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29/3/2018 0 Comments INTERVIEW 6 - Nathan Kontny, CEO of Highrise: Deconstructing Highrise (and why “eating your own dogfood” is good for business)During the Techpreneur Interview Series, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to entrepreneurs from the US, Canada, and Europe, bootstrapped businesses, full-time techpreneurs, a side-hustler, and entrepreneurs that have gone through accelerator programmes. In this final interview in the series, the Purposeful Products Blog features Nathan Kontny, an entrepreneur that has founded several businesses, including City Posh and Inkling Inc. Several years back he was brought in to run Highrise, a startup SaaS company whose core offering is a “simple CRM” system for entrepreneurs. We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including the intricacies of running customer interview sessions, strategic marketing, hiring, and hustling in general! In this post, we will "deconstruct" Highrise, and look at how an established SaaS company literally “takes care of business,” as explained through the eyes of its CEO.* This is a long post, covering a range of topics, including:
You can download the entire interview here. Welcome Nathan! First, could you tell us about Highrise and how it came to be? My understanding is that it’s a spin-off from another company… Highrise was originally launched in 2007 by the makers of BaseCamp. They were known as 37 Signals back then. They were having trouble keeping up with talking with reporters, and lawyers, and dealing with landlords… There were all sorts of collaborations that needed to happen. Because it was people based, rather than project and task based, it didn’t make sense to use the Basecamp project management software, so they created a simple CRM to do the job. It ran for years, but it was never the focus – that was on BaseCamp. The product hadn’t had any updates for a while, but was growing as a business, and it deserved more attention. It became a spin-off in 2014, which is when I came in to run it. Highrise is now its own company, and there are 7 of us in the team. We help people who need a simple CRM, and need to track who said what to whom, and when - whether it’s sales leads, speaking to journalists, or other tasks; it’s about making sure those things don’t fall through the cracks. In previous interviews, we’ve talked about how people got started, but I’d love to talk to you about the middle part of the story - about establishing the product, marketing, sales, optimisation, and fine-tuning… Just from looking at your website, it seems that you know your user base really well. There are a lot of references to how your customers work in your sales copy, with some really specific language - for example, when you talk about customers’ “lead spreadsheets.” How did you gather such intimate knowledge of how your customers think and feel? There are a couple of things – talking to them, and using the product so much ourselves. None of the Highrise employees came from BaseCamp. We didn’t have that knowledge of who the core customers were, and who was using it. So right away, we made sure that we used the product every day. We started using it for our internal helpdesk, and used it to manage all our incoming emails, and for managing support requests, feature requests, and customer requests for pricing and demos. We converted that all over to Highrise. Just the act of using the product every day to support ourselves gave us a lot of knowledge of the product, how people use it, its quirks, and its problems. I come from an Agile background, and when you consume the service that you are offering to customers, we call that “eating your own dogfood” – because if it’s good enough to give, or sell to others, it’s good enough for you to use as well, wherever possible! This removes those blinds spots you can have in relation to your product. When you use it yourself, you can empathise better with your customers, and get eyeball-to-eyeball with the things that don’t work so well on a practical level, because you're a customer too. How did you approach speaking to customers? It’s quite hyped-up parlance now, but we ran a number of Jobs to be Done (JTBD) interviews. JTBD looks at how people identify that they need to solve a problem, or transform in some way – in other words they recognise that there's a “Job to be Done.” A person then “hires” a product, that has a "Job to Do", to get them from where they are, to where they want to be. Jobs to be Done was made famous by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor and leading thinker on disruptive innovation. He's the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma, and the Innovator’s Solution books. Clayton did some research for McDonald’s because they wanted to increase milkshake sales. When they started asking people why they were buying them, people were saying: “I have this long commute to work, and if I "hire" a banana, I eat it too fast, and if I "hire" a muffin, the crumbs are all over me, and if I "hire" a bagel I have to mess around with the cream cheese, and if I "hire" a donut, one is never enough... but when I buy a milkshake, it lasts a long time. It supports me on my drive to work, and I’m still full at 10.00 a.m. (You can find an in-depth Medium article on the topic here, and some scripts and JTBD questions, written by a product manager from Google. You'll also find an article about understanding your customers on the Kissmetrics Blog (a blog well worth following for its quality content on a range of business topics.) If you'd like to learn more about the research done for McDonald's, you can find an article published in the Harvard Business Review about it, and the theory of innovation here.) How did Highrise manage the JTBD process? We borrowed Ryan Singer (Head of Strategy) from BaseCamp, as he’s well versed in carrying out Jobs to be Done interviews. Then we got customers on the phone, and basically interrogated them! JTBD interviews aren’t always a comfortable experience… We asked them about their businesses, and their emotions, and what they were going through when they bought Highrise, so the information you see on our website came from those interviews – lead spreadsheets, follow-ups, things not falling through the cracks – in fact we modified the language on the website after we ran those interviews. Customer interviews can be tricky. It’s easy to infer the wrong things from interviews, and customers can say one thing, but actually their motivations can run a lot deeper. How did you make sure you pulled out the right information from the interviews? Ryan knows Bob Moesa, who worked with Clayton Christensen, and educated himself in this area, but it’s definitely a skill you need to practice and get good at. I’ve been running my own businesses since 2005, so I’m accustomed to talking to customers about products, but maybe not getting the feedback I need right away. Customers love to talk about features. If you ask most customers what they want, most times they’ll tell you about a feature they dreamed up. This happened to me on Twitter the other day, when I was talking to a customer about a problem they were having. I had to say: “Just put Highrise out of your mind and tell me about the problem you’re trying to solve.” You must help the customer to distance themselves from the product temporarily, and to focus on the job they have, and the emotions they go through. You’re not paying customers to be innovators for you. It’s not the customer’s job to provide you with all the information you need to make good judgements about what you’re going to do. You have to get really good at teasing that information from them. You have to ask “Why?” many, many, many times until you think you’ve got all the layers – starting from the feature request, down to what’s really going on within their business that’s troubling them, and driving the need to ask for the feature. Here are some YouTube videos about our Jobs to be Done interviews. Thanks, that’s a great piece of advice. It’s important to be able to separate the product from the problem! Don’t just take a feature request at face value, follow up with the customer, because there could be more to the request than you realise. The process shouldn’t always be: “He, she, or they said they want feature A, so we’ll build feature A” without further discourse, or analysis… It could be a great idea, but you might be missing an opportunity for learning and gaining deeper insights about your customers, product(s), and pricing, so probe a bit more before going ahead. Toyota do this really well, they say: “Ask why 5 times…” I started thinking about Toyota as soon as you mentioned asking “Why?” many times! (If you haven’t come across it before, The 5 Whys exercise was invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. I refer to an article about the 5 Why’s in my book Don’t Buy Software for your Small Business Until You Read this Book. Here’s the link to the article: Toyota Traditions. Ask 'why' five times about every matter.) It's important to set your customers up for the JTBD interviews. You need to let them know that you’re going to be drilling down, otherwise it feels impolite; “No, but why are you…? But why…? Please tell me why…!” It can get uncomfortable when you’re trying to investigate the psychology of people. When you ask customers a lot of questions, you turn the spotlight on them, and people often want to focus on what they want to focus on, and may not go into real depth with you. From the perspective of someone that's worked on a lot of product teams, I'd say that people often request features based on the first idea that comes to them that seems like the answer. That’s why psychologists are trained to get deep into people’s psyches, and to understand their motivations. As people who make products, we need to channel some of that. A product team could take many days (or longer) to consider a feature and its pros and cons, and then to plan it out, and work through all the kinks in the customer journey / steps in the process. They will also consider the right technical approach, and the best way(s) to deliver the functionality and present it on screen etc. I think it can be useful to educate customers about how much work and thought goes into creating quality features, and why we need such detailed information... I also noticed on your site that you tick all the best practice boxes with regards to marketing - you’ve clearly defined your customers’ problems, your product’s benefits, and you provide lots of social proof - quotes, tweets etc. Could you talk us through the work involved in getting your Homepage to that stage, and what went into bringing all those elements together? The JTBD interviews provided a lot of it. People talked about searching for “something simple”. Even the top phrase on the page: “Simple CRM.” Everybody was looking for simple. People also kept talking about “zero learning curve.” We talked to all these entrepreneurs that were super busy, and were hiring their first sales person, or business development person, or support person that they needed to collaborate with. They didn’t have time to read anything, they just wanted something they could turn on, that would work really fast. Salesforce, I don’t think you would expect to just turn on. If you work at Accenture, or one of those big consulting companies, they have “Salesforce Champions” - people with a dedicated responsibility to assist users. We know from our interviews that our customers don’t have champions. They just need to get out of their spreadsheets, today – right now! So all that helped with the language. Our marketing covers versions of that message. The wording for: “We have a manual, you won’t need it” came from thinking about other products that we all really appreciate for just turning on and working, like an iPhone. People say they love iPhones because they’re so simple, and because they didn’t have to read a manual. It’s just intuitive. As you say, there’s a ton of social proof, I’ve been making products for a long time, and I’ve seen over, and over again how important it is to have social proof, whether it’s logos, or case studies. It varies – for smaller businesses you need a lot of quotes, maybe tweets. If you’re a small SaaS business, and you’re dealing with enterprise businesses, they’ll want to see case studies, or how other businesses used your product and saved money, or how other businesses have implemented your product. It’s all different versions of the same thing; they want to know; do other people like using you?  Social proof from Twitter... We also looked at other ways to provide social proof, from magazines like Inc magazine, and Entrepreneur magazine - publications that I know my customers read. I’m very attuned to that. The JTBD interviews really helped guide us to highlight the right benefits, and to answer the question: “Of all the emails we receive, and the things people are saying about us, which ones are we going to spend time highlighting on our homepage?”  "Master within minutes" - a powerful sound bite which appeals to Highrise's target audience Thank you. How long has it taken you to “optimise” your homepage? Would you say your homepage is optimised? We’ve been optimising it forever! BaseCamp optimised it a long time ago, then we came in… I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve blogged that we just got another 31% improvement on our Homepage, so it’s never done! I just finished an experiment 2 weeks ago, where I added a link: “What is CRM?” in the footer on the site, it’s a popular search term, so it was an attempt to do some more SEO work. That's a great example of how tweaks and changes can improve a website, make it more targeted, capture more leads, and convert more sales. If you're doing this, have your website analytics in place first so you can compare before vs. after! Are there any other marketing tactics that techpreneurs can use when putting together a high converting website? You’ve got to get the layout right, the social proof… I’ve been doing web design reviews every week on YouTube, where I look at someone else’s site and I feel that people are getting testimonials wrong. Either they don’t have any at all, or they’re buried somewhere at the bottom of the page. I think you need them high up to convince people to stick around and not bounce right away. Some of the arguments I get for people not having testimonials are:
But there are ways to hack around that. Get the product in the hands of friends and people you know, and you’re likely to hear something great. At first it was my sister, or my mom commenting on early sites that I worked on. There’s nothing wrong with putting testimonials from your sister, or your mom on your website. If they said it, and it’s true, who cares?! You don’t have to say: “This is my mom”, although if you do it could be interesting! You can say: “Here’s what she said, [and use your mom’s name] she loved this product!” I didn’t pay her to say those words, she wasn’t lying. Another thing - go to the biggest customer that you can find, and ask for an introduction. Offer your product, and give yourself away for free. We used to do this at the first company I started with Y Combinator, and we gave our product and ourselves away for free to O’Reilly Media. We made ourselves available, and went to their offices and showed them how to use the product. It was free consulting, but at the end of the day I got to use their logo on our site, and mention them in interviews, and use cases, and they were talking about it too and about how well the product worked… We didn’t make a dime from that deal, but the next one we could charge for, and it generated a good buzz. They are good tips! Going back to testimonials... User testing is a great way to get quotes and testimonials too - usually someone says something which is quotable! We’ve used sites like Usertesting.com before. You pay a price, $20 - $30, and the tester uses your product, and they record a video. Whether it’s the first, or second iteration of your product, someone will make a positive comment about what you’re doing. Keep listening to the feedback, and make the product more useful, and prettier. I would say: “Hey, can we put this comment on the website?!” and the testers said “Sure, no problem, I love the product, put me on there!” You need to ask for permission, but as you say, it's a wonderful way to get testimonials. They're a great, low-cost resource for startups. I’ve used Whatusersdo for clients, but they're more expensive. Nathan, what’s your preferred social media channel, and why? Right now it’s YouTube. It used to be Twitter. I do love the simplicity of Twitter; the short blocks of text, and not needing to become friends before you can reach out to people. It’s also easier to sift through feeds than it is on Facebook. Although I have more followers on Twitter, if I look at where the world is going, it’s going more towards video. Facebook is moving more towards video, and YouTube keeps on growing. Kids want to be YouTube stars, rather than athletes when they grow up! If I want a place in the future, I need to become good with video. How’s it been going? Has it had an impact on your business? I do this daily vlog, and there’s a lot of experimentation. It’s not growing really fast, but it’s growing. It’s not easy to say that traffic from YouTube is going to the Highrise website, but it’s a long game that I’m playing. People email and say they’ve been watching the videos and finally got their business started, and they’ve signed up with Highrise. That’s an interesting point. There was an interview I did for Entrepreneur Interviews Series 1 with Rob Cubbon, where he talked about the importance of thinking about the future and the “big picture," and setting time aside to work on long-term goals vs. just existing in reactive mode. Thanks for highlighting how you do this! It’s not like people are watching my videos, getting their credit card out, and signing up, but more about people following me for six months, and consuming my content, and now they’re signing up. People say they love how I’m helping them on YouTube. I use it as a place for constantly testing content. I post a new video every day, whether it’s web design advice, business news, or going about my day with my 3-year-old and trying to draw lessons from it. When I see what hits, in terms of more likes on this video, or that video, then I’ll write up a nice version of that in Medium, and that Medium post will end up driving traffic back to Highrise. I try not to take a myopic approach, because you can take one piece of content and spin it off into 5 other things and one of those might generate the impact that you want. I’d say my Medium writing generates more traffic than my YouTube channel does, but it’s all inter-related. Medium seems to be helping a lot of entrepreneurs gain traction... I think seeing your thought process laid out will be interesting for readers. A CEO thinks about tomorrow, and if you’re always thinking about tomorrow, in many ways, that approach starts to take care of “today”. It’s like that quote by Sean Patrick Flanery: “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.” So, we’re talking about these different activities having different length sales cycles? The YouTube cycle is just longer… Right. One way to do it is to dump a bunch of money into Google ads, but once the money runs out, the traffic stops! You really need to invest in things that are going to be long term traffic generators. A lot of entrepreneurs have their heads down, working on a product, and they’re not doing any audience building activities. They’re focused on features, and I think they’re hurting themselves, because it’s likely that the product you’re working on today is not the product you’re going to be working on 5 years from now, and if it’s not, you’re going to be starting over with something and you still won’t have an audience to use that product. I feel you could reverse the priorities and build an audience whilst you’re coming up with that genius product. Whilst you’re building a product, don’t forget about building an audience. I’m a big fan of the long game, and investing in meeting people online, and providing value, so that one day they’ll actually use the products you’re selling. I really like what you said there. When you think about the concept of constantly starting from scratch with new products or services, it could be quite soul destroying! You're playing a bigger game than just what’s happening today, or this month, or this year, and not just building, or making “stuff”... I was with Y Combinator with a startup in 2011, and I made that mistake. I didn’t build an audience, we were paying for Google ads, but we ended up walking away from that product, and ended up starting from scratch again with the next product. I refuse to make that mistake again! Now I try to encourage customers, and say: "This is the product, but you should really follow what we’re doing on Medium, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook." One day, if we move on to a new product, hopefully they’ll still be around to try the next thing. How much time, do you or your team dedicate to marketing on a weekly basis? I spend almost 100% of my time on marketing these days. When BaseCamp spun off Highrise, they hadn’t worked on it since 2011 and it was slow, broken and not quite right. At that time, I put a lot of focus into the product. Back then it was 10% marketing, 90% product. I was working on features every day. Now we’re a larger team, there are people that can focus on the product and I need to crack the marketing challenges that we have. We have a great product, but not enough people know about us. I should have started even sooner on marketing. People want good products, obviously, but it doesn’t do you any good if nobody knows about them. I don’t know what the magic formula would have been - 50-50% probably. Marketing is different for different people, but for me it’s everything from Google ads, SEO, optimising the website and making sure it continues to convert better, and pricing plans, and making sure they can sustain the business. It’s writing blog posts, it’s posting YouTube videos. It’s not just advertising. Everything that you’re doing aside from working on your product, and building a team is probably attributable to marketing. Where would you focus your energies if you were starting again? I would have started with YouTube even earlier. Now there’s video on Instagram, and videos on Facebook... But video is harder than writing. You’ve got to get good with video, and editing, and telling a good story, so the sooner you start, the better. It’s going to take a while… When I look at the videos I posted 18 months ago, I cringe. The lighting is terrible, the editing is bad... if you’re going to be terrible for a while, just start practicing now! I’ve been on Medium for a while, but I probably would have done more to pursue writing on other publications. I’m on the Signal vs. Noise publication from BaseCamp, which has a nice following, but I feel that I’m probably talking to the same group. If I want to diversify, and reach more people, I’ve got to be on other channels such as The Mission, and Startup Grind. I’ve only published a few things with them, and I should have considered other publications too. I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently – publishing on your own site vs. other sites, and looking at how you can reuse, and adapt content to save time without affecting your SEO. The current wisdom seems to be that it’s best to check that Google has indexed your article on your blog first (if it comes up in Google searches, you'll know it's been indexed) before you upload it to Medium. If you do that, Google recognises your site as the "master" source for the content. Then you can publish on Medium. The risk is that if you publish to other sites first, and then publish to your own site, it could appear to Google that you’re duplicating / copying content, and your site may be penalised. Others recommend publishing part of your post on other sites, and linking to your site so people can read the rest. I'm experimenting - we shall see! That's a tough one, the whole SEO thing, ‘cos you're right, you're putting a lot of content on Medium as opposed to your own site. I think we made that mistake a little bit - putting our content on Medium, when we don't have enough content on Highrisehq.com. We're trying to crack that. It's totally ok to rewrite an article. You can write something once for Medium, then write a different version of it for your blog, or website. It's not that hard to do. Don't just change words for synonyms, but take another crack at it, alter it and add another two hundred words, or make it 200 words more concise, or pick different anecdotes… We're doing that now to get more content on our website where all that SEO traffic is more valuable than it is on Medium. Medium has been great for us. It’s such a great social channel for spreading a message. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have your own blog, and your own content, but it probably means that you can't forget about Medium. (You can use the Medium content upload tool to import your existing posts onto Medium.) There's a constant learning curve with business, isn't there? Can we talk PPC (Pay Per Click advertising)? Some entrepreneurs have said it doesn't work well for their businesses, because based on what they charge customers, they can't justify the cost. However, others have said it does. What are your thoughts? PPC is expensive and in many categories for CRM, it's insane! It teeters on not being affordable for us either. There are very few wins there. Often, I don't think paid ads is the right way to go. However, it can help you test products, even if you're not making enough money from it. It can get the word out about a product early on when you're struggling. I don't think it's sustainable for most people - you and your competitors are just giving money to Google, and the cost of your ad placements is going up… So, no, I don’t love it as a long-term channel. I'm much more of a fan of focusing on longer-term investments in audience building; finding people who want to follow you for years, who will help you to get your product out there. Yes, you've got companies like Salesforce to compete with! We even compete for keywords that Salesforce probably doesn't care too much about like “easiest CRM" - come on Salesforce, you're never going to be the easiest to use! They make so much money from their Enterprise customers that it makes it hard to compete, even for keywords that probably don't mean that much to them but mean a lot to us, because the prices have been jacked up so high. As a new business, you should be careful with your budget, and spend your time on YouTube videos, writing, and talking to people on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for that Nathan. Are there any tools that have been useful for analysing traffic and customer activity on your website? I've got three analytics tools running all the time. My favourites are Clicky, it’s a little old school, but I like it for real-time stats and web analytics, and we use Google Analytics a lot. It’s a pretty good tool which is accessible for startups, because it's free. There’s also one called Heap Analytics. You can basically turn it on and they measure everything. They’re capturing every click and you can come across things that you may not have thought you'd be interested in before – “Oh, do people click on this link or not?” If you suddenly think of a question like that, they have the data, but it can get pricey pretty quickly. Often with analytics tools, they have a free plan and then an enterprise plan, so be careful with them - they are going to be useful early on, but then they get so expensive! We also use Optimizely a lot, but it's the same thing there. I think Optimizely has got a really cheap starter plan, but then it goes to Enterprise really fast. I noticed that trend with analytics tools when I was researching products to include in Entrepreneurial Espresso, which features over 450 software applications for entrepreneurs. [You can download the first 3 chapters of Entrepreneurial Espresso for free here.] The issue is that customers get used to them, invest time in them, and then may have to abandon them because they can't afford to use them anymore. Yeah. I'm getting annoyed because it keeps happening. I'm not going to call them all out by name, but I was using a tool that was 75 bucks a month and then it became 175 bucks a month, and then it was: “This feature is 175 bucks a month, but if you want this feature it's another 175 bucks a month!” You think: “I’ve invested all this time into you, and now your prices have become astronomical...” I understand it’s how they need to charge to run their business successfully, I guess, but I don't have a good feeling about it when it happens. There's another tool I won't name, but we got in with them when they were still using SaaS pricing, and we were spending a hundred bucks a month with them. We kept putting in more data, and then it became a thousand bucks a month. It was fine, as our usage was changing and I could see that, and we could afford it, but all of a sudden we found ourselves in this category where they said: “Well, we've got rid of the thousand bucks a month plan, and now you're going to need to get on the phone with one of our sales people to talk through your usage.” and I thought: “I don't want to get on the phone with a salesperson! I don't want to haggle over price. Just tell me what it costs, and keep it consistent!” These are important points to consider if you’re considering pricing, and your sales process. The beauty of SaaS is that you see how much it costs, get your credit card out, and get started. No booking appointments, or fearing that someone is going to waste your time, or sell you something you don’t want. Adding in the sales piece adds friction to the process. That’s such an “Enterprise” mentality, thinking that people want to speak to your sales department! Unless they have questions, they usually don’t. They just want to get on with buying and using the product. Data storage / data centre costs rise as more data is stored, and companies are passing that cost on to customers, but it’s still extreme. In my software survival guide for small businesses, I advise readers not to focus exclusively on the entry-level price when buying software, but to look at the second price tier, and the third before committing, and to think: “It’s fine now, but can I afford this product at the higher tiers?”, and “How soon will it be before my usage reaches those more expensive tiers?” If the answer is "no", or "soon" to those questions, keep looking, because it’s so disruptive to disengage with a product you’ve become accustomed to using, and to start hunting for a replacement. I know! At a certain level when you’re trying to do new things with products, it involves sales people, and now I'm just stuck and I'm probably just going to toss the product away, because I really don't have the time to deal with them. I think there could be a gap in the market if somebody can make this work, and offer a reasonably priced tool for small businesses starting to consume more data, where there’s not this huge price jump, and crunch point where businesses are looking at the pricing and saying: “Hmmm, what now?” You would think so. That's why I like Clicky so much. They’ve been around for years. There are only a few employees, and I don't think they’re VC funded, so they were able to create a sustainable business, and they charge