newsletter

Get More Clients Using Content, with Jessica Lawlor

January 14, 2020

Transcript

Jessica Lawlor: I also like to get ideas from other people, so I try to think about “What are the questions people are asking me?” For those who own businesses, I’m sure whatever it is, that their businesses and people consider them an expert and are probably asking them questions. For me, I get a lot of emails from people saying, “I want to be a freelance writer. How do I get started? How did you get your first client? What’s the best way to send a pitch to an editor?” So I look at all of those questions that I get, or questions that I see other people may be asking on Twitter, or on Instagram, and I consider those ideas as potential content for my blog.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 151 of How I Built It. Today I’m talking to Jessica Lawlor, a content manager, and strategist. Your content plan is integral to your small business, as I’ve learned over the past couple of years. I’m being a lot more intentional this year, and in this episode, Jessica talks about how you can too. We chat about content calendars, answering important questions regarding your goals, and how to create content even if you are strapped for time. You’ll hear me say things like, “That’s fantastic” and “I love that” a lot because honestly, Jessica says it all. I had nothing more to add. So without further ado, let’s get on with the show.

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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 my guest is Jessica Lawlor, and she is the founder and CEO of Jessica Lawlor and Company, a content management business. Jessica, how are you today?

Jessica: I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me.

Joe: Thanks for being on the show. I’m excited to talk about this because while I– This. Producing content is my primary business now between my courses and the podcast, I feel like I just recently started to be intentional about my messaging and the flow of a podcast season. So, I’m excited to talk to you.

Jessica: I’m excited to talk to you as well, and that’s great to hear.

Joe: Awesome. Why don’t we start off with a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jessica: Absolutely. My name is Jessica, and my background’s actually in public relations. I graduated from college in 2010, and I went to Temple University here in Philadelphia. I studied PR, and that was what my career was in for a while, but I’ve always loved to write. Communicating via writing is something that I’ve just always been super passionate about, very excited about. Over the years, I’ve had various blogs. I had a book review blog at one time, I had a personal blog at one time, and now I have more of a business blog. But while I was in college, and then as I started my career in public relations, I was creating content online via my blog and via social media. It was through my blog that I landed my first professional freelance writing opportunity. I met someone on Twitter who asked me if I’d be interested in helping to create some blog content, and I realized it opened up this whole world to me that you can build a career and develop a passion through content. Ever since then, I’ve built a side hustle doing freelance writing, and then three years, I took my side hustle full time, and I started Jessica Lawlor and Company, which I call JL&Co for short. It’s all about content management and helping people to tell better stories.

Joe: That’s fantastic for a couple of reasons. First of all, this is going to be telling that I feel like I didn’t do a lot of deep research, but I like to be surprised. I was surprised to hear that you are in Philly, I am in the Westchester area.

Jessica: Oh, my gosh. What a small world.

Joe: I know, so we are relatively close. It’s cool to hear how you landed your first professional content, professional writing gig. I feel the same thing happened to me with websites. Basically, somebody was like, “You’re good with computers. Can you make a website?” And I said, “No.” And they said, “I’ll pay you.” That, like you said, opened up a whole world to me. So that’s a great story, which is good because that’s what we’re going to talk about. I said at the top of the show that I’ve been trying to be more intentional about my content and putting out the right messages, maybe we can start with when you get a new client or customer. What’s the first thing you do to make sure they are telling the right story?

Jessica: Such a good question. It all starts with a lot of research. When I land a new client I want to get to know them, I want to learn about their business, I want to do as much research as possible. I like to ask them if I can take a look at past materials they have, and maybe they already have a blog. But maybe they’re just getting started, so I do have an onboarding questionnaire where I ask them questions about who is their audience, who are they trying to reach, what problems are they helping to solve. Some of those typical marketing questions that you’ve probably heard before, but the biggest issue that I hear from clients or potential clients is they just don’t know where to begin when it comes to content. A lot of them also are wondering, “Is it still worth it to create content when there’s so much noise out there right now?” Obviously, my answer to that is, “Yes. It’s definitely worth it.” But really, what I love to do is to help people rein in all of their ideas and create a strategic content calendar that will help their bottom line and help them reach their goals, whatever that may be.

Joe: Gotcha. Do you find that a lot of people–? I’ll give you some context first, last year I interviewed Josh Garofalo, and we talked about how a lot of people in their messaging want to just reach everybody. Like, my target audience is anybody who wants to buy stuff from me. Do you find that a lot of people are not sure what problems they’re trying to solve? Or, did I say that right? Like, have people identified the problem that they’re trying to solve by the time they get to you?

Jessica: Sometimes, no. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A great example here is I work with TheWriteLife.com. It’s a website for writers, and one question that we’re always asking ourselves is, “Who is our audience?” Because a “Writer” is a very broad term. It could be a freelance writer, and it could be a technical writer, it could be someone who wants to publish a book and be a non-fiction author, or a ghostwriter. There’s so many types of writing. So even within– The Write Life knows who it’s trying to reach, we know we want to reach writers, and then even from there it’s “Do we need to niche down?” Asking those hard questions, so I find that sometimes people do have an idea. Maybe they have a broader audience that they’re trying to reach, and then we try to figure out what are the different types of content we can create to reach various audiences within their larger audience if that makes sense.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. So once you’ve identified the problems you’re trying to solve, you’ve gotten to know them a little bit better. Where do you go from there? Do they hire you to do specific types of content, is it strictly for the blog? I don’t know if “Whitepaper” is still a common term?

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, the way I like to describe what I do, I call it “Content management,” but “Content management” sounds confusing. I can see how it’s a pretty vague term, but what I often tell people is that if they bring on my team to help with content management, what they’re getting is an in-house managing editor. I think that helps people to think about it in a different way. Every client has different needs, but for me, this service can include a lot of stuff. It can include that editorial strategy that we just talked about. Figuring out who the audience is, figuring out what type of content it is that they’re looking for. It also involves content planning, which is my absolute favorite part of the process. I live for creating a content calendar. It’s my absolute favorite thing to do, and that’s fun because that’s when you get to brainstorm “What is the content? What are some potential headline ideas?” Part of my job is also finding writers, and that is something I can definitely speak to. I love working with freelance writers and helping them to develop and hone their own voices. I help to hire writers, and I also help to create content myself. Sometimes a client will want to hire out writers who are experts in whatever topic they’re talking about, but sometimes me and my team will create the content for them. It also ranges from editing the work, doing headlines, a little bit of SEO optimization, helping a client figure out how to promote the content they have. I think that’s sometimes where people get frustrated with content, is that they create this wonderful content, and they put it out into the world, but they don’t promote it, and no one sees it. Then they get frustrated that the content doesn’t create results. Content strategy also includes making sure that you’re promoting your content too, and then also helping a little bit with some email marketing and affiliate marketing. You mentioned whitepapers, that’s definitely still a thing. Most of my clients now call it e-books or just downloadables, or freebies. But all of those things fall under this umbrella of “Content management,” but at the core, it’s what you said. It’s telling great stories that lead to someone taking some type of action.

Joe: That’s fantastic. It sounds like you offer a whole wide range of things, but you said, “I live for creating a content calendar,” so let’s dig into that a little bit. I’ll just give you a softball firs, I think. How important is creating a content calendar?

Jessica: Creating a content calendar is immensely important. Without the calendar, you have no idea what frequency you’re going to be publishing at, and you have no idea what content you’re putting out there. Especially when you’re working with writers, you need to try to work as far ahead as possible so that you can account for deadlines, and you can account for editing time. It’s definitely important, and whether you’re publishing five days a week or seven days a week, or even if it’s just once or twice a month it’s great to have that calendar to also see “Are there timely things happening within the year?” We’re obviously heading– Right now we’re recording in December, so we’re coming towards the holidays, and I’m not sure when this will go live. But depending on what time of year it is, there’s certain content that might be a great fit, so if you’re planning ahead, and you have the opportunity to seek out those opportunities and take advantage.

Joe: I think that last part has been what’s helped me a lot. Like I said, I’m trying to be more intentional, and that included creating a content calendar for this podcast from January through May. I know that this episode is airing in the early part of the year, and you are right before my interview with Matt Medeiros and podcasting. It’s going to be “Telling a story,” then “Telling your story on a podcast,” and then “Should you start a podcast?” That’s going to help me cross-promote some other things, like a course I’m working on and stuff like that, but I also know later in the year I might want to talk about some other things. “We’re going into summer, that’s going to be a feast or famine time for freelancers. Let’s talk about how to beat that.” But I agree, I just started doing content calendars three months ago, and I’m already seeing the benefit of it, and I don’t feel like I’m doing it right. So my follow up question for you is, what do you recommend for somebody who wants to create their own content calendar?

Jessica: Sure. First off, Joe, that’s super smart that you’re doing that. I love to hear that. And it sounds like you’re being strategic about thinking about how your content– You’re obviously putting out this podcast content, but you’re also trying to figure out how it blends in with the rest of your business. I think that’s super smart, so kudos to you on that.

Joe: Thank you.

Jessica: In terms of creating the content calendar, there’s so many different ways. I have a couple different tools that I love to use. One is called Air Table, and it’s pretty– It has a lot of functionality. I probably don’t use it to the fullest extent, but I like to use their calendar function as an easy way to drag and drop ideas from one date to the next. I also love to use, there is just a simple plugin, I can’t remember the exact name, but it’s a plugin for WordPress that’s an editorial calendar, and I use that for one of my clients as well. Already we’re within the blog, and you can move things around easily. Of course, you can just use your own calendars. You can use a Google calendar, and some people prefer spreadsheets. I’m more of a visual person, so I like to look at the calendar by a monthly view. Trello is another great tool, and it’s really up to you and the way that you like to be organized. For me, I’m type A, I like to look at the calendar, and I prefer to use the WordPress editorial calendar or just my own Google Cal.

Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. I use Air Table, and I did not know they had a calendar view. Right after this interview, I’m going to be checking that out.

Jessica: Yes. A lot of functionality there.

Joe: Awesome. Air table is such a great tool, and I feel like you get maybe too much for free. I haven’t been compelled to want to pay for it yet because I don’t use any of the paid features, but I’m sure I’ll get those soon.

Jessica: I love that, and I also use a very similar tool to that one called Click Up that I’m a very big fan of, and it’s very similar to Trello. I also use the free functionality, and it’s been fantastic for that, but in terms of just going back to what goes on your calendar, for me, I keep it very simple. If I have a blog post idea or a headline idea, a potential headline for that piece, I just plug that into the day that I’m planning on publishing it and then work backwards to figure out other deadlines. If a blog post is going live a month from today, I need to figure out who is going to be writing that post, and when should the post get to me so that I can edit it? How long will it take me to figure out headlines to do optimization for SEO? Working backwards in that way, but some people like to get a little more complicated. Some people like to create content briefs. That’s something that I do for some of my clients who like to have more detail about what a post might look like upfront. So we do a little research around the keywords ahead of writing the post, figure out what we want to include and decide if we need to interview anyone, find some resources and put all of that in a document so that the writer has a lot of information to go off of. That’s something that you also might include in an editorial calendar if you’d like to take it a step further.

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Joe: How far out should you write your content calendar? Do you do a whole year, or do you do a quarter? What do you think is best, or what do you do most of the time?

Jessica: That’s a great question. It depends on the client, and it depends on the posting frequency. For example, my client Muckrat is a tool for PR professionals, and it’s a software. They post on their blog about four times a week, so that’s a pretty robust publishing schedule. When we’re posting that much content, I like to try to plan a month or two months in advance. Typically the Muckrat team or whatever client it is, they might have quarterly goals or some ideas by the quarter, but in terms of planning out the nitty-gritty of what’s going to be going live on their blog, we like to plan about a month or two in advance. If you’re publishing less frequently, maybe four times a month, you could still do that just a few months in advance. Or it sounds like maybe what you’ve done in the case of your podcasts and business is looking at the whole year and figuring out “When are you going to be launching other products or other services, when does it make sense?” I think it depends on what your goals are, but I personally work best planning out maybe a month or two in advance. Because things change and you want to take advantage of opportunities that pop up as well, so if there is a trend that’s hot right now and it pertains to your business it’s important to be flexible and make some room on your content calendar to be able to address whatever it is that might be hot or trending at the moment.

Joe: That’s a great point. I think that at least I’ve heard the term “News-jacking” for some of that stuff. It’s a great call, that’s why we have hot takes.

Jessica: Totally.

Joe: That’s fantastic. So, one to two months in advance, depending on how often you publish. I think that is a great point. So, if I’m a freelancer or a small business owner and I say to myself, “I’m too busy to blog,” or “I’m too busy to put content out, I need to spend all of my time finding clients.” What are some of the things that you would say to them? Like, how can publishing on a regular schedule, where you said it could be even once or twice a month, how can that be helpful to a freelancer or a small business owner?

Jessica: Putting out content is so helpful, especially for small business owners. I think where people get overwhelmed is, like you said, a lot of times, a small business owner is one person. They’re so busy, they want to focus on growing the business, and they think that content– They know content is important, but they don’t know why or maybe they just don’t have the time to do it. One thing I like to encourage people to do is to look at the content that they already have. A lot of times, business owners have content that they haven’t put out there in a public way that they could probably repurpose. I’m a really big fan of repurposing content. For example, maybe even– I would encourage a business owner to look back at their Instagram. What have they posted on Instagram in the past couple of months? A lot of times, people tell many stories in the caption of an Instagram post. Is there a story in one of your recent posts that you could potentially repurpose into maybe a little bit of a longer blog post? That’s a way to figure out something that you’ve already done and repurpose it in a new way. Another thing is business owners are always going around and speaking at conferences, events, webinars, and they create often a presentation for these kinds of events. I love to encourage people to repurpose the content that they’ve created for a presentation or for a webinar and turn that into something else. I like to challenge myself when I create something to figure out, “How can I break this down, and how many different ways can I break down this content to share it in a new way?” I like to encourage people in that way. That’s what I would tell people who maybe already have some content, but for those who have maybe no content, I would encourage them to see if they could make the investment in hiring someone and just seeing if it works. You know what I mean?

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a really good point because it is an investment. I’ll tell a quick story, and it has to do with one of the sponsors for the show. Ahrefs– Hold on. I’m going to read you the– I’m going to tell a quick story about one of the sponsors for this show called Ahrefs, they’re sponsoring this episode, but I started using them before they sponsored. I realized that my online courses site wasn’t ranking as well as I thought it would, even though I had the number one courses in a couple of subject matter areas. It’s because I wasn’t putting out content on that site. I figured, “I blog on my blog, this other site will just be for courses.” But that’s not a great strategy. I should have regular content there. So, what I’ve been trying to do– Speaking of repurposing, is when I put out a YouTube video, I write up a blog post along with it. I take the outline for the video, and I publish that over on my online courses site, and it’s a great way like you said, to take content I’m already doing and put it somewhere else.

Jessica: I love that. Yes, and I and I know you recently did an episode on repurposing content with Jaclyn Schiff, the founder of Pod Reacher. Full disclosure, I’m now working with Pod Reacher as their managing editor, but that’s what drew me to Jaclyn’s business was I love that she essentially encourages people with podcasts to hire her and her company to repurpose podcast content into other online content. For people who don’t understand how content works, it might seem a little crazy, or it might seem like you’re repeating yourself, but you’re not. People consume content in so many different ways. Some people are visual learners, and they love YouTube. Some people like audio, they are podcast listeners. Then other people still love to just read long-form articles online, so I think the more ways that you can get your content seen in the way that someone else wants to consume it, the better.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a dramatic uptick in downloads and listenership when I started publishing transcripts for each episode because I got feedback that, aside from the accessibility aspect, a lot of people just like to read or scan for the big points. So I think like you said, it’s super important. Jaclyn is awesome. I enjoyed having that conversation with her, and I’ll link to her episode and a bunch of other things we’ve talked about so far in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it. I just wanted to mention one more tool around repurposing, since that’s all we’re talking about right now, and that’s repurpose.io. Have you heard of this? Have you seen this?

Jessica: I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t, no.

Joe: I would not be, because it’s mostly for media like podcasters. I found it recently, and I found a really good annual deal before their price went up. But what I’m using it for is taking this podcast and automatically sending it over to YouTube. That’s just another channel for my content, but they also create like audiograms and stuff like that. They’re not a sponsor or anything, and they’re just a tool that is top of mind for me recently. Again, another good way if you’re doing media stuff, an easy way to repurpose without having to put in any work at all– Like, if you make a YouTube video and you want to have a podcast, you can use repurpose to send your audio over to whatever your podcast host is. So, repurposing is a great idea, especially the Instagram. I see people post tomes on Instagram.

Jessica: I think it’s great, and I think it feels to people like it’s less daunting. I mean, the idea of sitting down and writing a blog post for a lot of us, especially those who maybe don’t consider themselves writers, is a daunting task. It’s even daunting for me sometimes looking at a blank page, so I think for people who just want to speak out to their audiences, Instagram is so easy. Because they’re just on their phone, they’re posting a picture, and then they’re just writing from the heart. Essentially that’s what writing should be, but it becomes a little more complicated when we know we’re publishing it for the world to see. I think that Instagram is a great place to go back and see if maybe that inspires any ideas that you could use in the future.

Joe: I think that’s a great point. When someone is trying to come up with content, looking at your website, you talk about telling someone’s story, how would you recommend someone come up with ideas to tell their own story? Should I tell about the time, like my first PHP code, or whatever? The first time I wrote PHP, like, are people going to care about that? It’s like, how do I weed out the good ideas from the bad ideas? Are there any bad ideas in content? Things like that.

Jessica: OK, let’s see. Where to begin? That’s a loaded question.

Joe: Yes.

Jessica: I guess there is bad content or bad ideas, but I think when it comes to brainstorming, put all of those ideas down on paper. First, I would say brainstorming is a great way to start, but I also like to get ideas from other people, so I try to think about “What are the questions people are asking me?” For those who own businesses, I’m sure whatever it is, that their businesses and people consider them an expert and are probably asking them questions. For me, I get a lot of emails from people saying, “I want to be a freelance writer. How do I get started? How did you get your first client? What’s the best way to send a pitch to an editor?” So I look at all of those questions that I get, or questions that I see other people may be asking on Twitter, or on Instagram, and I consider those ideas as potential content for my blog. Thinking about what questions you’re asked the most is a great place to get started as well.

Joe: That is just a fantastic idea because people are– Even if you have clients, clients are asking you questions about the process and about “What about, how do I help you with this? What’s the review process like?” That’s all good content for you to publish.

