were saying– There’s a lot of things that I’m good at, and there’s a lot of things I’m not good at. Like marketing, forget it. I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time. But you have to figure that out and own that. What are you good at, what are you not good at? Get help and stop trying to do it yourself, stop trying to bootstrap it as a badge of honor and invest in yourself. You can either– Money and time have an interesting relationship. You can either spend a lot of time, or you can spend some money and spend less time.

Joe: “Money and time have an interesting relationship.” I love that. When I was younger, I had so much time, and I would do everything. I had all the time and no money. Now that I am older and I have a family, time is the most valuable thing to me. I will happily spend $200 dollars if it saves me several hours, or whatever.

Kirsten: Yes, absolutely.

Joe: Yeah. I love that, “Invest in yourself. You can’t do everything by yourself, and you may need to take on a little bit of debt. That’s perfectly fine.” People who start brick and mortar businesses before the age of the internet had to go to the bank to get a loan to buy property. The idea is that they were investing in their future self to be able to pay off that debt and be in a better place, so I think that there’s an interesting look at debt today with the whole Total Money Makeover movement and no debt ever. Sometimes you need to invest in yourself, and that future investment will hopefully pay off if you do your due diligence. So Kirsten Bunch, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Kirsten: Thank you. This has been great. They can find me at my website, and it’s KirstenBunch.com. I’m also pretty active on LinkedIn, more than any of the other socials, although I am on all the others. You can find me with my name, pretty– Somewhat unusual name, although there are other Kirsten Bunch’s in the world. I have a blog that comes out weekly that’s called Changed the World In a Hot Flash that people seem to like. That’s something you could sign up for if you’re interested in connecting with me.

Joe: Awesome. I will link to all of those things and everything, especially the books, we talked about a lot of books today– That we talked about in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it. Kirsten, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Kirsten: Thank you. This has been great. Thanks a lot, Joe.

Joe: Thanks so much to Kirsten for joining us today. Lots of takeaways. There are a lot of takeaways from her interview. She also gives a ton of advice in her trade secrets, and you can’t do everything by yourself. “There is a lot of things that I’m good at,” she said, “And a lot of things I’m not good at, and “That money and time have an interesting relationship.” I liked that one. She said you may need to take on debt, which we may differ on the philosophy of that. I try not to take on any debt if I possibly can, but the overall message here is invest in yourself. This is incredibly important. You need to invest in yourself and the tools that will help you become what you want to be. I think that part is incredibly important, and if you do need to take on a little bit of debt to get that education you need or the certification that you want, then so be it. The idea is that you should believe that that debt is an investment and you’ll be able to pay it back in a short amount of time. So definitely check out Kirsten and all of her fantastic resources, which will be linked in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it/130. Thanks so much to our sponsors, Ahoy! Creator Courses and Pantheon. We would not be able to do the show without them. My question of the week for you is, “Have you ever felt like you needed to make a career change, and what did you do to mitigate that change?” Let me know on Twitter @jcasabona or via email at Joe@HowIBuilt.it. Thanks so much for listening. If you liked this episode, then please share it with somebody who you think will benefit from it, I would appreciate that. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Patrick Campbell and ProfitWell

June 4, 2019

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 126 of How I Built It. Today my guest is ProfitWell co-founder and CEO Patrick Campbell. ProfitWell, formerly Price Intelligently, has worked with all sorts of companies, including big commerce WPEngine and MasterClass, and they focus on doing things figuring out the best pricing for subscriptions. As a matter of fact, Patrick talks about how he became obsessed with subscription growth. He wanted to figure it out and share that information with people, so we talk about how he built ProfitWell, and we also talked about what he’s learned as far as pricing goes. I enjoyed this interview because it’s something that I always wrestle with, I’m sure a lot of you out there also wrestle with it. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation with Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell after a word from our sponsors.

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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 Patrick Campbell, the co-founder, and CEO of ProfitWell. Patrick, how are you today?

Patrick Campbell: I’m doing well. Excited to talk about building and all the fun stuff that comes with growth.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for coming on the show. For the audience, why don’t you let us know a little bit about who you are and what you do, and what ProfitWell is?