reasonable prices. I think a lot of the analytics companies are VC funded, because they need to store gobs and gobs of data, but we all know that VCs want a huge return on their investment, and if you don't make money fast enough… Now the VCs are looking for results and you're going to be under pressure, and if you want to raise more VC funding this is where businesses start to say: “Look! We've moved into the Enterprise market!” At that point, it's almost like there's nowhere else to go... Can you tell us about your journey as an Entrepreneur, and now as a CEO? You've founded several businesses, and been through the Y Combinator program twice! I always wanted to run my own business my dad was very entrepreneurial, so I always had a taste for it. When I was in school I had an internship with a uranium processing plant. I worked as a chemical engineer (Nathan has a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering.) I worked with this entrepreneur; he was the plant manager, on the side he was going around measuring air quality for people. He also had plans drawn for a pizza restaurant he wanted to start... He was just inspiring, and I had every confidence that he would succeed. When I got out of school I wanted to accomplish that too. I got a traditional job at Accenture, but I was always doing these little side hustles here and there. I was doing some consulting for a friend of mine, building apps and stuff. Then Y Combinator came about in 2005. I found out about it and we applied, and got in. Since then I’ve been starting and building new businesses. I did Y Combinator for 5 years, and did it again in 2011. That didn't quite work out, but I was able to turn that into Draft, the writing software, and the Highrise job just landed in my lap because of the work I had done with Draft. I couldn't have predicted how this path was going to go, I was just open to different opportunities. There have been struggles, especially with the first business where you wonder: "Can we do this? Is it working?” There's a lot of self-doubt, and a lot of experiments, and stuff that doesn't work... You lose your confidence over, and over again. That's it. That's the journey. That's what you go through. I read an Elon Musk biography, and it was a good one. They were on the 8th or 9th rocket test, and on their last rocket. They had nothing left, and they probably weren't going to be able to raise any more money. Then it finally works. You've got to be open to failure, after failure, and then other times things work, and get you onto the next challenge. Uranium?!!! I want to ask you so many questions about that, but I don't want to go off track! When you're starting a new venture, do you have a way of deciding when "enough is enough"? I think one of the big things with knowing when to quit is when you feel that you're not learning anything anymore. The way folks like Elon Musk achieve success is through experiments. He's always got another idea for an experiment. If you're experimenting and not learning anything new from it, then it's time to quit, because you won’t have an idea of how to fix things and make them better, so you can test that new hypothesis, and move to the next stage. But, if you do learn something, then keep going! In terms of work - I'm not a fan of pushing myself past any physical limits any more. When you're young you think: “Oh, I can stay up all night," but you quickly get sick! Back in the day at Y-Combinator, you’d get these kids who weren’t taking care of themselves. People got scurvy, they weren't getting enough vitamin C… It's not worth it! My dad was in the hospital recently, my mom has been sick, and it sucks. Life is so fragile, life is so fleeting it's not worth pushing ourselves to become more successful by hurting ourselves, by not eating right, by not working out, by not getting enough sleep. I give up when it’s 10.00 p.m. and I've got to go to bed to get 8 hours’ sleep. I don't try to physically overpower any problems I have with running a startup. I love your comment about not trying to “physically overpower” the problems that you have within a business. That can only be done for a limited time. We know that long term it's working smart, being disciplined, and having good systems in place that gets things done, but it's so hard not to use brute force! We're all guilty of it. Recently I had a situation where I had some work to deliver, and I was up late, then couldn’t sleep, and before you know it you’re sick and it ruins a week, or two weeks. You might get a small win now, but what did you get yourself? Probably a net negative overall. True! Sometimes the boundaries you set yourself are the most important ones. I’d also love to talk about customer support and customer success. I've been watching the development of the SaaS market as a customer, but also out of interest with my business analysis “hat” on, in terms of the different strategies that companies are using. I've noticed the whole concept of "customer success" has really grown over the last few years. How do you approach those concepts at Highrise? There was a guy who approached me who wanted to work at Draft. What was interesting about him was that he proactively helped a bunch of people in our customer support forum. I was busy and was having a hard time keeping up with customer support, but without me even asking, he was assisting people. I thought that if I hired him he would just get stuff done - I wouldn't have to tell him how to make a customer happy, he just knew how to do it and figure it out for himself. Not everyone is like that and can manage themselves. Others want guidelines about what they should do, and how to do their job. So, to answer your question you need to have lots of people like Chris, and support them in making your customers happy without you having to be there all the time! Look at Zappos (a shoe company renowned for excellent customer service.) The people at Zappos have been empowered to just make customers happy. Their process is great. The big lesson is to hire people who feel very responsible, and to empower them. Yes, that's hard to train or teach. I find that there’s a lot of customer service work done on autopilot, where agents aren't really listening (or reading) carefully, or paying close attention to what is being said… There's no 2-month Highrise class. That’s not going to cut it. In a startup, you need to be able to hit the ground running, and do whatever it takes, and to learn whatever you need to learn to do your job, which is to satisfy that customer on the other end of that email, and you need to be able to understand, and help them with whatever they're struggling with. There's definitely a personality trait there that you want to look for… Have you been able to narrow down a way to find those traits? There’s the Newcastle Personality Assessor (NPA) based on the “Big Five” personality traits that everyone has to a greater, or lesser extent - Agreeableness, Neuroticism / Emotional Stability, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion. I’ve investigated trying to select for high conscientiousness, to identify people who are achievement focused, but also disciplined, and thorough, but it's hard to do! I think one of the things that helped me with hiring Chris was that he was just out there in the world writing blog posts and talking to people online. Today, with social media you have a really good window into how people communicate with other humans without waiting until you get them in an interview. If someone’s applying for a job, go and see how they talk to people on Twitter. Follow them on social media. Are they helpful? Are they being constructive? If they're not on social media, and if they're not answering questions, and they're not writing blog posts, then that's a problem too. In an interview people might say: “Oh, I just haven't had time to do that,” but we all have the opportunity to do it. There's nothing stopping you from signing up for a Twitter account and being a productive member of some sort of community. One of the things I look for is people who are out there publishing things, whether it's open source products, or just writing a lot and being friendly and useful. There may be ways of testing for that in an interview, but there are ways of monitoring how people interact with the world just using social media. What you've said is far better... That’s concrete proof. It’s physical evidence, so it’s probably better than a test. Thanks for that comment! (If you'd like to see what your strongest traits are, you can take an NPA test here!) What's your top cash flow, or money management tip for technical entrepreneurs? It's just the way I run businesses, but I don't like to raise money, and I don't like to have a lot of debt. Even with my first businesses, we only raised $17,000 with Y Combinator, it was peanuts. After that, we didn't raise any more - we focused on getting customers to pay us. Even if they weren't the perfect customer, they were customers that could pay! People can be too obsessed with finding the "perfect customer", and have a narrow view of who their customer is, with good reason - they read The Lean Startup, which says that you need to find the perfect customer and do all these perfect experiments, but when you're struggling to pay the bills, it's not always easy to find perfect customers to pay those bills early on. With Ink (one of Nathan’s businesses), we had customers that wanted to use our products in ways that we hadn't even imagined, and hadn’t wanted to use the product, but they were going to pay us $30,000, and that was going to fund product development for the next five months. We did it again for a pharmaceutical company that wanted the software, and wanted us to give them a licence. We were a SaaS company with a monthly payment model, and there was this business that wanted to get our code, and they wanted to pay us money for it. I think it's ok to do that once or twice to pay the bills. Those customers can give you the runway to find your perfect customers. Sometimes you need to get a bit creative and find other ways of getting money, and you may need to deal with some not-so-perfect customers. So, be pragmatic... Exactly. Also, be sensible with money. I don't understand the number of people whose first action as soon as they raise money is to use it to buy office space. It doesn’t make any sense. You can get a co-worker pass these days for 50 bucks, and you can rent a desk somewhere, or work from your home. There is no return on that money - you’ve just burnt it so that you have an office to sit in. (On the topic of licenses, take care with your legal agreements when licensing your product to customers. A common type of end user license is a EULA - End User License Agreement, but if the client wants additional rights, you may need to call in a lawyer to help you cover all the bases and include the necessary clauses to protect your Intellectual Property. You can find a cheat sheet of free online contracts and legal resources for business use here, but remember that tailormade contracts are likely to be a better fit for your needs.) You can reflect, and let it sit in a bank account for at least a short period, because sometimes priorities change, but when it's gone, it's gone! What's next for you, and for Highrise? We need to get much better at marketing. We’ve gotten pretty good at optimising and improving our conversion rates through testing, but we need to get better about spreading the word, and getting people to check out our product. We've also been considering PR campaigns, and stunts to create a buzz this year. In terms of YouTube, I’m getting better with experimenting and looking at what works - I'm not just doing the same thing on repeat. I'm looking at what’s going to draw more people to the channel. I'm also spending more time on SEO on YouTube, looking at what kind of tags and titles will draw people in. We’re also building cool features, of course! Features are awesome, and customers love them, but that isn't part of the marketing flywheel. You can't just keep shoving stuff on to your product to make people come and pay attention to you - you've got to find something a bit more sustainable, probably along the lines of more teaching, and more helping people. Thanks Nathan. I wish you, and Highrise all the best! Where can people go to find out more about Highrise? The best place is Highrisehq.com: http://highrisehq.com.  You can find Nathan’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/nathankontny. *Please note that Nathan left Highrise during 2018, but you can still connect with him via YouTube, or Twitter: https://twitter.com/natekontny.
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15/3/2018 0 Comments Interview 5 - Alexis Theriault, “achieving 500,000 app downloads & 10,000 daily users with a young family, and a full-time job!”This is interview 5 in the Techpreneur Interview series featuring Alexis Theriault, the founder of the Brain Focus productivity app. This week, we'll be chatting about his experience of hitting 500,000 app downloads and 10,000 daily users - all generated from his side-hustle; an app development business. Welcome Alexis, thanks for joining me on the Purposeful Products Blog!  Alexis Theriault, founder of the Brain Focus and Brain Focus Time Tracker apps How long have you been an entrepreneur? I studied software engineering, and now work as a software developer. I started working on my own apps about 3 years ago - mostly to learn a new technology, but then saw the potential and started trying to earn some money! Did you have any experience of building apps before you built Brain Focus? Not too much. At work we had started building mobile applications. The first thing I did there was application maintenance, and then we decided to rewrite an application using new tech. That was when I started working on Brain Focus to learn about all aspects of mobile development. What else can you tell us about your app? Brain Focus is a mobile application based on the premise that your brain needs a break in order to be more productive. It can be used to achieve techniques like the Pomodoro, or the 52-17 (52 minutes of work, with a 17 minute break).
 Come on, it has to be the Evil Laugh, right? I've tried several cycles, including the 50-10, but never the 52-17! When I first left permanent employment to work as a freelance Software Delivery Consultant, some of the developers I worked with used Pomodoro timers to manage their time when working on product features and user stories. That was my first introduction to the Pomodoro technique, a technique to enhance productivity and concentration, by working on tasks in short, intense cycles. There are many productivity cycles out there - it’s about finding the rhythm that gets you the best results. If you're interested in exploring the benefits of working this way, here's a free chapter on productivity and focus, taken from my book of tools and software for small businesses, Entrepreneurial Espresso: http://bit.ly/free-productivity-chapter. Brain Focus started as a single app, which is the productivity timer, but then I created another application which is called Brain Focus Time Tracker, which tracks time in a simple way. You create an item in the app, start tracking it, and stop the tracker when you’re done. Then you can look at your statistics to better understand where you spend your time. When I can't decide between similar apps, I usually download 2 or 3, keep the one that’s easiest to get started with, and delete the others. When I was looking for productivity timers a few years ago, yours won! I like the app because it has clean, simple user interface and design, it's easy to use, and there are some nice options available via the Settings menu. It’s the perfect example of “just enough” functionality arranged logically, and without going overboard.