Jessica: Totally. Also, maybe if you’re not getting asked those questions on a regular basis, put it out there and say, “Ask me anything.” I was in a little bit of a blog rut on my personal blog a couple of months ago, and I decided to send out an email to my email list, and I made the subject line “Ask me anything.” It was the simplest email I’ve ever written, it was probably three sentences long, and I said, “I’m having a blog rut. What do you want to know about? Ask me anything. It can be about business stuff, and it can be about my life, it can be about my favorite TV show. Ask me anything.” I’ve never received so many email responses to an email newsletter that I’ve sent out than to that email. I probably got about 30 responses, and of course, some of them were more of the personal silly questions that I just answered for fun, but I got probably ten solid future blog post ideas just from asking. It never hurts to ask, and it doesn’t have to be asking an email list or Twitter following, maybe even asking just people in your close circle.

Joe: I am absolutely stealing that idea.

Jessica: Please do. I probably stole it from someone else, but honestly, it energized me too. Hearing back from people, I was like, “Yes. This is why I blog because people do want to hear from me.” I think that’s where a lot of times we can get bogged down too, by getting discouraged by how much content is already out there. People often wonder like, “Is my voice unique? Do I have enough to say? Why do people care?” But really, it is important if you have a story that you’re putting it out there.

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Joe: You mentioned your email newsletter, and I think that’s something that many guests on this show have preached that you should build. As we wrap up here, I’m wondering, and we have all this great content. What do we do with the eyeballs that are seeing that content? Do we prompt them to join our mailing list? Do we have a different call to action? Is it based on your goal? What is generally the next step after I write this great content, and I want to get somebody into– To use the sales-y term, “My funnel?”

Jessica: Sure. I do think it depends on your goal, maybe the goal at the end is to reach out to you for– Or, not you, but whoever. To reach out for whatever service it is that you are offering. But directing people to an email list is a great way to get them into your funnel, so if someone reads, a blog post that you wrote or an article that you wrote for someone else and you have the chance to link to an email list, once they’re on your list you can obviously nurture that relationship in a bit of a more personal way. That person has allowed you into their inbox. One thing I always recommend when it comes to email marketing is giving your email list a little bit more, or something different than just what you’re putting out there on your blog. Letting them in helps to build that trust, and then when you do something to sell or when you have something that you want to market to them, oftentimes, they’ll be a little bit more receptive to it. I am a big fan of getting people on your email list because I think it’s one of the best ways for you to build that trust and build that relationship to bring it onto to bigger things, perhaps.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. This last question before we get into the tips/trade secret is, for me, we’re talking about coming up with ideas for content. When you have your blog and then separately your mailing list, are we looking at a house divided here? Do we need to come up with two sets of content for both? Or, is there something else that you can do creatively with your mailing list to repurpose the content there for your blog or vice versa?

Jessica: Such a good question and I struggle with this myself. I’ve changed my strategy up over the years because I do think that it’s important to include in an email to your audience a link, at least, to your recent blog post. Because people do consume information in different ways. Not everyone uses an RSS feed, or not everyone sees your tweet that you wrote a new post. I do think it’s important to include a link to your latest content within your email, but I also try to always give my e-mail subscribers something a little extra. Maybe it’s something that I wanted to include in the blog post, but I didn’t have the room, or even sometimes, I like to get more personal and vulnerable with my email list. Again, my blog that we’re talking about right now, this isn’t for clients, but my blog is a business blog about how I’ve taken my side hustle and turned it into a full-time business. I give myself that liberty of being a little bit more personal and vulnerable, but I try to share just something a little extra while still making it relevant to whatever the most recent blog post is that I want to promote. This gets us a little bit into tips, but one tip I would share in regards to e-mail marketing is to always include a “PS” at the end. I don’t know why, but I like a “PS.” I always find my eyes drawn down to that, even if I maybe haven’t read the whole email itself. But you could always include a link to a recent post or even just an older post that you want to drive traffic to within that “PS,” so I would encourage everyone to give that a try and see how it does.

Joe: Awesome. That is another thing that I’m going to write down and make sure I do on my next newsletter. I can always tell how good an interview is based on my action item list after it, and this one is getting long.

Jessica: I love that.

Joe: So, thank you very much. This is fantastic. As we wrap up here, we’ve talked about a lot of stuff. Why should you put out content, how do you come up with ideas, and building a content calendar. What are a couple of tips that you would give to a freelancer or a small business owner who wants to be, let’s say, more intentional about their content management?

Jessica: One thing I would definitely recommend is taking an hour or maybe two hours away from wherever it is that they typically work to just do a little bit of content brainstorming. I’m sure that ideas come to them throughout the day and maybe they jot them down on their phone or put them in an email somewhere, but I find that if you set aside a chunk of time to do a little bit of brainstorming and thinking about content, you’ll often find a little bit more success. Getting away from your desk, going somewhere else, maybe with a notebook, maybe leaving the laptop at home and just sitting down and brainstorming some ideas. That’s definitely one tip. Another tip again is to talk to people around you. Ask them, “What are they curious about when it comes to your business? What questions do they have?” Those are the questions I love to answer. I realize that a lot of people in my life, even people who are super close to me, don’t know exactly what I do. I’m always trying to better explain that. I get a lot of blog post ideas just from talking to people who don’t fully understand what it is that I offer, and that’s good to know because a lot of times the people that you might work with, they don’t have an understanding of what it is that you do because it’s the service that they’re looking for that they don’t know how to do themselves. Asking those questions is a really smart way to develop some content, and my third tip here would just be to get started. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t have to have a year planned out. If you have a blog post idea right now or a content idea, what’s one small step that you can take today to get it started? Maybe it’s writing an intro, and maybe it’s coming up with a headline idea. It could be something super simple, but don’t wait. A lot of times we wait because we want to make sure that we have our calendar in place, we want to make sure that we have enough content. But I would say just get started now, and then that’ll help get the ball rolling.

Joe: I love that. That’s fantastic. That’s the same advice I give to people who want to start a podcast. They say, “How do I start?” I’m like, “Just hit record. Figure it all out later, but get comfortable in front of the microphone and know if you like this and start recording yourself.” I think that’s fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and all of this advice. I do need to ask my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jessica: I do, I have two trade secrets. One is very tactical, and then one is a little bit more general. So my tactical idea here, my trade secret, is around headlines. Headlines are a super important part of the content puzzle. My tip here, and I learned this from Alexis Grant, who is the founder of The Write Life. She’s one of my clients. Never write just one headline, for every blog post that I write for myself or for a client, I write 5-10 different headlines. Sometimes they’re very similar. Sometimes it’s almost the same variation, maybe just switching up a word or two, but once you get into the flow, it’s like brainstorming. Once you get into the flow of writing headlines, often the first headline you write or maybe the one that inspired the blog posts idea, it’s not the best headline. Maybe it’s not the best for search engine optimization. Maybe it’s not really what the blog post is actually about, but by sitting down and writing 5-10 headlines, you’ll land on one that will really make sense and will probably resonate more with your community.

Joe: Awesome. 5-10 different headlines?

Jessica: Yeah, a little bit of work, but it’s good.

Joe: It’s important. You mentioned SEO specifically there because you need to figure out what is going to attract people without deceiving them. You want to make sure that your headline summarizes what you’re talking about, as well as gets the attention of the Google robots.

Jessica: Totally. Then my last trade secret here, and we’ve touched on this a little bit already, but it’s never too late to get started with content. I’m sure the same goes for podcasting or starting a website or starting a business. I know it feels like everyone’s out there doing it, but there’s room for everyone, and everyone has their own unique voice. I always encourage people, and it’s never too late to get started. Jump in now.

Joe: Awesome. Excellent advice to end on. Jessica, thank you so much for your time. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?

Jessica: Sure. I’m at JessicaLawlor.com, and I’m also on Twitter. My handle there is @JessLawl, and I love Twitter, so I’m always there chatting. Find me there or on my website.

Joe: Awesome. I will link to those two things and a whole bunch of other resources we talked about today in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it Jessica, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Jessica: Thank you.

Joe: Thanks so much to Jessica for joining me today. I thought this was a fantastic and timely interview for me. My favorite takeaway was that if you need an idea coming up with content, to e-mail your newsletter subscribers and tell them to ask you anything. I think that’s fantastic. I’ve done that a few times since, and I’ve gotten some great responses that have produced a lot of good ideas for me. Then the other thing is, always try to give your subscribers a little extra and always include a PS at the end to draw them in. I think that’s a lot of really good advice there, just around your newsletter. Your newsletter is your best place for selling your products or services, and things like that. So again, thanks to Jessica for all of her fantastic advice. If you want the links that we talked about, the show notes, and all that fun stuff, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/151. Thank you to this week’s sponsors, SaneBox and FreshBooks. Those are two tools that I use every day in my business, and I’m so excited to have them on the show. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a rating review over at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you are more interested in the membership that I mentioned at the top of the show, or you’re wondering, “What stuff will I learn if I sign up for a membership at Creator Courses?” You can get a free guide on 5 tools to help you build websites faster over at HowIBuilt.it/tools. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Developing a Mailing List Tool on top of GMail with Ajay Goel

September 24, 2019

Transcript

Joe Casabona: Recently, Pat Flynn over at Smart Passive Income talked about the new hot marketing tool that isn’t new but is often forgotten, and that’s email. Today, our guest AJ Goel has built up a business around the fact that there are lots of people who haven’t forgotten email, and that there are scores of people who are remembering the importance of email in their marketing effort. AJ built GMass, a Gmail extension that allows you to send marketing campaigns right from the Gmail interface that we all know and love. In this episode, we got to talk marketing, development, and much more. I got to pick his brain about building a Chrome extension, which I thought was super interesting, and of course, AJ gives us lots of great and actionable advice. So, let’s get to it. But first, here is 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 my guest is AJ Goel, the founder of GMass. AJ, how are you today?