Patrick: Yeah, totally. That’s always the question because I could talk for an hour or I could say a small missive of who I am, etc. I guess I’ll give the boring version with a little bit of spice to it here. So I’m from Wisconsin originally, we’re based in Boston though. My background is in econometrics and math. I started my career working in the US intelligence community in DC, and then I moved to Boston to work at Google. Basically, I was in big bureaucratic organizations, Google and the US government, so I wanted to jump out and jumped into the startup community here. About six years ago, I got the bug and started what was then called Price Intelligently, and we changed our name to ProfitWell. Basically, we are obsessed with understanding subscription or recurring revenue growth. Our big mantra is, “We want to understand subscription growth better than anyone else, and then share that knowledge and then imbue that within our products.” The products that we offer, we have a free subscription financial metrics product. You plug in your billing system, Stripe, Braintree, Zuora or whatever you’re using, and you get access to your MRR, your churn, etc. Then the way that we make money is once you log into that free product, you’ll see “This is a problem, this is a problem, this is good.” When there’s problems, we have a couple products. One that helps reduce your churn by attacking your delinquencies, and another that helps with your pricing, which was the Price Intelligently product. So we’re pretty obsessed with the subscription world, and that’s hopefully a good little background with some nice highlights.

Joe: Yeah, that’s perfect. So you’re from Wisconsin, but you’re based in Boston. Are you a Boston sports fan?

Patrick: I have to say yes, or I’ll get attacked. I’m definitely a Wisconsin sports fan still. Green Bay Packers especially, and I love the Bucs and the Brewers, but it’s hard to love those teams because the Packers have been doing well for a while, but it’s hard to love the other teams that haven’t done as well. But in Boston, it’s super tough because everyone– I feel that we’re so spoiled out here with all the championships and such that’s creating terrible fans. People who are like “We didn’t make the finals this year, and it’s a terrible season, everyone should be fired.” I don’t know, when the Brewers went over 500 and didn’t make the playoffs, it was a great season. It’s just a funny thing. I don’t know, and I like the whole “Championship or bust” mentality out here. I think it’s interesting, and I think it’s helpful.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I was born and raised in New York, so I am a New York sports fan. I have the same mentality with the Yankees. It’s like “The Yankees didn’t make it to the playoffs, it was a wasted season.” That said, Mets fans are a little bit different, they’re grateful to make the playoffs. It’s always fun to see the expectations of different fandoms, but we’re not here to talk about sports even though I initiated and I could talk about that all day. I just had to know, as a New Yorker, if you were a Red Sox fan.

Patrick: I mean, I will say I hate the Yankees, to add some fire here.

Joe: That’s fair. So, you worked in the US intelligence agency and then Google, and you mentioned that those are large bureaucratic agencies, and you wanted to jump into the startup community. What was maybe the biggest bureaucratic headache that you– Or, what was maybe a common headache that you saw due to big bureaucracy?

Patrick: That’s a really good question. I think the common one and the biggest one are a little bit different. The biggest one which you’re annoyed at, but you also realize why it’s important. When I worked in the intel community at one of the agencies, it would take three to four forms to change a print cartridge in a printer. Now you sit there, and you’re like “Oh my God, that seems ridiculous.” Then again, you’re like “OK, if you think about being in an intelligence community, printers are places that you can have attacks, or you can have people collecting information and such. So having logs on logs does make sense, but it’s also like ‘Maybe it shouldn’t have been four forms, maybe two forms would’ve been OK.’ “That’s kind of how everything is, so when you’re a young, I don’t know, arrogant kid, trying to take over the world and do really– Just hungry. The bureaucracies, that’s tiresome. I think the bigger, more persistent and/or common thing that I think was frustrating was this whole concept of “Communication management.” If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you spend a lot of your time– It’s not quite politicking, but it’s “I have to make sure that I am being presented in the best light when I do this presentation,” and then there’s “I have to take on this extra project, because that’s how I get promoted.” There’s just a lot of this stuff that’s outside of the core work and also makes it complicated, because all of a sudden you say something that is not even inappropriate but mildly rubs someone the wrong way and so now you have to go apologize. There’s just a lot of stuff that comes with a large organization, so when building an organization of ProfitWell, and we’re now about 60 people, that becomes one of those things where “How do I, with the knowledge of not wanting that inside an organization, how do I make sure that I cannot snuff that out because some of that stuff’s important, but make sure that it’s efficient and it’s the type of conversations?”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great point. I think a lot of people probably start their own companies because they see something that they didn’t like in their full-time employment or in the traditional job market, and being cognizant to not make that part of your company culture is then a big challenge. Especially because these giant companies have been able to scale and maybe that’s part of scaling. I totally understand that. I worked in higher-ed, and I was never really good at the politics stuff. Again, being a New York Italian, I always spoke my mind, and that got me into trouble because I always told my superiors the things that they didn’t want to hear, but I knew were right. Luckily I’m self-employed now, though.