There are a long list of options in the Settings area, but they are all clearly labelled, and can be easily accessed by scrolling up and down the screen. Work, and break durations can be chosen, and the app can be set to vibrate, or play a sound when your time is up! How did you first come to recognise that there was a problem that you could solve with Brain Focus? When I started building the app, there were already a lot of similar applications in the App Store. I thought: “I’ll do this for fun, and we’ll see what happens.” Then I started to get some downloads, then more and more followed, along with some good reviews. I started to get hundreds of users per day and began rising in the app store listings. At that point I started to think that I had something. Based on the good feedback I had received, I began to think that I could earn money from the app, which would help in investing more time into it. Were you able to get product feedback before launching, Alexis? Not before launching, but I started to receive feedback from users post-launch, and started implementing the features that people requested. That really helped me! I did do a small Beta launch with my co-workers… What are the most important lessons, or realisations you've had about life as a tech entrepreneur? Building software is costly (in terms of my time) and people are now used to getting software for free, so it can be challenging to monetise. If you're interested in Alexis's business model, he has opted not to charge upfront for his apps, but offers a Go Pro upgrade option which works like an in-app purchase. Users that wish to move to the Pro plan can choose what they want to donate (known as PWYW - Pay What You Want, or Pay What You Wish pricing) by selecting from five set price points. In previous Techpreneur Interviews, (see interview 1 with Kyle Richey) we've talked about Apple's App Store users being more "primed" to pay for apps than Google Play Store users, but this is the first PWYW model that we've covered on the blog. It can be nerve-wracking when you first start charging customers to use your services - especially when customers have easy access to free apps. PWYW empowers the customer, and can be used to gather data about how many users choose to pay, and in this case, to monitor which price points are most (and least popular). Should Alexis choose to change his business model in future, he will have historical pricing data that he can refer to! What else weren’t you prepared for, or expecting? The Android software versions all have different behaviour. There are variations between different phone manufacturers too, so there are often bugs on one phone, but not on others. This makes it hard to reproduce and fix problems, and I needed to buy a lot of phones! It's never the first thing techpreneurs think of when running an app business, but when creating apps, you'll need to be prepared to do testing on different devices for the reasons that Alexis has mentioned - devices aren't the same, and they behave differently. Unfortunately, you can't rely on your app performing in the same way on different devices - even different models made by the same manufacturer of a tablet, or smartphone. You can test manually, but you can also use app testing services, such as Amazon's AWS Device Farm, which give you 1000 minutes of free testing, and remote access to a range of real devices of different makes and models - all managed via the Cloud. It depends on your product, but in my case, it's hard to test functionality related to measuring time in the Cloud, so I use physical devices when I test.  Desktop and mobile devices - Source: Brad Frost. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brad_frost/7387824246, Let’s talk Android vs. iOS, web apps, and desktop apps. Do you have a preference? Android, since I feel it's an easier, less costly platform. iOS second, since most people prefer to use their phones. Then web. I think desktop use is declining, but progressive web apps could change everything. What have been the biggest highs and lows of your experience as a tech entrepreneur? Seeing increases in downloads and usage is my biggest high, such as when I reached 500,000 downloads, or 10,000 daily users. My lows come if I introduce bugs into new app releases. What’s your top cashflow/money management tip for tech entrepreneurs? My best advice is to keep your day job, so that you don’t expose yourself to too much risk. That is a choice, but it can be better to start whilst employed, and when you think it’s a good time to invest all your time on your project, then you can leave. What’s a typical day like for you now? For now, it’s a full day’s work, then life with kids! What would you do differently if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice now you’re “older and wiser”? Start when you’re young! I would have started working on side projects earlier, when I had no responsibilities (no house, no child, no girlfriend) because the more responsibility you have, the less time you have to work on projects. If you have less responsibilities, it’s easier to quit your job, and to focus. Thanks for the advice Alexis! What’s next for you and Brain Focus? I’m hoping to have more time to invest in Brain Focus, so that I can improve the Android version, and build an iOS version with the same features, and more! Where can people go to find out more about your app?  Brain Focus Android / Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AT.PomodoroTimer&hl=en_GB iOS / App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brain-focus-productivity-timer/id1262657470?mt= Brain Focus Time Tracker Android / Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AT.TimeTracker This is the 4th interview in the Techpreneur Interviews series, and this week I'll be talking with Matic Bitenc, the CEO of Toshl Finance, a company whose apps are very popular in both the Google Play and App Stores. (The Android app has a staggering 26,000+ reviews in the Google Play Store.) Matic came from an agency background, and he and his team have had what could be described as the dream journey for a tech startup. They were accepted onto an accelerator programme, moving out to California from Europe, and got early traction with their app. In this interview we’ll talk about healthy cofounder relationships, company mascots, redesign backlash, using social media to promote apps, and more! Welcome to the Purposeful Products Blog Matic! Please tell us about your app. Toshl Finance helps people track and plan their finances. People note down their expenses in the app, or sync them automatically with their bank or credit card. They can see their financial flows, set up budgets to limit their spending / increase saving, and get reminded about upcoming bills.  Getting an overview of your finances with the Toshl Finance app We try to make it as easy as possible and even fun at times. Our Toshl Monster mascots and the slightly odd sense of humour pervasive throughout the apps certainly help with that as well.  The Toshl Monsters It's great that you mention mascots Matic, it's the first time the topic has come up during this series. So, what's the deal with mascots? Tech products can be a bit cold and transactional, so mascots can be used to strengthen your brand, and make it easier for customers to connect with your company. They can be a point of differentiation, and a way to give your brand personality, a topic that I discuss in Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book. What was life like before Toshl? I worked as a user experience architect at 3fs. We worked on many interesting projects before Toshl, but they were mainly for outside clients. It's quite different when it's your product and you’re involved at every stage. We get to decide on the direction of the product, also taking on board the feedback from our users, of course! Before that I studied European Studies in Ljubljana and Lille. Co-founded a web community of Slovenian Mac users and I even did improv and stand up for a while! Toshl is actually spinoff from 3fs, which designs and develops lots of great digital products. I worked on some of them before starting with Toshl - there was an app for creating comics for tweets, social platforms for telecommunications clients, amongst other projects. Improv! A world away from the structure of product and software development… The Toshl Team moved out to California from Europe, right? That would be a dream for many entrepreneurs - can you tell us what that experience was like? We moved to San Francisco in 2012 when we took part in 500 Startups accelerator. It was certainly a very interesting experience, we learnt a lot and had a great time. A friend once said that San Francisco and the Silicon Valley are like Disneyland for entrepreneurs. The density of the startup ecosystem and the opportunities it provides are certainly remarkable. We moved back to Europe after a while though. The lifestyle and surroundings in Slovenia were preferable to most of us. There's also less and less of a difference between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world when it comes to running startups, and our customers are all around the world anyhow.  The Toshl gang - and some awesome wall art! What’s a typical day like for you now? We're flexible regarding working hours, so I arrive at work anytime between 7 and 11 a.m., depending on the day, and what we have going on. I check out the work chats and notifications to get a feel of what's going on. I also check the various analytics we have set up. As we're not a large team, my work can vary a lot. I can be planning future features and business model changes, or replying to support queries, testing, recruiting... whatever comes up. Things are usually more specialised for other members of the team, but entail a variety of platforms and technologies, or design/marketing related work. How long have you been an entrepreneur? 6 years. The magic 6 years again! You’re the 4th techpreneur in a row that has said they started in 2012. It’s becoming a bit like that Jim Carrey thriller where all roads lead back to the number 23! The 4 of you have different backgrounds, come from different countries, and came to entrepreneurship in different ways too… If any readers want to comment on this recurring coincidence, I’d love to hear your thoughts! How did you first come to recognise that there was a problem that you could solve with your app? A colleague was renovating his apartment and precise tracking of finances was crucial. We talked about possible tools he could use and we wanted to get a better overview of the finances for ourselves. The app market was rather nascent at the time, and all the solutions we found didn’t work well, and looked rather crappy and drab. We thought we could do better, so we set forth designing and making a better expense tracking app! Our first prototype got some traction, feedback was good, we carried on and the rest is history. You can find out more about the evolution of Toshl Finance here: https://toshl.com/blog/toshl-finance-press-kit/. Press kits and "story telling" are topics that I’d really like to explore. We’ve talked about entrepreneurs' origin stories in every interview, but not the actual concept of the “Entrepreneur’s story.” By this I mean the use of story as a marketing and profile-raising device. Story-telling is in our DNA, and stories are not just for kids! We know from the popularity of TED Talks that adults are also entertained by people able to deliver messages in interesting and engaging ways. If I ask you to name the global phenomenon that started as an app for students at Harvard University, you'll know exactly which company I’m talking about, because the origin story of the business has been so widely shared. Take a look at the press kit for Toshl. Not all software businesses have them, but you can gather together:
It doesn’t have to be perfect! You can always update and improve this over time. Was there a moment that made you think you were onto something big with Toshl? I don't think there was a single big "Eureka!" moment, but rather a steady stream of responses from people using Toshl who showed us that our product had value for them. Lots of them were very passionate about it, with long lists of ideas for future development. Our approach to building more personal and less commoditised apps also seemed to have struck a chord. If customers have requests, or even criticisms, these can be a huge source of opportunities, so always log feedback and analyse it with a cool head so you don’t miss a trick. Sometimes what people are trying to communicate is - “If you can just fix this, it will make all the difference”, or “Once you have a better handle on that feature, that will give me the confidence to upgrade my subscription”, so be aware of this. I think the tech sector is pretty good in this respect, but you do come across companies that seem to see feedback as a drag, and don't appreciate the value of the data they’re receiving. Feedback leaves the door open to understanding more about what your users really care about. You can choose to shut the door, or open it wider and embrace what you learn. This doesn’t mean fulfilling every request, but you should carefully consider the points that are being made. Were you able to get product feedback before launching? With the very first prototype, we did some internal testing with our friends who hadn't yet seen the app. This was to make sure that it was all easily understandable, worked well and so on. The first version was a pretty bare-bones attempt, so more features and refinements quickly followed. Did you do a Beta launch? How did it go, and what was involved? A few years later, when we did a big transition to a vastly redesigned Toshl Finance v2, we had a much more extensive Beta program. We invited hundreds of our existing users to help us try the apps and work out any remaining issues. Lots was improved and fixed based on that feedback, but we still underestimated how big a shock a new design would be to people. Most people loved it after getting to know the new Toshl in the coming days, but the shock showed on our app store reviews for quite a while. We learnt to be a lot more gradual with future updates. Beta tests which usually attract the most early-adopting users won't tell you that. Yes, because early adopters aren’t “typical” users… Thanks for bringing that up. It’s a really interesting point. This group think differently to the general population, and represent about 13.5% of the gen pop.  