Ajay Goel: I’m doing great. I’m excited to be here, Joe.

Joe: Thanks so much for coming on the show. You booked at a point right before I got sick, and then I traveled, and then I moved into a new house. I have you in Evernote like four times based on each show we’ve had to reschedule. So, I’m glad that we’re able to finally get together and do this.

Ajay: Yeah, and then I got sick eventually as well and had to reschedule. I think that makes for what is going to be an awesome episode because the wait has been so long.

Joe: Yes. We’ve been building it up, like waiting for the next Star Wars movie. Hopefully, the next Star Wars movie will be good so this ages well. So, why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Ajay: I am a software developer by profession, and I’ve also been an entrepreneur for most of my career. GMass is my product and my business. GMass is a Chrome extension for Gmail that lets you send email marketing campaigns from directly inside your Gmail account.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I’m so excited to talk to you about this for a few reasons because I’m a software developer myself, but I’ve never written a Chrome extension. I’m usually in the realm of PHP and JavaScript stuff, but I love this idea of being able to send email marketing campaigns right from Gmail. Because I feel like you’ve probably found this yourself in the quest for the perfect email client, a lot of people generally fall back to Gmail.

Ajay: I live my life in Gmail all day and all night when I’m working, and I wanted an easy way to send the email campaigns without leaving that environment. A few years ago, when I first started working on this, I assumed that somebody had to have already built this because it seemed like such an obvious idea. It turned out that a couple of people had tried, but because Gmail has never done a good job of supporting developers that build on top of Gmail, they weren’t very well-designed products. So, I saw this opportunity.

Joe: Awesome. I love that. I don’t love the lack of support that Google provides to Gmail developers, but I love that you first were like, “For sure somebody wrote this.” And then you saw the opportunity. It’s like I feel like if you see a product that is just so-so, there’s two schools of thought, “I can make it better,” or “There’s a reason this developer is not making it better, and it’s probably not financially feasible, or it’s not worth it.” So, you took the more positive path here.

Ajay: Yeah, definitely. Email marketing has been on a growth trajectory as an industry ever since the early 2000s. I had another email marketing company that I built and sold prior to starting work on GMass. When I saw that there wasn’t already a good plugin for Gmail, and when I recognized that I’m already an email marketing expert, I decided that I have to be the person to build this.

Joe: Yeah, I love that. You’re absolutely right about email marketing because I think a lot of people– At least, let’s say the mindset two or three years ago was “Email is dead. Long live Twitter and Facebook as the best way to get to people.” But since I’ve started this show, more and more of my guests have said, “Email is so important.” It’s been their main driver of their business, and growing their email list is their number one goal to get an audience– A good, qualified audience. That’s what you’re looking for.

Ajay: Yeah. It’s interesting because I have a lot of entrepreneur friends, and to give you a counter-perspective to what you just said, and I have a couple of entrepreneur friends who are not in tech who have pretty much given up on email. They don’t use email as a medium anymore. However, the vast majority of entrepreneurs, especially tech entrepreneurs and people inside these organizations are using email more and more often. The biggest evidence I see of that because I’m always worried about the death of email because the death of email represents the death of my career or the death of my company. But the thing that I look for is anytime I send out a campaign to my own users, and it’s the most exciting thing for any marketer after sending out a campaign is watching those stats come in and seeing who’s opening your email and when they’re opening your email. Sending out an email campaign compared to any other communication channel, like posting a Facebook message or tweeting a tweet or posting on any social network, the time it takes for those opens to come in immediately after sending an email campaign– I’m talking seconds, emails get opened within seconds, minutes after sending a big email campaign out. That’s pretty good evidence of how tied people are to their email accounts.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Personally speaking, email is the first thing I check in the morning. Though I feel that’s unhealthy and I shouldn’t, I can’t help it. I pick up my phone, and I look at the time, and I’m like, “I wonder what emails came in overnight.” So, I fully believe that. I know that some people, like you, said, maybe people not in the tech space, like the influencer space is probably more like “Instagram or Instagram Stories is a good way to reach your audience.” But as far as in my experience and the people I’ve talked to like you said, those qualified leads and those people who are on your mailing list are the people that you’re most likely the most connected to. So you found that there were some extensions doing what you wanted to do, but they weren’t very good, what was your next step? Did you have a feature set in mind? Did you talk to other people about this idea?

Ajay: My next step was to scope out what I wanted my minimum viable product to be. I already knew that that didn’t take very long. Within five minutes I could write down what I wanted it to d and all I wanted it to do, and this is still the core essence of the product today, but all I wanted the plugin to do well was to make it so that a button sat next to the normal send button in Gmail. I wanted my button to act slightly differently from the normal Gmail send button, in that if I put 20 addresses in the to line and then put in a subject and put in a message, just like I would normally type in the email in Gmail and send, I hit the send button I know that that one email is going to go to all 20 people, and those 20 addresses in the “To” field will be visible to all 20 people that receive the email. What I wanted my button to do was to take those 20 addresses in that “To” field and send individual emails. So 20 individual emails with just one address showing up at the “To” field. So splitting the two field up into individual emails. That’s all I wanted the plugin to do initially.

Joe: That’s great. That’s you being a good internet citizen because I have been on newsletters where they forgot to either do the BCC field or something like you did and then I was privy to all of their responses because the other people decided to reply-all instead of just replying to the sender. This happened mostly in the higher-ed space. We used this one software product that emailed their entire customer base more than once, and then I got all the responses in my inbox, and those were terrible days.

Ajay: That’s poorly designed software. I’m flattered that you’re calling me a “Good internet citizen,” because most people when they learn what I do for a living and what GMass is, “Good internet citizen” are not the words that come to mind.

Joe: It’s taken me a few years to figure out the importance of email marketing. It works, obviously, it works, and if you do it in a good way, then you can connect to your user base. If you’re sending them an email every hour like, “Buy this new thing,” that’s being a bad internet citizen, but that’s also not email marketing. That’s just spamming people.

Ajay: Absolutely. We promote the ethical use of our tool and the ethical use of email to communicate with people, although we do have bad actors that are always trying to sneak around our filters.

Joe: Right, absolutely. Every piece of software will have that. There’s an ongoing, let’s say, I don’t know, “Debate” in the WordPress space and in the hosting space about various websites that are being hosted by people or various websites that are using WordPress, and whether they should be allowed to based on their message. I’m not sure where you’re based, I’m based in the United States.

Ajay: Me too. I’m in Milwaukee.

Joe: Cool, very cool. I figured as much, but I never want to assume. I think we’re on a similar time zone, and I think I noticed. But anyway, the First Amendment is a very important thing. So, who are the bad actors? Who are the–? That’s a little bit of a tangent, though. Because there is definitely bad email actors.

Ajay: We can get into the Constitution if you want.

Joe: I know, I don’t know if I’m ready for that. I don’t know if the listeners are ready for that. Maybe I’ll release that as a bonus later. OK, so you had your minimum viable product at this point. Were you using anything, like any, let’s say professional–? First of all, what’s the timeframe here? Like around what years?

Ajay: This is 2015.

Joe: OK, cool. So were you using any other mailing list service like Mailchimp or ConvertKit? I don’t know if ConvertKit was around then.

Ajay: I think it was, but I was not. I had built another email marketing platform called Django Mail, which was a lesser-known platform, not quite as popular as Mailchimp. I ran that for 10 years and then sold it. So if I was going to use another external platform, it was probably going to be that because I was most familiar with it because I had built it. But I’ve always been of the mindset that if I’m going to do anything in email, because email is where my expertise lies, I tend to play this mental game with myself where I tell myself that– Let’s say I want a particular email automation functionality or a particular email marketing feature, and let’s say there are other products that have it and I really need it. I play this game with myself, where I forbid myself from doing what I need to do until I build it inside my own product. So to answer your question, in a roundabout way, no. I was not using any other platform, and when I finally needed a platform because of the work that I was doing at the time, I decided I wasn’t going to send an email campaign until I had built my own product to do what I wanted. That’s what GMass was.

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Joe: Let’s get into the title question then. We’ve set this up, you found that there were tools, but you wanted to improve upon them. You had your MVP. How did you build it? How did you decide, “I’m going to make this a Chrome extension?” I guess that’s a pretty easy answer, but what was it? What were the pre-development considerations that you made?

Ajay: Sure. I had already built another Chrome extension that was another plugin for Gmail that did something entirely differently, it was a proofreading and editing plugin. So I’d become familiar with the world of Chrome extensions, and actually, it was an effort– I was going forward with that product that led me to this need of being able to communicate with 20 or 30 people at once, needing to send a personalized email. That’s the genesis of the idea, and then because I had already built this other Chrome extension that also added a button next to the send button, I had the fundamentals down. So I knew I could pretty quickly spec out in my head how the first version of GMass should work. Now, my skills were in using this library that this company in California called Streak had just introduced that made it possible to add all sorts of buttons and widgets to the Gmail interface. This company in California called Streak created this library called Inbox SDK just a few months prior to me launching the initial version of GMass, that made it easy to hack the Gmail interface. I mentioned earlier how Gmail has never really supported developers that have built stuff on top of Gmail, so this company came along and made the jobs of all these developers that had been trying for years to hack the Gmail interface with some success here and there– It made our jobs a lot easier. I jumped onto this library and built GMass on top of this library. Now, where I lacked skills was in the back end programming part, so this library allowed me to do the front end part which is adding the buttons into the Gmail interface and control how the user interacts with the product. But I didn’t know any back end programming, I used to when I built my prior company, but my skills were so outdated they were basically irrelevant at this point. So for that piece, I hired a friend of mine from high school who is a back end programmer to write that initial functionality that takes those addresses in the two fields, splits those up into individual addresses and basically in a software loop, loops through those addresses and kicks off those emails. So, he built that part, and I built the front end part, and within a week, I had a working version of GMass.