Patrick: There you go. That’s how you– That’s how you cut all those things, you cut through them all, go full self-employment.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. What gave you the idea to start Price Intelligently, now ProfitWell? Because I love this idea, and as more and more people get into thinking about subscriptions and monthly recurring revenue, I feel like it’s easier than ever to get into that now. But doing it right is hard to do, things like find the right pricing and prevent churn. So what gave you the idea for this business?

Patrick: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think there were two vectors in starting the business, and the first one was I would say that young hubris that I was referencing before. The “I can do better.” All this other stuff and being frustrated in larger organizations, and so that made me jump out of the larger organizations, and then even at a smaller organization, I worked at this company called [Jim Vara] between Google and starting Price Intelligently. But even in that smaller organization, which was about 100 people, I still felt that hubris and so I don’t know if that was– Then I’ve grown out of that in a good way. But I’m thankful that I was a little bit of a gruff, early 20-year-old millennial if you will, back in the day. Because I think that pushed me to not just settle for a traditional 9-5. The “This is an idea,” where it came from– I was tasked, I was a strategic initiatives person where basically I would find little problems here and there. “The support people need training, or the order management system needs a product manager,” just little stuff like that. The one thing I got tasked with was pricing. So there was just– They gave a kid, basically a young middle 20s person this whole pricing thing, which was all of a sudden something where I had a little bit of a playground where I would see changes we would make would either have giant wins in terms of revenue or have giant losses. So that was one of these things where I was like “Interesting. This is fascinating.” Especially when it came to most companies and most businesses, we put so much sweat and so much effort into building something. Then, when it comes time to price it, we’re kind of like “I don’t know, just put a nine at the end and put the most expensive tier on the left and we’ll call it a day.” There should be some more science here, so this got me fascinated with digging deeper and deeper on a problem. Then what we discovered was that pricing is not just the number, it’s your packaging, your positioning, who you choose as a customer. That opened up the entire vision for where we’re going in terms of this whole subscription growth, subscription science element. So, yeah. That’s the mild origin story or the ideation story if you will.

Joe: I like that. You said there should be more science here, which I mean, definitely. I feel like more often not, I’m just picking a price that I think people will pay and then seeing if people will pay it. But you’re right. You said, “It’s not just pricing, it’s packaging, it’s positioning, it’s knowing the customer.” I’m actually really curious about the research aspect of it. I always ask, “What kind of research did you do?” But in this case, it sounds like your product offers a large amount of information presented with the research around it for maybe psychologically what pricing works, and stuff like that. Would you be able to explain that a little bit?