This curve is also known as the Innovation Adoption Curve. Source: https://www.free-power-point-templates.com/ Your suggestion to phase in major changes slowly is a good one! People often hate software changes because they may be forced to change their behaviour, or to relearn how to use something which they were already happy, or familiar with. We become familiar with the apps on our devices, and feel that the software we use belongs to us because it serves our needs, and holds our data. This is why changes can leave customers feeling confused, inconvenienced, experiencing a loss of control, or sense of outrage! Snapchat, Twitter, the BBC and other big brands have all experienced what is known as redesign backlash. It's a very real consequence of making changes - just Google the term, or the phrase design backlash, and you will find pages of companies that have faced challenges when changing their user interface, and removing, adding, or altering functionality. If you want to make changes to your product, try running a preview with existing customers so you can identify any tweaks needed to help customers adjust and accept changes more easily. Updating support documentation, such as FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), or training videos will also help customers to transition more quickly. How did you find your developers? The starting core of the team already worked together at 3fs, so they were the ones who brought us together to begin with. Later on we'd find people mostly through job ads on Facebook developer groups like this, a tech community in Slovenia called Slo-tech, and posts on our website and social media profiles. You have a co-founder, don’t you? Do you have any tips for building happy and productive co-founder relationships? Yes, Miha Hribar is a co-founder of Toshl and the CTO. I think we get along well because we have compatible characters, and try to maintain a constructive spirit. Obviously, in many years of working together tensions can rise at times, but when this happens we both try to "steady the ball", empathise with the other's point of view and not let the situation spiral out of control. Mutual respect is a prerequisite. There are 6 of us in the Toshl team right now and I'd say these principles apply to everyone in tight-knit teams. It feels a bit strange theorising about this and offering it as a tip, as this is just basic social conduct as far as I'm concerned. Not that I'm 100% successful in sticking to these tips either, but I certainly try. What are the most important lessons, or realisations you've had about life as a tech entrepreneur? There is no ideal path. Carve your own. Where did you experience the steepest learning curve? In keeping track of everything that's needed when running a company and making products. From the app design details, accounting, support, shares, language translations, ongoing testing issues, business deals, promotions... There are thousands of things you need to pay attention to, do and make sure they all come together. Not letting something fall by the wayside while managing to ship high-quality products is a constant battle. What have been the highs and lows of your experience as a tech entrepreneur? It's a rollercoaster, so minor highs and lows come weekly if not daily. It's difficult to point out just one. Highs certainly come when you're launching major product updates like the v2 and the Toshl Medici update with bank connections. Getting feedback from customers who love Toshl, hiring great new people, reaching major user and revenue milestones, and getting accepted into 500 Startups have all been highs for us. The lows are just the opposite - when team members quit, if we release a version with an unexpected serious bug, or when lots of people have problems with a feature. Let's spend some time talking about marketing... How did you identify the right target market for your product? Our initial target market is rather broad, as managing personal finances is something that almost every adult person needs. We narrowed down the target segments using our existing experience with our customers. For example: obviously tracking finances using mobile apps would appeal more to younger and mid generations (20-45) who are old enough to handle their own finances, yet more at ease with technology than older people. We used anonymous statistics and data from social networks to confirm and narrow down the results. Further segmentation was based on qualitative research from our support experience. We were able to identify a few main types of users who used Toshl in a certain way and came to represent a certain market segment. For example:
We then apply these lessons to ad variations, and apply the demographic targeting in some cases for better efficiency. Thanks for these insights! That first segment is one I would never have considered when thinking about who would use a finance app. I think it's worth pointing out that with a new business, you won’t always know exactly who's going to use your app, and how, and you may be surprised to discover the subgroups that are using it! I’ve spoken in several of my books about being fully present when doing customer support, and paying close attention to the types of people that are making contact with your business, the demographic that they come from, and how (and why) they use your app. Was there a transition to making sure you were marketing your “solution” to the right audience? I don't think there's ever a perfect fit. We're always learning and transitioning towards better segmentation, content, and new marketing channels, which all bring new challenges. Segmentation is helpful for thinking about marketing, making it more efficient, and finding new ad content, but marketing directly to a segment is just one tiny dimension of your product. It’s your initial "hook" that draws people's interest, when a problem or desire arises. From that point on, marketing is really ingrained into every design decision you make for the product. They're values that you subtly communicate to customers and they draw people in to using Toshl in different ways to manage their financial lives. What’s your preferred social media channel, and why? I’d love to hear your opinions about making social media work for apps, and SaaS products. Facebook. Simply because it seems to garner the most response from our users. Posts are structured to allow debate to develop, and it seems to work well. On the downside, there's the heavy hand of Facebook when it comes to limiting or increasing your post reach based on customers’ business interests, and so forth. It's a nice additional communication channel on a platform that people are familiar with, but I'd never rely on FB alone to reach our customers. Emails are still a lot more reliable and less encumbered by gatekeepers. That brings us neatly to the old “Which is best - social media, or email?” debate! A social media platform does not offer any true ownership of the profile that you build up. It can change its rules, close down, or change its focus, which can leave businesses in trouble if they are overreliant on social channels. People check email regularly, and addresses don't tend to change frequently, so unless customers opt out of receiving communications from you, email is still a reliable way to stay in contact with prospective and actual customers… Personally, I love Twitter and the publicness and searchability of it, but the reach is lower and it's often difficult to follow a thread. Social media is great for communicating with your most engaged customers who want more tips and to know what's going on with the company. We post all the stuff we like to share; e.g. new updates, upcoming Beta tests, personal finance tips, but consider too insignificant to bother everyone with using an email blast, which might quickly become annoying - and takes more work. Great point, and an interesting example of how to use social media as a way of sharing useful snippets of information! How much time do you allocate to marketing on a weekly, or monthly basis? About a day each week, but the time is unevenly spread. Which activities do you think have helped your startup to gain the most traction? Talking, and writing to journalists (especially in the beginning). However, it’s getting more and more difficult as we're over the “app hype” of a few years ago. Also, app store optimisation, ASO (a form of SEO for the app stores to help your product to be discovered through the smart selection of keywords, and keyword rich descriptions) and optimising paid marketing campaigns (AdWords, Apple Search Ads etc.) One of our clients said they wished they had a time machine after getting some advice from us. What would be the number 1 marketing tip that you would give to yourself, if you could go back in time and coach your less experienced self? Start with paid marketing earlier, and double down on getting the analytics right. What’s your top cashflow/money management tip for tech entrepreneurs? Use Toshl ;) Toshl Finance is mentioned in two of my books as a useful tool for entrepreneurs / tech entrepreneurs in terms of: i) creating an initial budget for building an app, and ii) maintaining an ongoing monthly budget to keep the product running and to monitor burn rate. You can find tutorials on how to use Toshl Finance here: https://toshl.com/blog/tutorials-manuals/. What’s next for you, and your app? Going deeper. We added over 9000 bank connections with US banks and services in 2017, and will be adding lots more connections worldwide in 2018. We'll make it even easier to help people stay on top of their finances - first by tracking financial flows, regardless of bank, service, or currency, and then by managing the money directly. All the while making it more fun and effortless to do so.  Just some of the many bank connections accessible via Toshl Finance, displayed on an iPhone v7 Impressive. That’s a LOT of bank connections! I wish you well with your plans. Before we wrap up the interview, can I ask you a few quick-fire questions?
Android has a better developer console, but I still find app discovery to be better on iOS. Less devices and OS variations help too. They go neck and neck. If I were making a new app and had to choose one of the platforms to start with, I'd probably go with iOS, but it depends on the product and market. People are always interested to know the answer to that, and I really like that you brought some points to the discussion that haven’t been mentioned before! It’s been great Matic, thanks! Where can people go to find out more about Toshl?  You can find us here:
Website: https://toshl.com Blog: https://toshl.com/blog/ Tutorials: https://toshl.com/blog/tutorials-manuals/ 15/2/2018 0 Comments INTERVIEW 3 - CHRISTOPHER GIMMER, “HOW SIMPLIFYING THE CONTENT MARKETING CHALLENGE BECAME A $40,000+ A MONTH BUSINESS.”In this 3rd interview in the Techpreneur Interviews series, we’ll hear from Christopher Gimmer, CEO of Snappa, a web-based graphic design tool for marketers and entrepreneurs. Find out how his need to alleviate a problem in an existing business led to the birth of an even more successful one! We also talk about the reality-check of the 1000-day rule for entrepreneurs, and you’ll come across a lot of information about strategy, mindset, and the processes involved in scaling a bootstrapped (self-funded) business. Chris really breaks down the rationale behind some of the major decisions that he and his co-founder have made, and the interview has morphed into something very much like a case-study. Let's get into it... Welcome Chris. Thanks for joining me on the Purposeful Products Blog! Can you tell us a bit about your background? It’s kind of a long story! I actually have a finance and accounting background. I majored in finance at university, and worked as a financial analyst for about 5 years. I got bored with what I was doing, and started travelling a bit more, and wanting a bit more freedom. I also wanted to work on things I was more passionate about. I met Mark, my cofounder at Snappa, at work. I discovered that he did some programming on the side, and started becoming fascinated with the whole online world and online business. The two of us became really good friends, and we started launching side projects while we were both working our day jobs. We had a couple of failures along the way like most people, but eventually we had minor success, and then some decent success with Snappa, and then we both quit our jobs to go full time on it. So, that’s the quick version! Was Snappa your first experience of building an app? The first thing we ever did was a student dating website. We were able to get a decent number of users in our local city, but it wasn't a real business, so we eventually gave up on that. The first thing we started that was somewhat of a success was BootstrapBay, which was a marketplace for bootstrap themes and templates. (Bootstrap is a framework that helps developers to create web based applications.) We grew that to about $10,000 a month in revenue, so it was profitable, although there were costs, of course. After that, we started working on StockSnap, a free stock photo site, and then came Snappa, so that was the progression. Snappa was the fourth thing that we worked on. Did you just say StockSnap is one of yours as well? I didn’t know that! I use it quite a lot... Yes, but we recently sold it. We were working on BootstrapBay and I wrote a blog post on where to get free stock photos. That post started doing extremely well, and was bringing in a lot of traffic. Essentially, we were linking to a lot of these new stock photo sites that were starting to pop up, and we thought to ourselves, “Why don't we create our own photo site?” At the time, none of these sites had search functionality, and they were releasing photos under Creative Commons, and they usually had just one, or a handful of photographers that were contributing. So then we launched StockSnap and started building up some traffic… Actually, we had the idea to build Snappa a year or two before we started working on it. We weren't sure how we were going to market it, but once we had the traffic from StockSnap we realized that it was probably a good time to launch Snappa as a graphic design tool, so we were running the two sites in parallel for the first two years. For two years?! Phew! Hard work… Yes. We were focusing almost all our energy on Snappa, and StockSnap was running in the background, and it became more of a lead generation source. Then someone came along and realized the potential of StockSnap and made us an offer for it. We took the deal because it made sense for someone with more resources to be able to focus on it... … and develop it? Yeah, develop it more than we were doing. When we launched Snappa, probably 30% of our traffic was coming from StockSnap - maybe even more than that, but over the two-year span, we started to develop other traffic sources too. When we sold it, it was a smaller portion of the leads and the revenue that we were generating, so we were okay selling it off. Yes… I was just going to ask you if you experienced a drop off in web traffic after that. I had already calculated what that drop off in traffic might be. Obviously, that was a big factor in the selling price - we had to make sure that we made more than enough on the sale to counteract any reduction in traffic Actually, it was a lot less than I was anticipating, so I think it worked out well for us. So you’ve got more time to focus on your baby now? Yeah, exactly! How long have you been an entrepreneur in total, Christopher? I guess if you count the student dating website that we launched back in 2012, then that was the first thing that we ever put out into the world. For two years it was just messing around with side projects while we were working full-time. There was nothing too serious. Eventually I said: “I need to figure this out, and learn what the hell we’re doing.” At that point; late 2013 / early 2014, I started to read a lot of books and blogs, and listen to a ton of podcasts. I was soaking in as much knowledge as I could about how you market something online, and how you actually launch it. Early 2014 was when we launched BootstrapBay, and I think at that point, we had a much better idea of different marketing tactics. During that time, Mark grew tremendously as a developer, and the quality of our products increased too. So, 2012 was when I started dabbling, and 2014 was when we started to take things a bit more seriously and really went for it. We left our jobs shortly after launching Snappa, so I’ve been an entrepreneur from anywhere between 3 to 6 years, depending on when you start counting! I recently interviewed Kyle Richie, the CEO and founder of the Strides goal setting app, and Justin Chen, cofounder of the polling app PickFu, and all three of you started in 2012! That is a total coincidence, so why 2012? Does it take that length of time to develop a high-profile product? There must be something to it... Actually, one of the theories that I hear quite a bit is the 1000 day rule. It says it will take 1000 days to replace your job income with the income that you’re generating from your business. If I take 2014 as the time when we started working on things more seriously, it was pretty true for me. About 3 years in is when I was making as much as I did in my day job. It does take time. Nothing really happens overnight. You do think: “How long do I give this?” and "How long will it take?" each time you start a new venture. It’s good that you mentioned that, because sometimes you need to graft for a while - it may not happen in 6 months. Over the last few years, I’ve met a lot of entrepreneurs, and there are very, very few people that I’ve met where it's taken them less than a year to have a resoundingly successful business. The common trend is usually that it takes a couple of years of grinding to finally get there. I think with entrepreneurship what you’ll find is that the first few years is a lot of sacrifice, a lot of hard work. You'll probably be putting in more hours than in your regular job... But once you hit that inflection point, it just starts to get a bit easier, you aren’t working such crazy hours, and you’re making more money than at your day job. You have to be willing to suffer before you can start to reap the benefits. That’s the observation that I’ve made. Yes, you feel the burn first, and it gets harder before it gets easier! I think that’s why there are so few entrepreneurs, right? Because in reality, most people don't want to make that sacrifice for several years, so it ensures that only the tough survive, so to speak. Entrepreneurship is a bit Darwinian... Yeah. Exactly! Please tell us some more about Snappa. Snappa is an online tool that helps you create online graphics. In essence, it’s a much easier and simpler version of Photoshop. When I was working on BootstrapBay, we were growing it primarily through content marketing. At that time, I was the one writing all the blog posts and creating all the content. I’m not a designer. I was a finance guy by trade before becoming a marketer/entrepreneur, and any time I needed to create images for our blog, I found it really painful to do so! When I looked at the different tools out there I found that they either had a lot of good features, but were slow and difficult to use, like the Photoshops of the world, or on the flip side, the tools were easy to use, but too simplistic - you really couldn't do much more than add text on a background. I found an opportunity for a graphic design tool to cater to marketers and entrepreneurs like myself who wanted to create nice-looking graphics, but where it wasn't in their best interest to be spending hours working on one graphic that was going to disappear in the newsfeed the next day, so that's what the vision for Snappa was. So, you were scratching your own itch, as the saying goes? Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. Every time we published a new blog post, as a bare minimum, we would need a new featured image for that post, and I didn't just want to use stock photos, I wanted to make a custom image, and we needed images within our posts too. I was using Photoshop and I just found it was taking way too much time. At the same time, these amazing free stock photo websites were popping up. I thought it would be awesome if we could integrate these nice stock photos within the tool itself to save that extra step of scouring the web for stock photos, before importing them into Photoshop, and adding design elements onto them.  Inside Snappa. Creating custom graphics for "the big 5" on social media. Was there a point where you started to think that Snappa could become something big? Before we launched Snappa I took a year off from work and for myself, personally, there was a lot riding on it. If it failed, I was basically going back to my job, which would have been kind of embarrassing, and it wasn't something I wanted to do. The first week we did an initial promo, and I think we got 250 sign-ups, and that was steadily growing month over month. Within the first few months, we knew that we had something on our hands, and I thought: “Wow, we have a real business here. I can finally quit my job.” You never want to get too far ahead of yourself, thinking your business is going to be the next huge thing, and obviously, we’re a bootstrap company, so Snappa is never going to be a billion-dollar business, but it did exceed our expectations. I think we also had a limited mindset in the beginning. We were saying: “If we can get to $10K of revenue a month, we’re set for life!” Then you hit that and you think, “Oh, okay…” and you put the next goal in place and it's never good enough, you are always striving for more. But this wasn’t just luck – the point to emphasise here is that you validated your idea before building, didn’t you? As a result, you did even better than expected! How did you identify the right target market to fit the product? I tried to do as much customer development as I could, because one of the lessons I learned early on from the student dating website and other things that we launched was that it’s a shame to waste 3 - 4 months developing something that people don't care enough about. Yes, it's a tough lesson. I had a theory that a decent amount of the people that were using StockSnap were probably using those stock photos for social media and content marketing stuff, so the first thing I did was to send out a quick survey asking people what they were using the stock photos for. If people said they were using them for social media and content marketing, I followed up and asked if they’d mind hopping on a skype call. I think I did another survey too, and then I did about 20 Skype calls. I asked them questions about their process for creating graphics, and what tools they were using… stuff just to validate whether they were experiencing the same pain points as I was with the graphic creation process. After I started hearing enough feedback from people that it was indeed a pain point, that gave us the confidence to go ahead and start building Snappa. The launch you did - was that a Beta launch? In July 2015, we put out an open Beta. It was really barebones, compared to what Snappa does today. There was a lot of stuff that wasn't in that first Beta. One of the things we learned was that you don't want to spend years perfecting a product which: a) might not be useful, or b) where you may not even have worked on the right things. Our plan was to launch as quickly as possible. As soon as we had something that was semi-valuable we started gathering as much feedback as we could, including identifying other critical features that we needed to put in, and obviously working through as many bugs as possible. After that initial beta period, we learned what the absolutely critical features that we needed were. Then we set a goal and said “Okay, as soon as we finish these three or four features that we’ve decided on, we’ll do a full launch and then we’ll have a free plan and a paid plan.” So, we officially launched at the end of November and split out our plans. That was how the launch went down. It sounds like you were pretty disciplined. Through all that, what were the most important things that you learned about life as a tech entrepreneur, because I know that wasn’t your background initially. Everything takes longer than you think it will... Indeed! I don't think new tech entrepreneurs are prepared for that. It can definitely be frustrating... I don't know a single entrepreneur in the software world that does not share the same experience. A big lesson that we’ve learned is to try to validate as early as possible, and to get the product out there because what you think is super important may not necessarily be that important. You really do learn the most when people are actually using the product. This may sound counterintuitive, but I’ve found that features aren’t always as important as you think they are. Every time that we’ve come up with a new feature that we thought was going to be revolutionary, it didn't make as big of a difference as we thought it would. That's not to say that you should never improve your product, or keep innovating but I think sometimes people think “Oh I just have to add this one feature and then all these customers will come flocking.” That’s usually not the case, so that’s one word of caution - don’t always rely on new features to save your business. That's great advice. Working in development teams myself, I know there's a tendency to have these features that you feel are the “wow!” features. We’d be so proud of those features, and think they were awesome, but you come to realise that customers may be much more interested in something else. It’s so important not to waste time and financial resources on the wrong things… There were some quality features that we launched where we did notice a bit of an uptick, but for the most part, 75% - 80% of the time we launched a new feature, the graph just didn't change that much. So, what do you think really does start to make the difference? Is it just a slow, incremental thing? Have you noticed anything in particular that creates an uptrend? Believe it or not, I think the reliability of the product is a big thing. You can have a buggy product that has all the features in the world, but if it’s not working properly, eventually people are going to get tired of that. Usability is another thing - even with a lot of features, if the product is difficult to use, that's going to create a problem. We tried as much as possible to balance feature development with stabilizing the product; making it as fast as possible, making sure all the bugs were squashed, and making sure it was easy to use, no matter what features were added in. Of course, marketing also makes a huge difference. At the end of the day, people need to find out about your product. If you have the best product in the world, but no one knows about it, it won’t do you any good. I think it’s a combination of getting more eyeballs on your product, and making sure it’s easy to use, works well, and listening to your customers in terms of which features are really important, and not worrying to much about the nice to haves. Thank you. I really appreciate those comments. I say it in my book for tech entrepreneurs, Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book - you can’t just invest in features and appearance. The product needs to be stable, free of major bugs (and irritations that drive users nuts!), and perform well (in terms of speed, and time to load screens etc.) Otherwise, for every new customer you win, you’ll lose two or three more. Steve Krug, the UX and usability expert, wrote a book called Don’t Make Me Think, which is a good book to take a look at too. Software should be easy to use, even with minimal instructions - no head scratching, no frustrations… It should be very obvious how to use it, and its ease of use should be tested with real users! What would you say has been the steepest learning curve for you? To be honest, the whole experience was just mental to begin with! Also, there were two times where we’ve had to re-do huge chunks of the software in order to make Snappa scalable. Originally, we built the first version of the app on an Open Source framework, and then we realized it was only going to take us so far, so we had to rewrite some of the code, so that it was completely custom. That set us back quite a bit. Then six months to a year ago, it was a similar story where we had to convert the app, which was written in PHP over to NODE.JS, so that was another three months or so of just cranking out code. At times like that you do feel like you’re going backwards because you're not pushing out new features. Chris, thank you, you’ve raised some excellent points. The reality is that the architecture for the product is important, and if this isn’t quite right, or you need to evolve, or change direction as a business, you may have to revisit work that’s already been done. There are times when code needs to be updated, cleaned up and generally improved which can put new feature development on hold. Chris is sharing some very honest feedback here about some of the day-to-day challenges and frustrations of commercial software development. There can be a lot of work to do in relation to maintaining and managing code, keeping code quality as high as possible, and making sure that you have a firm foundation to expand from, even if it slows you down for a while, whilst you establish a firm base for yourself. It’s normal to put your foot on the accelerator to just get features built, and then to be forced to ease up as you run ahead of yourself and need to clean house again... This is also known as technical debt. Yeah, basically you need to do that in order to start pushing out those new features again. You always want to keep advancing and adding new features, but sometimes you really need to take a step back and improve what you’ve got, before you can take another two steps forward. You have to be o.k. with that – it’s just part of running a software business. You need to refactor (revisit and improve) code here and there, and you need to make sure your product is scalable… I think that was one of the biggest challenges. When we do launch the next project, I think from day 1 we’ll pay a little more attention to that kind of stuff - making sure that we have a really good foundation. I don't necessarily regret the way that we did it though, because we had no money. You have to balance planning ahead with just getting the damn thing out there! Now that we have more experience, and more resources, it makes sense for us to plan things out a bit more, and to be a bit more careful, but going back two years, we just needed to launch with the frameworks or knowledge that we had at the time. As someone that’s bootstrapped their business, what would be your top cash flow or money management tip for tech entrepreneurs? Hmmm, that's a good question! The nice thing about the SaaS model and recurring revenue (also known MRR, monthly recurring revenue) is that it tends to be a lot easier to forecast. In terms of hiring costs, we always hired just that tad bit ahead, so we weren’t putting ourselves in a bad position. We tried to hire as soon as it was possible without screwing ourselves over, but it’s tough because you don’t want to go too long before hiring because the feature requests pile up, but at the same time, as a bootstrapped company you never want to overextend yourself. In terms of our expenditure, we spent most of our money on development, and then for marketing, we were extremely scrappy. We never really did any paid advertising. All the marketing tactics we used were basically free, or as close to free as possible, so you have to figure out what marketing tactics don't require upfront cash and then get really good at that! Did you ever do Pay Per Click, (PPC) / Search Engine Marketing (SEM)? We experimented a year and a bit after Snappa launched. Unfortunately, because we have a Freemium product with a very low price point, it's just not very profitable. I’ve talked to many software founders about this, and generally the ones where paid advertising is working have products with lifetime values in the thousands of dollars, and are more enterprise-y. With products like ours, it tends to be more difficult to make the ads work. Ideally, you need a learning budget, and from the people I've talked to, you need about $5 to 10,000 dollars to really figure out how it's going to work and how profitable it's going to be. That’s a bit tough to swallow as a bootstrapped company, to spend $10,000 on something that may, or may not even work out in the long run.  