Joe: Wow. That’s interesting. First of all, is this library still around street? Streak, Inbox SDK, or both?

Ajay: Yeah. Streak is one of the most popular CRM systems in the Google ecosystem, and Inbox SDK is now used by thousands of developers.

Joe: Awesome. That’s interesting. Let me start here because I don’t know this. What language– In what language do you write a Chrome extension?

Ajay: JavaScript. It’s pure JavaScript.

Joe: OK. That was probably an assumption I could have made.

Ajay: I should have said so.

Joe: I feel like Google writes everything in JavaScript– Google has a tool that converts Java to JavaScript, or vice versa. They have a compiler that does something like that, I learned about that in grad school. Maybe they probably– That’s been a while, so they probably killed it because they [inaudible].

Ajay: I haven’t heard anyone reference “Java” in a long time.

Joe: Yeah. I had to write Java or something like Java for my master’s thesis because it was being built on an Android phone. The first Android phone.

Ajay: I remember in college, Java was supposed to be the whole future of the world. “College,” I should I should put some context around that. This was twenty-two years ago, but I don’t know.

Joe: I’m getting close to that. I graduated in ’07 and got my Masters in ’09, so a little more than ten years for me. But same thing, JavaScript was not being taught in college when I went to college, and we were still doing Java because that was supposed to be the language. The cross-platform language.

Ajay: Those good old applets.

Joe: Yes, exactly. I know some of my professors who are still running Java applets on their websites, they wrote their website in HTML. I don’t know if they work anymore, but they’re still there, I see the little icon that’s like, “You need to enable Java.” Then what about the back end part? Was that also JavaScript?

Ajay: No, so that was C#. That’s where I didn’t have any skills at the time, so C# was a back end language, and SQL Server was the database platform.

Joe: Gotcha.

Ajay: My entire career, the stuff I’ve built has generally been on the Microsoft platform. Which isn’t highly regarded in the startup tech community, but it’s what I’ve always known and been familiar with, and my dad was a software developer, and that’s what he used. So it’s been in the family for a long time.

Joe: Nice. That’s cool. I used C# for a little bit, and I liked it, but I know what you mean. Today especially, it’s like “Have you heard of Gatsby? You need to try Gatsby now.” I’m like, “Two months ago you were telling me to use React.” I want to use something for more than a month and a half.

Ajay: Shifting platforms is hard because there are so many little undocumented intricacies and–

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. You’re always going to have technical debt no matter what you do unless you never launch then you’ll never have any technical debt. But to want to switch platforms because this thing is newer creates a lot of other overhead and headache. I think if it’s the best tool for the job, use it, but don’t just use it because it’s new, is my personal philosophy.

Ajay: Definitely.

Joe: If C# and SQL Server work best for you, and it– Is it still there?

Ajay: Yes, it still is. I don’t know why there are so many haters for the Microsoft platform.

Joe: It’s because it’s fun to hate Microsoft. But I think they’re doing some good work. That’s a hot take, “I like Microsoft and the work they’re doing.” Cool. So you have this JavaScript front end using Inbox SDK, the backend is C# and SQL Server. You’re making an asynchronous call, you have the button showing up in Gmail, you press that button, and it takes that data and sends it via “Ajax.” I don’t know if Ajax is an outdated term now.

Ajay: No, you’re right. The Chrome extension is making Ajax calls in JavaScript to the back end, which is written in C#. I’m impressed with your lingo, Joe.

Joe: Thank you.

Ajay: That’s what’s happening. So actually, in the very first version in that minimum viable product, let’s say I had 1,000 addresses in the “To” line and you hit that GMass button, you put in a subject and put in a message and hit that GMass button. In real-time, it loops through and is now sending one email at a time until it does all 1,000, and you might imagine that because that’s happening right in front of you on your screen, it basically freezes up your Chrome browser for the duration of the sending of that 1,000 emails. So, that was a problem. The first evolution of GMass after that first version was to make it happen asynchronously so that you hit the mass button, and you’re given an “All clear, good job, success, you did it” message. Then in the background without interfering with your current work, the emails start to send.

Joe: Nice. Very nice. That’s cool. Send everything to the server, and then you’re doing this through Gmail so at some point that information gets passed back, and Gmail allows that? Or are you also simulating that through button clicks with JavaScript?

Ajay: Good question. Gmail had allowed that by the time I started working on GMass, so Gmail had just released an API about a year prior. An API for back end developers, so the entire set of GMass functionality is built on top of the Gmail API. The timing of building GMass was fortunate because just a year prior Gmail had released its API, and just a few months prior Streak had come out with Inbox SDK. I now had the library for the back end, and I now had the library for the front end.

Joe: Nice. So timing was really good for you.

Ajay: Timing was perfect.

Joe: Yeah, I think that’s important too like if I have this idea that’s ten years ahead of its time, it’s not going to be unfeasible, and if I have the idea probably 12 months after the tools are available I’m not going to have the first to market anymore.

Ajay: I think a lot of the famous tech companies that people know about, Instagram and Twitter, I think a lot of them are successful because of timing. I don’t think timing is talked about enough in the community of how to be a successful entrepreneur.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s so true. Cool, so we’ve been talking for a while, but this is interesting to me. I don’t write enough code in my day to day anymore, so I have to live vicariously through other developers. It’s not anybody’s fault, I just started a business where I create online courses and do podcasts, so I need to find time to make coding my side hustle. So you said the first major evolution was making sure things happened asynchronously and that they were performant. What are some of the other evolutions that have happened? I think I’m most curious about this, Is because there are really popular mailing list tools, is there–? Or actually, let me rewind. You mentioned stats, so why don’t we talk about stats?

Ajay: Yeah. That was one of the key features that was added fairly quickly after launch, and I’m sure within a couple of months. The basic stats with any email campaign are open tracking and click tracking. From a technical perspective, how do you program those features? It’s pretty easy, so open tracking involves inserting a image tag into the email that is sent. If you’re sending a campaign to 100 people, we insert a unique image tag into all 100 emails, that’s what allows us to gather that open tracking data. From an interface perspective, it’s just a checkbox. The user just checks, “I want open tracking,” or “I don’t.”

Joe: OK.

Ajay: That came shortly after converting the sending process to an asynchronous process, then right after open tracking we added click tracking, and again it’s not a difficult technical thing to do. Adding click tracking to an email marketing product involves using some regular expressions to find the links in the campaign and then modifying those links so that they hit our server first and then redirect to the actual link so that we can capture the link and then generate the report in some readable, aesthetically pleasing way back to the user. Those two features, those two statistical features were added shortly after.

Joe: Gotcha, and that makes sense. That is actually how– From my understanding, that’s how most email marketing applications do that. They insert maybe a pixel, like a single-pixel image.

Ajay: That’s how everyone does it. There’s no other way to do that.

Joe: That’s super interesting to me, given that in 2019, you would think that there would be– It just shows how far behind email is. I guess email applications are.

Ajay: Yeah, it’s difficult to push email forward because email is so widely used. Anytime you have something that’s so widely used, if you want to introduce a change to the fundamental email protocol, which is called SMTP, you have to get everybody who makes email software to get on board and adapt to that change. That’s a really hard thing to do.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. If we look at maybe like a sister technology, like HTML markup with the World Wide Consortium, W3C, they need to convince essentially ten or fewer browser makers to adopt these standards.

Ajay: Right.

Joe: But going back to my experience in higher-ed, I had colleagues who still used command-line email, like still, three years ago.

Ajay: Like Elm. Elm I remember.

Joe: Yes, exactly. I’m like, “Why are you using–? We have graphical interface.” He goes, “I don’t want that. I want to read my email.” I’m like, “That’s wild.”

Ajay: That is wild.

Joe: So you’re absolutely right, you need to get Outlook and anybody who talks to Outlooks email servers, you need to get Google and Apple mail and anybody– There are dozens of email apps on the iOS store, on the Mac store, on the Windows store.

Ajay:, now that you mention that, you said how an HTML change only has to cater to maybe a dozen browsers. It is true that there are basically only two companies in the world that run the email ecosystems, and they’re Microsoft and Google. If you are a company and your company uses email, you’re either on the Microsoft Outlook platform, or you’re on the G Suite platform.

Joe: Right. Absolutely. I tried using other ones, and I was like, “Why am I not just paying $5 bucks a month for G Suite?”

Ajay: Right, and that’s what it costs. Generally affordable.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve looked into Proton mail, I liked their privacy settings or whatever, but I know Gmail. Going back to now what my professor said, “I’m familiar with Gmail, but also everybody– You can assume if someone’s using Gmail, the email you get sent will be processed the way you assume it will be.”

Ajay: Right.

Joe: But then that also goes back to talking about stats and how you do open tracking and click tracking, designing email is the same way. You still need to use HTML tables because you can’t assume the latest versions of HTML will work in every email client.

Ajay: Correct, yeah. There’s tons of information on the web about how to design an email so that it’s the most compatible across the most number of email clients. And yes, people do still use table tags in email where they would not use table tags in designing a web page because there’s easier ways in CSS to accomplish that.