Patrick: Yeah, definitely. Let me pick a depth here, and if you want me to go deeper, or if I go too far, then you can always cut it. It’s like, “How do you price?” In that sense, there’s a short version, and then there’s a medium version, and there’s a long version. I think that it comes down to if you think about what a price is. Your price is, the phrase I like to say is, “It’s the exchange rate on the value that you’re providing.” So, what that means is that you’ve put all this effort into whatever you’re doing and then all of a sudden you’re like “I created this much value and because we don’t barter things anymore, or at least formally, I’m going to put a number on that so that you can give me some cash equivalent for whatever that product is.” When you start to use that mental model, everything in your business from your sales and your marketing, all the way down to your product and finance, starts to become either driving someone to a point of conversion or justifying the price for the product that you’re offering. So, all that means is that you need to measure that precipice. There’s a bunch of models you can use in different ways that you can collect data. Everything from using souped-up conjoint analysis, which is expensive and takes a ton of time, all the way to just having qualitative conversations with your customers in the right way. This is all under “Customer development,” as it’s called. All of those things, what you’re trying to get at is measuring for the right customer and determining the right customer. What is their perception of that value? Because that perception is reality. Then using different value propositions in order to figure out, “Does this value proposition move the value this much, or does this value proposition move that much?” To give you a little bit of practical advice, if you and I were having a conversation on the phone here and I was trying to understand research about the computer that I’m conferencing in on here. What I would do is I would go, “OK. The computer has a bunch of benefits for you. It can make you more efficient, and it can give you a bunch of entertainment. It can help you with research, and there’s probably a bunch of other stuff. But out of those three, what’s the most important and what’s the least important?” You might say, “The productivity efficiency is the most important one. I don’t know, I need the research element and the entertainment I’m going to use, but it’s probably the least important.” Just with that data across 30 people, all off a sudden I start to have some semblance of “OK, for this computer, it’s an efficiency device. It’s the bicycle for the mind as Steve Jobs once said.” Then I might ask you, “OK cool, so that’s awesome. This is something that’s important for your efficiency, your productivity, and all that fun stuff. At what point is this so expensive, you wouldn’t purchase it?” You might struggle with giving an answer, and you might be like, “Probably $1,500.” OK, cool. Then I’d say, “At what point is it such a good deal you’ll buy it right now?” You might go, “$500 bucks” for a MacBook Pro or something like that. Then all of a sudden, I have again across 30 people, I might have a really good understanding of “OK, we’re somewhere around $800 to $1,000.” People think about this as efficiency. Entertainment is the least important, and it doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, it just means it’s the least important relative to the other stuff. I start to have a mental model of my packaging, my positioning, as well as my pricing. If you’re doing this in a more formalized manner– I’m using some extra statistical juice, if you will, to do this at a scale. But that’s really what pricing comes down to, is understanding that buyer and measuring that understanding. You don’t always have to agree with them, but you want to understand what they think in order to make sure that your positioning and just boosting that value.

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Joe: I probably consistently underpriced some of my courses, because I’m not sure what people are willing to pay. Even though I’m providing them the value of– For $200 I’m going to teach you a skill where you can turn around and then make $1,000. That should be a no-brainer. But on the same token, I was having a conversation with my dad over the weekend, because there’s this pen that I want that is $250, and he can’t possibly fathom why I would pay that much money for a pen. I said, “People pay $100 for a haircut, or highlights or a massage that lasts an hour and this pen is something that I would use every day for the rest of my life.” So it’s really, “What is the value of the thing that you’re offering, and what are people willing to pay for it?”

Patrick: The value changes too. So, the other example I love to give is if I asked you– This is how we think about value as human beings as a spectrum. So if I asked you, “This computer versus this water bottle in front of me, what’s more valuable?” It’s pretty easy for you, all things being equal to go “This computer.” But if I put you in the desert, don’t give you water for five to seven days, or whatever the maximum you can survive is, all of a sudden you’re like “Eff this computer, give me the water.” That’s what’s interesting too because that $250 pen– I don’t know anything about your family, but maybe your dad they scraped by every penny, etc. The idea of something that you could theoretically get for free, or for a dollar and paying $250 for it, for any reason seems preposterous. Whereas you might appreciate the finer things, that kind of thing. Or you appreciate stuff, and normally if you’re more dev-oriented, that’s what you do. So yeah, it’s super fascinating.

Joe: Yeah. That’s again, a really good point about the value changes. My car needs a repair, but I don’t need to repair the car right now, because I don’t rely on it for work. I work from home. But if I had to drive every day to work, I would make sure my car was fixed immediately because that’s my means for making money. So, you covered a lot of really great stuff and understanding the buyer and why that impacts price. As I get to the title question, “How did you build that?” or “How did you build it?” Maybe we could talk a little bit about the technology because a lot of technical people listen to the show. But also, how did you build the mechanisms to help a user like me understand my customers?