The Freemium model in action at Snappa. Uh-huh. That's certainly a lot to bank roll! I’m currently considering a number of different marketing channels myself. I'm going to try a several new things, and give each channel some time so I can see which ones work… Yeah, we’re still growing month over month so I feel like we still have a lot of room to grow with the marketing channels that we’re using. I’m not ready to make an investment into a channel that didn't look too promising, from our brief experimentation with it. When you’re a small team, I think it's better to do one or two things really well, as opposed to trying ten different marketing channels at the same time. Usually you’re worse off doing that. We’ve always been of the mindset that having one or two marketing channels that are working, double down on those ones, and don’t worry too much about what you’re not doing. That’s a good tip! There's a lot of wisdom in the advice to commit to a few channels, learn as fast as possible, and make them work, vs. experimenting more widely and, then doubling down. The latter is likely to be more risky, so it’s important to manage that risk. Be especially careful if you’re considering more expensive experiments... So, what's a typical day like for you now? Over the last 6 months to a year, I’ve been really focused on putting in the necessary procedures to take myself out of the day to day as much as possible. We recently hired a marketing manager who is now doing most of our marketing, so I’ve been bringing him up to speed with what we've been doing, what's been working, and giving him autonomy to start looking at different things that we could be doing, or improving on what we’re doing now. For me, a typical day includes overseeing operations, trying to come up with new tactics, and new things that our business could be doing, and coordinating the team so that everything runs smoothly. So, you're becoming a “pure” CEO - more of a visionary, and executing less of the day to day, “doing” stuff yourself. Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's definitely fair. When we first started, Mark was doing everything development-related and I was doing everything that wasn't! Now we have support. As a CEO, and a founder that's always what I’ve been striving for, working on the business… ...On it, not in it, yes! So, that was my goal for 2017 to get the business to that point where I could take a more high-level approach instead of being in the weeds all day long. That's the ultimate, but that's also the challenge, isn't it - when you’re starting out in business? You need to be able to switch between different “brains” that handle different aspects of the business; CEO, salesman, worker, customer care, finance person etc. etc. and then to become ready, willing, and able to start delegating so your business can grow. Were you able to do that early on? In the beginning, there is just so much coming at you, that you almost don't have time to think high-level! My goal was to eliminate things one step at a time so I could get to that point. Support was the first thing that I needed to get off my plate as that really bogs you down. The next thing was writing content. It was getting to the point where planning all the content, promoting all the content and writing it was becoming too much, so I hired a freelance writer to start helping with that. Eventually you start taking more of the day-to-day stuff out of it, and then you start realizing the value of thinking more high-level and more strategically. That’s the ultimate goal as founders, to have that flexibility, and spending most of your time being high-level and strategic, and the least amount of time putting out fires, and doing tasks that other people are probably better suited to than you are. It’s scary letting people take over marketing and the blog, because you think that no-one can do as good a job as you, but the reality is that we’re not as talented or smart as we think we are. It's hard to let those things go. If you haven’t read it yet, check out The E-Myth revisited by Michael E. Gerber. He discusses these concepts in detail, which is helpful in terms of revisiting your vision, and understanding how you should be aiming to manage your business over time so you control it, rather than it controlling you! Chris, what would be your number 1 biggest piece of advice for aspiring tech entrepreneurs? I think the number one thing is to try to launch and ship something as soon as possible. I know people that always seem to have an idea, and always seem to be working on something, and years later they’re still in the idea phase, or chipping away at something. You’ve really got to ship as quickly as possible because that's where you are going to learn the most - that point when your product is actually in people's hands. If you’re bootstrapping, then revenue is very important, so I would try to validate as much as possible that people are going to pay for your product, so whether that's getting presales - that's always the best situation, but probably the most difficult. Just try to be reasonably assured that what you are building is going to generate income when you launch it. Thank you! So, what's next for you, and for Snappa? We’re always looking at improving the product. We recently launched a team plan, so you can now collaborate on your graphics with different team members. We always have a full pipeline of feature requests, and things that we want to add in, and for me it’s continuing to grow the team and take more of a high-level approach with the business. Best of luck, with everything! Before we finish the interview, can I ask you some quick-fire questions? Go for it! Great!
As long as you have a short time frame for your Beta, I think it's fine. However, if you’re building your product for two years without any presales, that's where I think it starts to get scary.
If the software itself is the business, like Snappa where the software is the true value of the company, then I think you really want a cofounder who’s been there from day one, and really invests in the product. If the tech isn't the true value of the business, then I’m more willing to use a freelancer or an agency. So, the more core the tech is to the business, the more you want to protect it and keep it in-house? Yeah, exactly.
The last thing you want to do every time the competition launches a feature is to automatically copy that, because you’ll always be playing catch-up, and that might not necessarily be the right feature for your audience. Every competitor has a slightly different customer base, so we always prioritize the feature requests that we get from our customers, along with what our vision is for the product. We keep tabs on what the competition is doing, but I wouldn't say we monitor them very closely, and then panic or anything like that!
Where can people go to find out more about your app? You can go to Snappa.com.  Thank you! I appreciate your time, Christopher.
My pleasure, thanks for having me. This week's Techpreneur Interview is with Justin Chen, the cofounder of PickFu, an app which allows users to gather instant market feedback via polls shares his experiences of techpreneurship. PickFu appears in my latest book Entrepreneurial Espresso, a compendium of business-boosting tools for the modern entrepreneur. Justin and I first connected when I contacted him about featuring PickFu in the book. Welcome Justin! Could you tell us a little about your background? I studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley and then held some programming and project management jobs at a startup, and then at HP. Interesting - having project management skills can really help with managing your development processes! How long have you been an entrepreneur? My business partner, John, and I have been entrepreneurs since 2006 - we just had our 12 year anniversary in January! Congratulations, that’s a major achievement! Please tell us about your app. PickFu is a polling service that gets you instant feedback on your ideas and creative options. For example, if you want input on your latest mobile app design, post a poll with all the app design options and the PickFu audience will vote on which one they like and explain why. A poll with 50 responses can be done in 15 minutes - enabling you to iterate on your design quickly with the confidence of unbiased feedback. Very useful for entrepreneurs! PickFu allows users to A/B test (in other words, asking: “Do you like this one, or that one best?”), which is so helpful when you want to consult with the wider world, need quick answers, and an easy way to gather feedback about the "look and feel" of your app… Did you have any experience of building apps before you built your product? When we built the initial version of PickFu, John and I were already running another business called Menuism. It’s an online restaurant review and menu directory and is still operating today.  A / B testing two different designs using PickFu. So you're running multiple businesses too! How did you first come to recognise that there was a problem that you could solve with your app? PickFu came out of our own need for unbiased feedback. When we were working on our first startup, Menuism, we constantly polled our friends for feedback. However, we came to the realization that the responses were inherently biased and that our email harassing was netting a lower response rate as they got sick of giving feedback. That’s where the idea for PickFu came from. Uh-huh. There are only so many times you can ask your nearest and dearest about product names, company names, and designs before fatigue sets in…! What first made you think - “Yeah! This could be something!”? Once we built the first version and immediately got value from it, we decided to share it with the Hacker News community, (run by the startup incubator Y Combinator.) It got a positive response and Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the Internet privacy company, DuckDuckGo, blogged positively about it. After that, we realized that this simple and fast preference testing service filled a need. Nice! Early publicity is every new founders dream! Be prepared to share and promote your product everywhere. You can download a list of places to promote your software here: http://bit.ly/purposeful-places-to-market-your-app. How did you identify the correct target market to suit your product? Our initial market was the market we were familiar with - other entrepreneurs. However, as word about PickFu spread we noticed that it started gaining traction in a few new target markets. First it was self-publishing authors testing book titles and book covers. Then it was mobile app developers testing their app icons, screenshots and other creatives. After that we started expanding into the e-commerce space with customers using PickFu to fine tune their product offerings, listing photos and marketing copy. You never know the uses that people will find for your product once you release it into the wild. It might be used in ways you never imagined, which could be even bigger markets than those you first considered, so take careful note of who is using your product and how. Contact customers to say hi, set up short questionnaires to ask people what they are using your app to do, and generally get to know your customer base as thoroughly as possible. Justin, did you experience a transition to making sure you were marketing your “solution” to the right audience? We develop a new marketing channel each time we discover a new customer segment. This can be a combination of landing pages, ads, emails and outreach. After a few months we evaluate the traction of that segment, looking at the ROI and customer LTV. That helps us determine if we’re on the right track with that audience. That’s awesome and something I didn’t mention in my earlier comment - the creation of specific marketing to fit the different audiences that you have. The same message won’t necessarily appeal to the same groups, which is why creating customer profiles is so important. Understanding the different groups you serve will help you to communicate with and market to each group in the right way. You can download a free Customer Profile Template that I provide to readers of my book Develop Your Idea! It will help you to create customer profiles, think about the messages you need to communicate, and consider the best places to find your target, or "primary customers" on and offline. Were you able to get product feedback before launching? We did not get feedback prior to the MVP, but have constantly improved the service since then through customer feedback. We have also conducted both phone-based and in-person customer interviews to better understand how PickFu fits into workflows. Did you do a Beta launch? No, we didn't. O.k. and now for the $1,000,000 question: How did you find your developers? Both of us are developers so we did all the core development. We also have another developer in Argentina that we found through a local firm. We also hire other workers through UpWork, and bestjobs.ph. Cool, so core development “in-house” plus help from everywhere from South America to the Philippines! What are the most important lessons, or realisations you've had about life as a tech entrepreneur? Try not to outsource a job you haven’t tried yourself. It’s easy to get burned by misplaced expectations and harder to manage someone if you don’t have any familiarity with the space. It’s also a great learning opportunity to try everything yourself first. I agree 100%, although it has its ups and downs! Learning on the job can be a source of joy, a complete frustration, or a bit of both(!), but it’s an integral part of really understanding your entire business and having as few blind spots as possible. Where did you experience the steepest learning curve? When we first started, despite both having software engineering backgrounds, we didn’t have much web development experience. So learning a web framework from scratch and getting it deployed to production was quite the learning curve! I can imagine, and deploying a commercial app is a serious matter! What weren’t you prepared for, or expecting? How entrepreneurship is more of a marathon than a sprint. When we first started it was lots of long hours and ignoring all aspects of normal life, which was difficult to sustain when success didn’t come overnight. Once we developed more discipline and patience it was much easier to get into a normal, more sustainable pace. Yup. It can be easy to eat, sleep and breathe the business which is all very exciting, until you get burned out! Then comes the period of reflection, and making changes in order to sustain the business, your personal life (and your sanity!) long-term. I think that’s a really common learning curve, or maybe it’s more of an entrepreneurial rite of passage! What’s your top cashflow/money management tip for tech entrepreneurs? When your business is doing well enough, apply for a business line of credit at your bank. It will give you peace of mind knowing that you can draw on that buffer if times get tough. Thanks for sharing that! What’s a typical day like for you now? Are you a full-timer, or side-hustler? I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur since 2006. Currently, I wake up at 6:45 a.m, cook breakfast for the kids and make their lunches. I get them to school by 8:00 a.m. On the way home I’ll hit a coffee shop to kick-start my productivity for a couple of hours. First, I’ll triage any customer support emails then switch over to coding, either fixing bugs or tackling a new feature. Once I get back home I’ll sync up with my business partner, John, before continuing to tackle the to-do list, which is a mix of marketing, development and delegating to other team members. In the afternoon, I’ll pick up the kids from school and shuttle them around to their activities while squeezing in 45 min work sessions wherever I am. Once the kids are asleep, I’ll wrap up any loose ends and double check for customer support issues before winding down for bed. It’s so cool to hear how other people manage their days! What’s your number 1 biggest tip / piece of advice to aspiring techpreneurs? Have patience and don’t get discouraged when things don’t happen overnight. As entrepreneurs we spend all our effort working on something and then launch it hoping that the world immediately embraces it. However, that gratification rarely comes immediately and sometimes we can second guess our decisions, which might lead to hasty adjustments. Give your existing and potential customers time to internalize your awesome launch. Maybe it takes a few days, weeks or months, but have confidence in your decisions and keep moving the business forward. Great advice, and much appreciated. It can take a while to build momentum, that's for sure! Before we wrap up the interview, can I ask you a few quick-fire questions?