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Joe: This is another good question for you, I use ConvertKit for my email marketing, and I don’t have any special templates. I’ve read just plain text works best anyway, so mine is just straight up text. Do you do any designing inside of Gmail, or is it mostly just–? OK, so how do you do that?

Ajay: You can.

Joe: Right.

Ajay: The Gmail compose window is a fully functional HTML editor, so let’s say you’re a Mailchimp user. You can literally copy and paste your Mailchimp template over from Mailchimp into the Gmail compose window and using a combination of a couple other plugins you can access the HTML source code and manipulate it, and it will render just fine in the Gmail compose window. In that sense, using a product like mine or even some of my competitors, you can send a rich text HTML campaign through Gmail. Now, from an email marketing trend perspective, it’s interesting because email campaigns have become more and more text-based over time. Because there has been this tendency to want the email to look as natural and as personal and as typed by a human being as possible. So if you’re interested in getting the highest reply rates, let’s say your goal is to get a reply rather than a click, you’re probably doing an outreach campaign maybe, “Here’s hoping to get some engagement, hoping to develop a relationship.” If your goal is to get a reply, you probably want to send just text. Our goal is to get a click like you’re an e-commerce retailer and you’re sending out a promotion, and you want people to click and go to your store and buy something, and then graphics are more appropriate.

Joe: This is a really good takeaway for the listeners and for me if you want a reply just text works best. I’ve noticed that lately as I’ve changed my own campaigns, like when somebody signs up for my clickbait and my “Opt-in” I always send them a follow-up question like, “What’s the number one question you have about podcasting?” And I get a lot of replies because it’s very– It’s just text. It looks like I wrote it myself. But when I send out my weekly newsletter that’s usually composed of links, it gets a decent click rate, but I’d like to raise those, and if your goal is to get a click you said images are best?

Ajay: Yeah. You don’t have to, but that’s where they can serve you well if used in moderation and the whole thing is still well-designed.

Joe: Yeah. That’s another really good point. If you still have a three-column multi-color thing, it just looks overwhelming and could look pretty bad inside of whatever email client you’re using.

Ajay: A great example is when Amazon.com sends you a product recommendation based on your purchase history. The Amazon.com email will contain a picture of the product because it should because it makes the email more valuable.

Joe: That’s a really good point. Cool. I love that piece of advice. As we are getting to the end of this interview, I do want to ask you, you’ve had some pretty good evolutions. You’ve added stats, and you added the performance enhancements. What’s maybe one other big feature that you’ve added since launching, and what are your plans for the future?

Ajay: Another big feature we’ve added is we have this tool called the “Inbox spam or promotions” tool, and it’s a button. If you hit this button within the GMass interface, we’ll send a copy of your email to about 20 internal addresses that we maintain and then we’ll almost instantly show you out of those 20 addresses which of them landed in the inbox, which of them landed in the spam folder and which landed in promotions. To build off of that, our next big feature launch which is going to be in a couple of weeks is going to be called the “Spam solver” tool. And that will be an evolution of the “Inbox spam or promotions” tool, where not only will we send your email out to test addresses and show you where it’s landing, but we’ll automatically vary elements of your email until your inbox rate is at some certain high threshold. So we might make your subject line all lower case, or we might eliminate the graphics in the body of your email, or we might route the email through a different server. We’re going to run all these variations for you automatically and then tell you, “OK, this is what you should change in your email because this is what’s proven to get a higher inbox placement.”

Joe: Wow, that’s cool. That’s cool because as far as I know, I’m not like a power user, but I have no idea when emails I send get sent to spam or not.

Ajay: Yeah. So there are other tools that do that, like the “Inbox spam or promotions” tool isn’t the only tool that does that. There’s a company called G Lock that’s probably the most well-known company in that space, but as long as email has been around no one has ever written a tool like what we’re about to launch, which we’re going to call the “Spam solver.” We’re hoping that’ll be a big deal for us.

Joe: Yeah, that’s super cool. We’ll certainly keep an eye on that, and I suspect by the time this episode comes out– I won’t say that I’ll check before the episode comes out and then in the intro, I will mention if it’s out or not, like a pre-show bumper. So that’s cool, I will certainly look forward to that because I think that’s, like you said, a very unique tool. As we wrap up, I do need to ask my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Ajay: GMass has been built upon many trade secrets, but one that I’m willing to share is the importance of reviews and asking customers for reviews. GMass is significantly bigger than it should be based on the size of the company and how much money we spend on sales and marketing, GMass is significantly bigger than it should be because we’ve mastered our review game. I’ll say whether you’re a restaurant on Yelp or a software app with a listing on Capterra or G2 Crowd or a Chrome extension on the Chrome Web store. Getting everybody you can to write a review is instrumental in visibility. The more reviews you have, the higher you jump in the rankings. Not necessarily on the Google search engine, but on the platform that’s important to you. If [inaudible] is your platform or the Chrome Web Store is your platform, or the iOS app store is your platform, reviews drive your visibility. We’ve done a good job at asking users for reviews.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I love that. I feel like that needs to be reinforced with me, I’ve been toying with my call to action at the end of the show, whether I say “Share it with a friend,” or “Give it a rating and review on Apple podcast.” That’s the platform that’s most important to me. But for a while when I was doing the call to action to leave a rating and a review, this show cracked the top 20 podcasts in tech for a little while. When I saw that go down, I was like “All right, I’ll get people to share it and then maybe for this season I’ll go back to asking for a rating and review.” I’m experimenting a bit, but I did notice a noticeable change in my downloads and my placement in the directory. So it’s fantastic advice there, definitely put a process in place to garner or elicit reviews from your customers.

Ajay: Yes.

Joe: Cool. Ajay, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Ajay: I’m on Twitter, @parttimesnob on Twitter. You can email me at Ajay@Gmass.co and if you want my phone number to call me, contact me through one of those other channels first, and I’ll give you my phone number.

Joe: Nice. Very nice. I will include both of those as well as a link to the Chrome extension for GMass in the show notes for this episode over at HowIBuilt.it. AJ, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Ajay: Thanks, Joe. It’s been great.

Joe: Thanks so much to AJ for joining me today. I enjoyed this conversation. I know I say that every week, but my guests this season have been absolutely incredible. I loved his trade secret, asking for reviews from customers. By the way, if you like this episode, please review it on iTunes or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I love that we got to talk development and marketing, two things that I’m very passionate about and one of those things which I’m better at. Thanks so much to our sponsors, those are Ahoy! Pantheon and Gusto. They make the show happen, so check them out as a thank-you. If you like this episode and this show be sure to subscribe, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/Subscribe to get all of the subscription links. You can get all of the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it/139, and if you are interested in creating your own podcast, you can get my free workbook over at PodcastLiftoff.com. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, get out there and build something.

Kim Gjerstad and MailPoet

November 27, 2018

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode of 104 of How I Built It. Today, I get to talk to Kim Gjerstad of MailPoet. We cover a little bit of a different topic today. We’re not just talking about how MailPoet was built. We’re talking about Kim and his team has been able to build a really great remote company culture. Working for both non-remote and remote companies within the past six, seven, 10 years, I can tell you that building a culture among remote workers, well, your remote workers is a lot harder. You don’t see those people every day. You don’t get to go to lunch with those people. You don’t get a lot of face time. And so, Kim offers a lot of really great advice on how to build a remote team, where to find remote workers, and some of the tools that they use to make sure that the ship is running smoothly.

This is a really great episode, and it piggybacks pretty nicely off of a couple of weeks ago when I talked to Liam Martin from Time Doctor about making sure that your remote teams are tracking time and productivity in the right way. Kim has a philosophy on tracking time, as you’ll hear in this episode, but still there’s a lot of really, really great advice, especially as more and more teams move to a remote philosophy.

We’ll get into all of that in a minute, but I do want to tell you about our sponsors for today’s episode. The first is Pantheon. You’ll hear about them later in the show. The second is Creator Courses. WordPress 5.0 is an inevitability, and there’s a lot of concerns around how’s the new editor going to work, how should I talk to my clients about the new editor, what do I need to do to make sure their site doesn’t crash during this very important holiday season? Well, the courses over at creatorcourses.com will help you. There’s one just for users, so if you just want to know how the editor works, you could take that very affordably. There’s one for freelancers to communicate all of those changes to your clients, and there’s one for theme developers. If you go to creatorcourses.com/Gutenberg, you can see all of the offerings there. As an added bonus, you can use the code build it for a discount. Again, that’s creatorcourses.com/Gutenberg. Well, with that out of the way, I think there’s only one thing left to do, so on with the show.

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 Kim Gjerstad, co-founder of MailPoet. Kim, how are you today?

Kim Gjerstad: I’m doing pretty good, yourself?

Joe: I am fantastic. As we record this, it’s Labor Day here in The United States. It’s a beautiful day. It’s pretty relaxed because a lot of people are not working. I’m enjoying being able to catch up on some of the more clerical things of the business. Let’s see. Where you based now, just out of curiosity?

Kim: I’m based myself in Southern France, but we have a team of almost 12 people, and we’re spread around either Europe or Eastern coast US.

Joe: I asked that because the exact topic of today’s show is building a remote team and exactly what goes into that, but Kim, why don’t you first tell us about who you are and what you do?

Kim: I co-founded a plugin for newsletters for WordPress seven years ago in 2011. We’ve been running the same one plugin ever since, so that’s what we do.

Joe: Nice. That plugin is the thing that powers your business, and you being able to hire 12 employees, and things like that.

Kim: Correct.