Patrick: Yeah. It’s actually a really fascinating question, because I think that there ‘s– If we were starting, and this is the irony of building a company or building a product, if we were starting Price Intelligently today with the knowledge that we had from the past six years we probably would build it very differently. That’s why we’re doing a bunch of different things on that product to change it. The reason is because we’re a bootstrap company, so we haven’t raised any outside venture, or any capital at all. It’s funny when people say “Outside,” I’m always like, “Did you raise inside?” It’s interesting wordplay. No outside, no capital in general. Just me in a room, busting my butt for 18 hours a day for nine months to get the thing off the ground. But we used to have a pure software product, so it was just essentially a survey tool. We baked our algorithm into the survey tool, and then you could send out this survey, and you could get the answers, and then it would do the number crunching for you. What we found is that one, the reason that we do it this way is because to sell something on the pricing front, you run into a bunch of problems because you do need to measure that perception. But measuring that perception through A/B testing or measuring it through any other market signal is just not accurate and not great. So A/B testing, most of us, we could build a product for A/B testing for very high traffic consumer sites. Amazon can do an A/B test in 30 seconds, basically on price. The problem was that all of those companies typically build that themselves because they have a big stack that they want to imbue that into. For all of the rest of us, we have to go do this research. The problem we ran into was basically people– They didn’t want to do the work to get the data. So we didn’t solve that problem completely, but we solved a lot of that problem for people. Then all of a sudden, it was like “I have the data now, and I’m smart,” they didn’t say this, but they’re smart people and intelligent, “But I don’t know what to do,” because they don’t trust themselves because they’ve never worked on pricing before. They’ve never worked on anything come to pricing. They may have taken one course if they got their MBA, but then it was all theoretical. What we had to do is basically, from a user perspective, we started getting people asking us, “Can we just pay you to help us?” And we’re like, “We don’t want to do services.” Services are bad when it comes to software, that’s what everyone says. But what we noticed is the margins were really good because literally, all we were doing was giving them support, unlike the data and just answering questions. Then it evolved further from there, but it moved into what’s called a “Tech-enabled service,” where basically you can’t buy our software without buying us, you can’t buy us without our software. Now we basically run the software for our customers, and what that’s done is it’s basically just opened up the ability for us to have that trust factor with our customers and also help them implement quickly. The reason I said we wouldn’t build the exact same product today that we built over the past six years is because we started realizing– We’ve realized this for a while, and this is what spurred us building ProfitWell and ProfitWell Retain, and some of our other products. Is that we either need a product where it’s heavy usage, heavy workflow and that’s what’s going on with Price Intelligently and how we flow through with our customers, or we need to build a product that just absolutely does it for them. That with pricing is something that’s hard to do. I think we found out how to do that and that’s what we’re building right now, but it’s one of those things where that was a huge realization that we found to understand how to deploy this understanding and this science if you will.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s interesting. To summarize what you said, your initial product was essentially a survey tool where you could gather information. I signed up, and I could then survey my customers or people that looked like my customers and get information. But a lot of people, forgive me if I’m confusing this now, but a lot of people already had their own way of doing that, and they didn’t know how to process the information. Is that accurate?

Patrick: Yeah, it’s like if I– You’re an engineer correct?

Joe: Yes.

Patrick: I don’t know the first time you learned whatever language you’re super proficient in, or maybe this is a better metaphor– You’re coding in Python or something like that, and you all of a sudden are given a fresh language that you’ve never used before. It’s not that you’re not smart and can’t figure it out, and any engineer can use another language and the building blocks and figure it out. But you still probably want to ask someone some questions, or go into some communities and ask them questions, because you’re not entirely confident. You can guess and check because you can do that with code well and do some tests. But when it comes to your pricing, you can’t guess and check, because you can’t just put a bunch of stuff out there constantly, and you want someone to help you “Is this the right thing to do? Should we do this? What do you think?” That’s where we came into play.