Joe: That’s incredible. Just to set the stage, MailPoet is a plugin that is essentially you build your newsletter within the WordPress dashboard. Is that right?

Kim: Yeah, that’s correct, yeah. I like to say it’s like a Mailchimp in MailPress for those who are less familiar with WordPress.

Joe: Nice. I like that a lot. So you create your content, and then you can build your newsletter directly from the same interface, which is nice if you like to send out mailings of your own posts and things like that, right?

Kim: Correct, yes.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. As you mentioned, you have a team of 12 that is completely remote. Generally, I ask how did you come up with the idea or what research did you do, but in this case, I want to ask, what made you decide to have a remote team as opposed to a team all in the same place?

Kim: Right. We didn’t invent a model. When we started out back in 2011, throughout those years there were already other people experiencing that. The first, I mean, the most known was Automatic themselves. Automatic set the stage for all other smaller companies in the WordPress community. I had previously worked in a remote setting as a consultant. When we started MailPoet, we were four people and we didn’t live in the same city. And so, we started, it was in the DNA. We started as a remote team.

Joe: Nice, nice. That’s actually a really good point, right because we’re talking 2011 here. I worked for I had just gotten a job at the university and throughout my time there, I tried to convince them to let me work remotely, at least part time, and it was a tough sell. They essentially did not let me. In 2011, the idea of a remote team was not nearly as widespread as it is today. Automatic set the stage. So it’s in your DNA. Did you feel like you were taking a risk by doing it, by bucking the trend, and saying, “I’m hiring people who are not next in the same room as me.”

Kim: Right. It was. It got a little more complicated, not in the hiring process per se because you can hire anyone. The pool of talent you can reach is suddenly a lot wider, so it wasn’t in the hiring per se and people do look for jobs in a remote environment. This said, the challenge wasn’t there. It was mostly, okay, how can we scale a team in a remote environment? I mean, we’re still only 12 people. Automatic is hundreds of people. Still at a smaller scale, it gets complicated. There is things to put in place in order to fill the gaps that are missing gin a remote environment.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely stuff I really want to touch on because I worked for a remote team before going full-time on my own and that was one of the things that was tough, how do we, for example, how do you onboard a new employee? But first, you started off as a team of four people. When did you make your first hire?

Kim: I guess it was within after 12 months, so it was relatively quickly or within the first year, yeah.

Joe: Nice, very nice. You mentioned that having a remote team was in your DNA because all of the four co-founders or the four people who started the company were remote, but what kind of research did you do to make sure that you do it right, right? Because I mean, I can hire say a contractor here in The United States. I just pay them, and I send them a 1099 or whatever, they send me a 1099. Or if I hire somebody in my state, easy peasy. You just fill out the employment form and the taxes are all the same, but there’s a lot of difference especially because you have a multi-national company, right, essentially?

Kim:

Yeah, right. We have contracts at MailPoet today, but originally we were just hiring essentially freelancers, but on a full-time basis. I would say, “Let’s hire you as a freelance, but since you’re a full-time, and we want you to be full-time, then we’ll give you all the benefits of being a full-time employee.” Which would be vacation, not working on weekends, etc. You start building okay, you’re building a real job for someone. It’s just contractually, it’s still just a freelance. Today, we have written contracts, but I mean even before, we didn’t really need to have them, yeah.

It’s pretty like it’s not that difficult. People who are mostly afraid of the contract. People that have jobs and need to switch this environment, they’re like, “Well, what kind of contracts? When are you going to pay me? What is the legal, is it legally binding?” One way to comfort new arrivals is to say, “Well, here’s a contract that MailPoet or my remote company.” And everyone gets the same contract. You can talk to your future coworkers and confirm this.

Joe: Wow. Well, first right there, you can talk to your coworkers about the contract. That’s generally something that’s discouraged in a, well, let’s say a traditional, on-location work environment, right. You’re not really supposed to talk about salary or benefits and stuff like that because you don’t want to cause mutiny among the employees.

Kim: Right. Yeah, in a remote environment, you have to bet on transparency and full faith in being fair, right. We’ve got inspired by Buffer. Or for example, our compensation grid is public, well, internally public, so everyone knows how mu I earn, how the other colleagues earn. Buffer’s blog has been an eye-opener for many of us and I strongly recommend just to look into it. They call it the Open Blog, which is like the open company. So everything is transparent there. They’re going full-force transparent. We’ve gone pretty much that direction, except we’re not completely transparent with our customers or outer public, yeah.

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 gather resources to help you prepare including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it ways 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: I guess another question about this, which I feel is kind of different in the WordPress community especially, but do you have a hard time being that transparent? The opensource community generally is, but other more traditional or old hat industry are like, “No, you can’t know anything that we’re doing. That’s crazy. We have to keep it all close to the chest.”

Kim: Right. I think the switch, I initial … Now, I haven’t spoken, a few entrepreneurs have called me in the past, in the networks that I’m in here in France to ask me questions about remote offices. Of course, when it comes to remote offices, horizontality comes to mind, right. I think more of the switch to more classical environments has to be these little changes within the DNA, and say, “Okay. Well, we’re vouching for transparency. We’re vouching for a complete freedom of information.” If you chat with someone, chat on a public channel. Don’t chat on a, you know.

Joe: Oh, yeah.

Kim: So these kinds of tips and tricks. We don’t have a choice in remote because information is always in silos, right. You’re fighting that silo all the time. You want to break those down, so you have to overflow. You have to make all chats public all the time, and let people pick what they want to read.

Joe: Yeah. That’s I want to touch on two really good points there, right, because even in a traditional office, you try to combat the information silos, but it’s maybe a little bit easier when your coworker can walk across the hall to you and say, “Hey, I have a question.” You see silos in maybe different areas of a department. Maybe all the programmers get together, and there’s one silo. Then the project managers get together, and there’s one silo. It’s really easy in a company of 12 to have 12 silos, right, because everybody’s by themselves.

Kim: Yeah, yeah. Slack has these weekly stats that just say how many conversations were in public channels and how many were in direct channels. For example, this week I saw that the previous week, we had 25% of our conversations were in public channels. I thought, hey, well, that’s unusual because usually it’s more like over half our conversations are public. It was something about last week that was more like in secrecy maybe or people don’t want to add noise in channels for nothing. Generally speaking, I’d say half of our conversations or more are public.

Joe: That’s great and that’s a very cool feature of Slack too. We would get, I think, monthly reports when I was at Crowd Favorite. One of C-level officers would say, “Hey, this month, this many chats were private. This many were public. Let’s try to be better about that.” The other thing you mentioned was with remote offices, you look at a more horizontal organization, right. That’s talking about the org chart, right. Again, traditionally, when I was at the university, I reported to my assistant director. My assistant director reported to the director. The director reported to the VP, who reported to the president, who then reported to the board of directors, but with more remote teams, you see, I mean, that was a five level deep chart, and I was a senior developer, right. So you see less of that, right?

Kim: Yeah, I guess. I mean, we’re still a very small organization, right. At 12, we’re not big enough to have, let’s say, two teams of engineers. When I say by two big, usually it’s kind of like the management model that Google enshrine, where all teams should be a maximum eight people, and all of these teams should have a team leader. If you look at more of holacracy theories, where each group elects its own focal points for the outside. I mean, we’re looking at those and we’re saying, yeah, okay. We’re fairly horizontal. They say we’re kind of small. We don’t yet have a second team of engineers. I mean, we do have a DevOps that’s on the outside, but we’re not that big enough yet, yeah.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s really interesting. I do want to change gears here a little bit because you did talk about how can we scale a team, and there are some inherent difficulties with scaling a remote team. A lot of people say the life’s blood of a small company is the culture, right. I want to ask you about the culture and then the onboarding and training. How do you build culture at MailPoet?

Kim: Building culture in a remote environment is really by the way you act online like the way you act in Slack, your behavior on a day-to-day basis. We’ve in the past wrote some values down of what we think are the correct values that we share at the end of the team. This set, at the end of day, we’re more into, okay, it’s nice to have them on the wall, right. But just apply them day-to-day. Be helpful, be collaborative, don’t hide information, for example. Yeah, that’s how we’ve approached it, yeah.

Joe: Gotcha. As far as getting face time or your employees getting to know one and other, do you encourage video calls? Do you have team calls or anything like that to get everybody in a room or do you think that Slack does a good job of that?

Kim: No, that’s the hard part. Yeah, we need to meet face to face. We meet once a year on an annual meet up or annual trip. Now, is that sufficient? We feel it’s not. Maybe should be once every nine months. What else? Because we don’t, during the week, we don’t really have conference calls all that much. We do have some one-on-ones between let’s say one of the project managers and some of the colleagues. We do encourage those things, but then we don’t have stand-ups or we don’t have conf calls, so there is a bit of loneliness or lack of getting to know each other or space for that. I know some other teams, and we did one last week, just to try it, but I know some of the remote teams do a happy hour. Like on Friday, they’ll just like anyone comes into Zoom or a Hangout and just starts just to hang out basically.

Joe: Ah, that’s pretty interesting. I haven’t heard that before, but that sounds pretty neat. I’m sure that maybe one of the difficulties, right, is you mentioned you have employees. You’re in France, you have some folks on the East Coast of The United States. Then you said Eastern United States and Europe mostly, right? So Western Europe?

Kim: Actually, I should correct that because it’s the Midwest. We have someone in the Midwest. Yeah, we basically don’t hire people on the West Coast or in Asia, Australia etc. It’s just too far. We need to have a few hours of overlap in order to properly function. The person in the Midwest, she does really wake up early every morning, but she used to work for an Australian company, so she was used to that, right.

Joe: Gotcha. Gotcha, yeah, so that was probably a big improvement. I should say that as a born and raised New Yorker, basically anything West of New York and East of California is considered the Midwest to me. Just anything that’s not the coast is the Midwest.

Okay, so that’s cool. I guess, one of the, and this’ll be the last thing we talk about culture, but you want to make sure you have overlapping time zones with your employees, right? Because that can be really hard. When I was at Crowd Favorite, we had people in The United States and we had people in Romania. We had a couple of hours in the morning, but somebody may be in Australia was out of luck if their counterpart was on the West Coast of The US or maybe the East Coast of The US. Cool, very cool.

The other thing that you mentioned about answering the question, how can you scale a team? What came to mind was onboarding. Because I’ve seen it at both ends in a traditional company, I basically went around to everybody office and they taught me something about the job. Then in a remote environment, I had one-on-ones with certain people in the company, but I feel like there was a lot more on the job training. How do you mitigate that?

Kim: Right. Onboarding is what basically we do is we have there’s two … Okay. There’s just the actual day setup, which is just creating all the accounts, but then quickly it becomes, a new person has to set up a Skype or Hangout or Zoom talk with each of the colleagues. Then the new arrival needs to write a top 10 of things about themselves. It can be quirky or impersonal or it can be just professional. Then depending on the position, then we have just sessions, either sessions of working together or like let’s share the screen, and then let’s just work together. That’s how we do it on a remote environment. Then the project managers or whoever is taking overseeing that person, then just makes sure that it’s going well. Onboarding is pretty, I think the main aspect is that that new person really needs to Skype everyone, at least in a team of 12, it’s doable, right. At least have one physical contact other than Slack.

Joe: Gotcha. Yeah, I like that a lot because really, I mean, when I record these shows, I like to do face-to-face even though it’s an audio-only podcast because I feel like I have a stronger connection with my guest. You mentioned Skype or Zoom and Slack and Provision Accounts. Do you have a set of recommended tools that you use to help manage remote teams?

Kim: Well, we used, we really used the unusual suspects, right. It’ll be Google Docs, Trello. At MailPoet, we use Jira to manage the software development aspects with GitHub for just to for versioning. What else we use is specific or no, that’s pretty much it. There’s no specific tool per se. We use, there’s a new tool we stuff using called Velocity, but that’s more for seeing the performance and productivity of the depths. It plugs into GitHub and gives you a dashboard where you can see how your colleagues are doing, if there’s being slowed down etc. Apart from that, there isn’t more than that, no.

Joe: Gotcha. Actually, you touch on a really good point too there, right. Because it’s hard to measure productivity for a remote team, especially if you’re in different time zones or you’re not there. I had a boss, who wanted me to be in the office, so he or she could check up on me essentially to make sure I was doing my work, which is crazy because it’s easy to fake doing work in front of a computer. But I guess the point of that is do you do things like time tracking or do you feel like that’s burdensome for your team? Is Velocity sufficient?

Kim: Oh, yeah, we don’t. No, we don’t track any hours per se. It really goes against the philosophy. People who show up at work and if they’re motivated just by their presence, then it’s the wrong place to work. What are people motivated by, right? They’re not motivated by being there or being watched over etc. They’re being motivated by what they’re learning, their responsibilities they’re getting, the collaboration they have with their colleagues, how that current job fits in their career or at least what the perspective of their career might be at that moment, the salary the conditions. When we look at MailPoet, we look at these different aspects, when we discuss with someone their happiness at work.

Joe: Nice. What do you think is the best way to gage motivation? Is it the one-on-ones that you mentioned earlier?

Kim: One-on-one is a critical, in a remote environment, one-on-ones are critical. I don’t do them myself as often, but there’s another person, my colleagues does them as well. But they are the critical lifeline, at least to know what’s going on and also maybe fight loneliness. Loneliness and lack of communication or lack of feeling a part of something are the problems in a remote office.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we mentioned information silos before, but working remotely can make you feel like you’re in almost a literal silo because it could be lonely.

Kim: Correct.

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. Well, we covered a lot of ground, but I know that in the pre-show, we were talking about several other topics. Is there advice about remote teams that we didn’t cover here?

Kim: Well, there is one topic that I have in mind, which is hiring. If you want to hire or you want to be hired for a remote team, weworkremotely.com is the main job board for jobs for remote businesses. There is plenty there. Also, if you get a profile on, oh, the name escapes me now. This startup hub. I will remember it. Then there is we found out that if you, of course the best way to hire developers is word to mouth or personal recommendations, but if you want a great place to hire is Stack Overflow. When people that are not actually searching for jobs, but developers that are looking for answers, they go and find answers on Stack Overflow. And there on the right column, you can have your job position there. Now, being in that spot is quite expensive. Last time I checked–

Joe: I bet.

Kim: Last time I checked, I think it was 5,000 grand, but–

Joe: Wow.

Kim: But it does save you quite a bit of time. You basically, it’s kind of like hiring a head hunter, where somebody is not looking for a job, and then suddenly, oh, there he is. He’s poking at your job description. And remote jobs are remote is a keyword that’s very attractive for anyone in the workforce. So that’s definitely one place to … Actually, the only sort of two places where we post jobs in the past have been those two, We Work Remotely, and Stack Overflow.

Joe: Nice, very nice. We Work Remotely, that’s the job board from the guys over at Basecamp, right? Formerly 37signals.

Kim: Yeah, actually the job board was sold to another group recently, so they don’t take care. I think it was last year it was sold. So it doesn’t belong to them anymore, but that is originally theirs, yes.

Joe: I’m going to link to that in the show notes and also the book by the same guys called Remote, which is all about working remotely.

Kim: Yeah, correct. Matt Mullenweg has spoken recently about remote environments as well. I think either on his blog or elsewhere in podcast, he mentions the challenges of remote. Being such a large company, they’re a bit at the forefront of it, so he’s definitely got some interesting perspectives on it, yeah.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I will try to track down that link and put that in the show notes as well. Generally, at this point, I like to ask two questions. One is about what are your plans for the future, but I think in lieu of that one, I want to ask if there’s a job, particularly in our field, you think is not suitable for remote work, right? I was going to say any job, but a construction job clearly is not suitable for remote work. Do you think there’s a job in maybe the computer-based field that’s not suitable for remote work?

Kim: For me, I think the hardest one in our team is, at least in my eyes, but it’s product management. Product management requires talking to people all the time, right. If you have an idea for the product, you want to validate it with the support team. You want to check it out with the devs. If you have somebody in marketing or in growth hacking, you have to talk to them as well. It’s like bringing all the different groups or the different parts of the team together, and having a conversation, but you can’t. You’re in this remote environment, so you need to interview people. It’s that part is a little difficult. It’s a pain. To tell you, we’re changing. At MailPoet, we’re just changing a bit and we’re saying, “Okay. Well, since it’s so …” Me and another person that does product, we decided just to slot, okay, one hour every day. We just discuss. We pick up the phone and we just discuss all the items. So based–

Joe: Nice. That’s yeah.

Kim: More–

Joe: That’s a really good answer.

Kim: More phone conversations for the product managers. Yeah.

Joe: The project managers, I guess, the equivalent in client services. At my remote job, their calendars were just constantly full of meeting. I used to think, how do they get anything done? I’m like, this is where they’re getting their entire job done. I think that’s a fantastic answer. The last question I like to ask is do you have any trade secrets for us?

Kim: Well, we don’t really have any. We’ve been meaning to match MailPoet to work with WooCommerce for a while. We just never really got around to it so much, but it looks like we might be finally getting out of our busy period because we were working hard on onboarding. And now we’re looking into WooCommerce right now. This will be the next step for us. I’ve been talking about this for a while, but maybe I’m jinxing it again, but anyway, hopefully we’re going to get there.

Joe: Nice, nice, a little secret what’s coming down the pipe for MailPoet. I like that. Kim, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Kim:It’s pretty easy, kim@mailpoet.com.

Joe: Nice, cool. I will link that in the show notes as well. This was fantastic. Really good advice if you are thinking about starting your remote team or if you’re thinking about taking the leap and becoming a remote worker. I think there’s a lot of good advice there for both folks. Kim, thanks again for joining me. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Kim: Pleasure’s all mine.

Outro: Thanks so much to Kim for joining me today. I really appreciate his time and his insight on building a good remote team, building a good company culture. I really love what he said about needing to meet face-to-face and how they try to meet every nine months or so, maybe every year, every nine months to make sure that you get that face time with your coworkers, right. Because that’s important in building a bond, and building trust, and things like that. I just loves this conversation.

Thanks again to our sponsors, Pantheon and Creative Courses. Both are providing fantastic resources for Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0. My question of the week for you is if you run a company, do you do it fully remote or do you have people that are basically in the same city or town that you are? Or is you are employed or looking for employment, how important is a remote position to you? Either way, let me know by emailing me, joe@howibuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. If you want to discuss this stuff with other listeners of the podcast, you can join the Facebook group over at howibuilt.it/facebook. For these things and all of the show notes, you can go to howibuilt.it/104. If you liked this episode, you can head over to Apple Podcasts, and leave a rating and review. It truly helps people discover us.

As we start to wrap up season five here, this is the second to last episode, interview episode at least, I am just ecstatic with growth that this show has seen over the past six months. I’ve hit a few really important milestones, and if all goes well, better the end of this year, I will hit another one. So thanks so much for your support and for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

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