Joe: Gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I have the knowledge of programming, but I’m good at this one language. If you give me a different language it’s going to take me some time to figure it out, and if you are already launched and you have people potentially ready to buy your product and if you don’t have the right price, you’re losing money every minute that your pricing is wrong or that people are ignoring you because your price is too low or too high, or whatever. That’s the value there is that you helped me find the right price faster.

Patrick: Yeah, 100%. Then the other aspects around pricing, your packaging, who your buyers should be, all that fun stuff.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s great. That’s super interesting. So, are you familiar at all with the tech stack? Can I ask you what programming language or what platform you’re built on, or is that a different team member?

Patrick: So, I’m definitely not the head of engineering or head of product anymore. And even when I was it wasn’t– To give me that title would be because no one else had it. So, I’m more of a data science than anything. Basically what I’m saying is, early days I could debug things and figure it out. Now it’s way beyond my scope. It’s a Python stack, and we use a modified Django framework. Basically, in order to take advantage of a lot of the modules and things like that are made for Python and data. That was particularly important when we get into some of our other products. ProfitWell, which is a metrics product, because accuracy is the number one thing. That product, just as a refresher, is bringing in data from a billing system and then spitting out your MRR, your churn, all that fun stuff. Anyone who’s built analytics in a product knows that 100% accuracy is– 100% anything, but a 100% accuracy for metrics is incredibly difficult. For us, we had to instead of pulling from the invoice object, which is in every billing system, we had to go down to the event object, which is the most granular piece of all these billing systems. Basically, build all of these metrics from scratch, and it was honestly just a game of Whack-a-Mole for a year. I think the Stripe ingestion, we have 1,500 edge cases that we account for because everyone uses Stripe a little bit differently. Yeah, it was just something that’s pretty intense, and long story short, that ‘s– There’s some things I know more about our stack I would say, but I don’t know if they’re going to be helpful or would probably be embarrassing to me. To say something like “MVC framework, blah blah.” People are like, “That’s not what it’s called.” “OK, sorry.”

Joe: No, that’s great. I’m just always interested. I mean, Python generally is a very good language, especially for processing datasets. I’ve come to learn, at least, is what people tell me. I’m a PHP guy myself.

Patrick: Old school. I like it.

Joe: Yeah.

Patrick: I know the mild digs to give with different languages and such, but yeah.

Joe: Keeping it, old school.

Patrick: Instead of those Ruby guys.

Joe: Yeah, those Ruby on Rails guys. But apparently, JavaScript is this new up and coming thing that I should learn.

Patrick: JavaScript– Just the people– We had a couple developers come in, and they’re from IBM, and it was a big JavaScript shop, and we converted them to Python, and one of them was like “Yeah whatever, it’s fine. I can code in any language.” The other one was like, “We should switch everything to JavaScript.” They’re ironically more fervent than the Ruby on Rails folks, I found. Which is kind of interesting.

Joe: Yeah. For me, I know enough JavaScript to be less dangerous or whatever. But for me I feel like every other day it’s like “Have you seen this new JavaScript framework? You should learn that.” And I’m like, “Should I?” Because I learned Angular, and then React came out. Then Vue came out, and now something else is out. I want to write code.

Patrick: Yeah, refactoring for React, that was a fun project for us.

Joe: I heard the heavy sarcasm in your voice there.

Patrick: It’s just funny. The funny thing that I find, especially as a non-engineer, is basically looking at– That’s also, there’s a couple side notes. One side note, it’s funny whenever you ask– I used to run this founder meet-up in Boston, and whenever you would ask, it was for people who didn’t have founders, looking for founders or co-founders I should say. Whenever you ask a technical founder, “Are you a technical founder or more of a business founder?” They’re very clear, “I am a technical founder.” Whenever you ask a business founder, “Are you a technical founder, or a business founder?” They’ll go, “It’s a little bit of both.” No one stays in their lane, and I’m just like “No, I’m not a technical founder. I know I’m not. I know enough to be dangerous but dangerous in both directions. Helpful and terrible.” It’s interesting. I can’t even remember the other tangent, which I think was more relevant for what we were talking about, but yeah. Oh, React. The thing that comes up is, as a non-technical founder, it’s estimation, “When is this going to be ready?” That’s not the right question. But you do need to know when it’s going to be ready, or roughly when it’s going to be ready. So with React, it was like “Yeah, we’re going to refactor it.” I think it was something like five weeks, and it just took so much longer. It was just one of those things where it just kept coming up.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Whenever I come up with an estimation, I always double it no matter what. “How long do you think this will take?” I think it’ll take four weeks, so it’ll take eight weeks.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s what I’ve started to do in the back of my mind, whenever I hear something. Which I think is fine, because I think we’ve determined you can either have a deadline on– If you have a new feature, let’s say. You can have a deadline on when the feature is going to be ready, or when the launch is going to take place. We’ve chosen “We’re not going to have a deadline on when the feature is going to be ready.” That means when it’s ready, we have to tamper down engineering a little bit and be like “It’s not going to go out right away.” It’s going to go out within a reasonable amount of time, but you can’t expect everything to be dropped. It’s just fascinating. Especially when you start getting to a certain scale, and we’re not even that crazy scale yet. How that interaction plays out.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a very good point. I lost my train of thought there.

Patrick: It’s all good.

Joe: Here, I’ll clap my hands. Joel, if you could edit that part out. I’ll start at “That’s a good point” again. I think that’s a really good point, and I’ve read a lot of things from the BaseCamp guys about when they plan launches or features and things like that, and it depends on how your company works. But I think that, in general, human beings are optimists and that’s why we always get the short estimate. I think that nothing is going to go wrong when I do this, and therefore it’ll take me four weeks, but then two weeks in and you’re like “Oh my God. I have no idea how React works.”

Patrick: Yeah. We also spend– We don’t spend nearly enough time estimating, right? If we spent three weeks to estimate something that was going to take three weeks, you might be completely accurate, but you’re like “If it’s going to take five weeks, it’s better that I just started working on it.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good point too. As we wrap up here, I always like to ask, “What are your plans for the future?” I know you touched on this a little bit and ProfitWell has changed over time, but what’s some big thing that you’re working on coming down the pike that you’re, of course, willing to announce? I don’t want you to give your roadmap and then be held to it.

Patrick: No, it’s OK. You never give out your roadmap, or you never give dates of your roadmap. I think we– We’re pulling on this thread as the whole subscription science “Search for truth” concepts. I think that really where we’re at right now is just combining our brands, trying to get the right story to be told to combine the different products that we’ve built and then going deeper on everything that we’ve been doing. So if you think about any business, but especially subscription or recurring revenue businesses, you acquire a customer, you monetize that customer, and then you retain that customer. We want pure end to end deliverability– Or, excuse me, we want pure end to end basically analytics on everything from top of the funnel, all the way through your engagement. So we came out with our first version of engagement data that’s connected to your financial data last year, and we’re going to continue to pull on that thread and then also add top of the funnel data as well. We want it to be turnkey, not “You have to spin up a bunch of APIs and do a bunch of stuff,” but “It automatically does it for you.” Then with that, all of that data combined, it’s going to make our paid products which focus on basically solving some of these problems just that much deeper. That’s the non-specific answer, but the specific answer is we’re just going to keep going down this rabbit hole. Some specific things we’re coming out with that I’m excited about, there’s a whole talk that we could have about our approach to content. We’re focused very much on this whole media strategy. There’s a lot of video, and there’s a lot of blog, there’s just a ton of stuff that we’re coming out with. We’re basically going to be launching a bit of a network in the next couple of months here that you can access, and it’s going to have a bunch of different shows around subscription growth and things like that. That’s something we’re excited about when we think about content as a product, and so I feel it’s OK to throw that in the product roadmap discussion.

Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I think it makes a lot of sense. People have been saying “Content is king” forever, and it’s still the case. Good content is what drives organic traffic and trust and things like that. So as we wrap up here, I do want to ask you my favorite question. I’m excited for your answer, and that is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Patrick: Trade secrets. We’re pretty open with a lot of our secrets. We’re pretty open with everything we find out, so we have this show that we publish every week called “The ProfitWell Report,” which is just benchmarking data that we’ve discovered on different stuff. Everything from “Is it important that you sleep, in terms of growth?” All the way to “How do you optimize your annual subscriptions?” Things like that. I think– OK. So here’s two things, I don’t know if I’d call them trade secrets, but two things I think are super important that I feel are definitely going to be true based on the data. For one, I think in the next couple of decades there is going to be a need for every product to have some free element. It might not necessarily be a totally free tier, but it might be a side product that has a pricing greater or a marketing greater, things like that. Some of the businesses have already come out with it, and the reason for that is because content is getting so dense, we’re in this market where it’s like “Let’s make content better and better,” and good content will probably always be relevant. But we’re heading into this world where it’s getting harder to acquire customers, and so the best way to do it is to nurture them through some free product. We’ve seen that people who convert from a free product to a paid product typically have better NPS, better retention, better expansion revenue, etc. I think that the unit economics are going to continue to play out and you’re going to need some free element. This is why we gave away ProfitWell for free. Just because we saw that it wasn’t a great monetized feature product, I should say. Now we’re expanding on it, that’s the most trade secret I can give, and I’m more than happy to share the data for the show notes on that.

Joe: I think that’s fantastic advice because I think another way to put what you said is we’re very much in a trust economy or the beginnings of a trust economy. Traditional advertising doesn’t work for people, and people want to trust the people that they’re giving money to and the best way to develop that trust is by showing them you do good work by giving away part of it for free. In my case, I might create a free course to show people I know what I’m talking about. Then they start to trust me as an instructor and then they’re willing to buy my paid course because they like how I teach.

Patrick: 100%. Absolutely, 100%.

Joe: That’s great. Patrick, thank you so much for that piece of advice and for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Patrick: I am @patticus on Twitter. I’m also really active on LinkedIn, so just Patrick Campbell on LinkedIn.

Joe: Alright. I will add both of them to the show notes. Is @patticus, is that an homage to Atticus Finch, by chance?

Patrick: You know, it’s funny. Sort of. I think that’s the rationalization. It was in my sixth-grade chemistry– No, not chemistry. It couldn’t have been sixth grade then. Yeah, sixth-grade science class. There was this band called Atticus.

Joe: Oh, my God, yeah. I used to listen to Atticus, yeah.

Patrick: Yeah. I wasn’t a huge listener or fan or something that. But one of my classmate’s friends basically listened to them, and he was just like “It’s Patticus. It’s Atticus, but Patrick.” So that’s where it took off. It just was a childhood nickname and it never really fully caught on, but I’ve just embraced it. It’s one of those things where you’re trying to find a Twitter handle and having a pretty common name like Patrick Campbell pushed me to that.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. I will include links to all of that. Including a link to Atticus, the band, in the show notes. Which you can find over at HowIBuilt.it. Patrick, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate you taking the time.

Patrick: Absolutely, thanks for having me.

Outro: Thanks so much to Patrick for joining me today. I enjoyed a bunch of aspects of this story. How he was a bootstrapped company, how he recognizes that the way he built it when they first started is not necessarily the way they built it now, and so they’re changing a few things. He talks about the dangers of estimation for time and cost, of course. I like his advice about never giving dates on your roadmap, and his trade secrets about them being open about what they find out is great too. It falls into the same credo as the WordPress base, which is primarily where I’m from. So, thanks again to Patrick for joining us. My question of the week for you is, “How has this conversation shaped your view of pricing? Are you going to change your pricing model at all?” Let me know by emailing me, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. Thanks so much to our sponsors for this episode. Castos, Plesk, and Pantheon. If you liked this episode, go ahead and share it with somebody you think will also like it. I think there’s a lot for a lot of people here, so feel free to tweet it out or email it to a friend or a colleague who you think will benefit from listening to this episode. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Kirsten Bunch and Changing Careers

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Patrick Campbell and ProfitWell

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