Where can people go to find out more about your app? https://www.pickfu.com.  Amazing! Thank you Justin, it’s been a pleasure.
WELCOME TO ENTREPRENEUR INTERVIEWS - SERIES 2...It's been a few months since I interviewed any entrepreneurs, and I’ve really been looking forward to talking to some techpreneurs for Series 2 of Entrepreneur Interviews, which features interviews with techpreneurs. I've spent over 10 years making the journey from initial idea to finished software product with clients, and I love to talk shop! You may have come across information on how to avoid the risks and pitfalls of creating software in my "how to" book for tech startups, Don't Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book. Now, you'll find out more about what it's really like to be a tech entrepreneur - the triumphs, frustrations, challenges, and learning curves experienced by people who make a living from their own software products. Series 2 begins with Kyle Richey, the CEO of Strides, an iOS and web app with rave reviews in Apple's App Store. There's some great advice in this post - I hope you enjoy it, and series 2 as a whole! Welcome Kyle. Thanks for joining me on the Purposeful Products Blog! Sure! How long have you been an entrepreneur? I started my first business in July of 2006. What’s your background? I was getting a Bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, set to graduate in 2008 at the bottom of the recession. Since I had been making some money from my online business (very little, but enough to pay some bills), I decided to double down and focus on building my business full-time, rather than attempt to get a job. Now it's been over 11 years and I'm proud to say that I've never had a job or even filled out a resume. :) Wow! Straight out of college and a business owner already. That’s an interesting path and I wonder whether it will become the norm in years to come... Tell us about your app, Strides. Something as important as building good habits and tracking important goals is much more difficult than it needs to be. So, in 2012 I started building this ambitious service to make it all simpler... while maintaining an insane level of flexibility. It's come a long way since then, but I'm excited about everything we have on the roadmap to keep making it better for everyone. The app motivates and encourages by keeping track of users’ current and best ever streaks of success in changing a habit, or working towards a goal. It also shows how close you are to completing your goal. Take a look at Kyle's screenshots of his app - you'll need to pick some attractive screenshots to showcase your own app, along with a pitch / bullet pointed summary, and description of your product's benefits that you can use for App Store Optimisation (ASO), and to include on your website.  The Strides App - iOS version Did you have any experience of building apps before you built Strides? Yeah, I designed and helped build a few simple apps in the first few years after the App Store launched, but none of them went anywhere because they weren't set up for success:
Those are really critical items. Because it's so important, a business plan is highly recommended. The key reason? In order to create a plan you'll need to think carefully about many aspects of your business. This time for reflection almost always surfaces important points you might otherwise have missed! Here’s a business model template you can use to make sure that your bases are covered. The modern style of "lean" business plan is short, sweet and to the point. Say goodbye to the traditional 30+ page tomes (they're probably the reason why a shockingly small percentage of people create a business plan): http://www.witszen.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Business-Model-Canvas.png. How did you first come to recognise that there was a problem that you could solve with your app? I kept hearing people complaining about New Year's Resolutions not working, and it felt so sad. Why is it so difficult for us to set a reasonable goal for the year and actually achieve it? Isn't that what life is all about, making meaningful progress on the things we care about, growing? For sure!… And what made you think - “Whoop! This could be something!”? When I created the first version it got a decent amount of traction early on, and even though v1.0 was awful...seriously - it really resonated with people. I remember getting an email from someone saying it helped them break a bad habit they had for years, and I knew it was worth pressing on. That is powerful feedback! So, what was involved in doing this? Phew! I've been working an average of 20+ hours per week on Strides for over 6 years, so that's at least 6,000 hours of work from me, and I don't even do the development for iOS, Web or Android. I've invested over $300,000 in the development so far. It has literally been the hardest thing I've ever done - even harder than having two toddlers, ha-ha - but I love it. It’s so great that you shared that dollar amount for readers. Thank you. It’s important to set a proportion of your profits aside as your business grows so you can continue to maintain and develop your product. In Don’t Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book, I recommend that readers ringfence funds for infrastructure – servers/ database storage, etc. and application monitoring, automated testing, and source code / release management software. You can’t just spend 100% of your money on features. The foundations of the house need investment too, not just the parts you can see, but the underlying parts too. Once you launch customers will make demands. They’ll have ideas, requests, bugbears… You’ll need to listen and respond to their needs, and have some budget set aside for new features. It will be important to analyse feedback, user trends and data about your customers, so you can work out the best and most profitable actions to take to maintain your existing customer base, and win new customers. How did you identify the correct target market to suit your product? This one's tricky. I definitely wouldn't recommend building something for "everyone" like we did. Find your niche for sure. The purpose of Strides is to make it flexible enough to track absolutely any goal or habit, so I knew going into it that we couldn't possibly have one specific target market, so instead we're targeting a mindset: people that want to track things to improve them and appreciate the progress they've made. I guess the quickest way to sum it up would be to say this was a "scratch your own itch" business that has naturally evolved over time. Was there a transition to making sure you were marketing your “solution” to the right audience? Not really. Since I was building it for myself originally, I just kept getting more requests from people wanting more flexibility, and did my best to filter things out and focus on the most impactful additions. Were you able to get product feedback before launching? No, but I really wish I did. I didn't even show people a prototype before development. Big mistake that wasted tons of time. Thanks for sharing that. It’s so important that people new to developing commercial software understand why early feedback is so important. Did you do a Beta launch? How did it go, what did you learn, and what was involved? No, not for v1.0. We do Beta testing with new features now though, and I highly recommend it. What are the most important lessons, or realisations you've had about life as a tech entrepreneur? Firstly, working from home is amazing. If you have kids at home, and/or get distracted, my favorite tip is to listen to instrumental music with headphones. It helps so much. Aside from that, I'd say the biggest thing I've learned is that you have to be in it for the long haul. Focus on adding as much value as possible, and as long as you align your incentives with the people that are paying you, you'll do great. Love that tip! I use music to induce a state of focus quite a lot. I talk about some great tools related to productivity and focus in my latest book Entrepreneurial Espresso. You can get a free chapter on productive work cycles and focus music here: http://bit.ly/free-productivity-chapter. Where did you experience the steepest learning curve? Not prototyping and testing before building. I figured I could just make judgment calls, but it was so costly. Sketch out your ideas and show them to anyone who will give you honest feedback. Do that for a few rounds and if you're feeling a sense of progress each time, design it in more detail and do it again, then start building. It'll save you 10x as much time as it takes, I promise. And 10x the money too! One of the biggest rookie mistakes is hiring a developer too soon, based on wireframes and user journeys that are still too sketchy to translate into working software, or spending time building the wrong things… then having to waste more time and money to make adjustments. What weren’t you prepared for, or expecting? How much time it takes to grow monthly revenue, depending on the business model. I've had businesses that never turned a profit, others that took years to have their first profitable month, which ended up getting acquired because I stuck with them until they were making a solid monthly profit, and others that were profitable from day one. Think long and hard about your business model. If you need cashflow early on, consider keeping your job, taking out a loan, getting funding, or doing consulting/services to pay the bills so you have time to grow the business. What have been the highs and lows of your experience as a tech entrepreneur? The highs are the flexibility, schedule, working from home, the residual income, asset ownership, and mostly the ability to work on something you care deeply about. The lows are the days when nothing seems to be going well, and you feel like giving up. Read The Dip, by Seth Godin and decide if it's time to quit or stick. It'll only take an afternoon to read it, but it'll help you press on when it's worth it, or quit confidently if it's not. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ve heard of the book but must confess I haven’t read it. You’ve just reminded me of an interview I read with Nathan Barry who runs the email marketing SaaS company, Convertkit, https://convertkit.com. He asked himself: ‘Do I still want this as much today as the day I started, and do I still want to be the CEO of a SaaS company?’ Because if the answer is no, then I should shut it down and move on. Then he asks: ‘Have I really given ConvertKit every possible chance to succeed?’ Because if the answer is yes, then something was wrong. Maybe the timing is wrong, or the product is wrong, or the market is wrong, or I’m the wrong person to do this. https://www.groovehq.com/blog/nathan-barry-interview. As another tip before giving up, Jay Abraham's book, Getting Everything You Can Out of all You've Got is worth a read. Some approaches are a little old-school, but makes you realise that no matter what you've tried so far, there are literally hundreds of other options for marketing and building your biz. I got to see him at a conference a few years ago and he was brilliant! What’s your top cashflow/money management tip for tech entrepreneurs? Partner with someone with complementary skills and sign a concise agreement based on profit share. If I had done this sooner, I could have saved $150,000+ on development for this one app. The crazy part? When I worked with agencies, the quality of the work was lower than it is with co-founders (not because they're worse developers, because they don't have a vested interest in the business) and it cost way more. This isn't easy, but do your best to build a solid team or partnership because it'll help keep you motivated while saving everyone money. Also, use Stripe to collect payments, https://stripe.com. Yup, lack of skin in the game. It’s just not their baby! Stripe is great and so easy to set up (and as a fintech startup themselves, they are killing it!) What’s a typical day like for you now? Are you a full-timer, or side-hustler? Full-timer since November 2008 when I graduated. I wake up at 6:00am, work out, get ready, have breakfast with my family, and work on my top priorities from 8:30am until 12:00pm. Then, we eat lunch together, and I play with my kids for a while before I get back to work until 5:00pm. Sometimes I work at night or on the weekends if it makes sense, but I try to take Friday afternoons off. That sounds like a pretty awesome routine! I’m jealous! Maybe it’s time to develop some new habits. (I know just the app, ha-ha!)  Entrepreneurship allows Kyle to have a more flexible family life One of our clients said she wished she had a time machine after consulting with us - what would you do differently if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice now you’re “older and wiser”? Great question! It'd definitely be to focus on building one or two things that have long-term potential to become businesses big enough to pay each co-founders' bills. I wasted SO much time working on little apps that never had much potential, but they were almost the same amount of work. Focus on as few projects as you can, and do your best to make sure each one could meet your goals five years from now (based on business model, market size, problem, expansion, growth, trends, etc.). That’s great advice! What’s your number 1 biggest tip / piece of advice to aspiring techpreneurs? Don't think of your app users or website visitors as numbers in your analytics. Always ask "what's in it for me?" from their perspective with everything you design, develop, write, etc. If you do this throughout your entire business, it'll be a lot easier to at least succeed in adding real value for real people, and that's the foundation of every successful business. Amen to that! Thanks so much for speaking to me! What’s next for you and your app? Absolutely! We're working on sharing progress with family, friends and teams for Strides, along with an Android app coming out later this year. We're also launching a new app called Summit Day Planner that covers the Tasks, Calendar Events & Notes side of your daily routine. Lots of people requested these features for Strides, but we decided to put them in their own app to keep Strides from becoming an even bigger app. :) Uh-huh, the power of public declarations! People are more likely to follow through if they’ve already openly shared their intentions. It’s pretty powerful stuff – so if you haven’t told anyone you’re going to build an app, tell a few supportive people and “put it out there!” Good luck with the new app. Exciting times! Thank you! Before we wrap up the interview, can we cover a few quick-fire questions - just for fun? Great! O.k. Let’s do it. Here they come!
I’ve got to ask you more about your last response! Almost everyone we work with wants to know which platform to start with… I'm sure they'd like to hear you weigh in on the topic. Well, since 2008, the general trend has been toward mobile, and if you're building a software business it's most likely going to need a mobile component, maybe mobile-first or even mobile-only. Running the numbers, there are more people worldwide using Android, but most of the money is spent on iOS, especially when you consider non-game apps, so in my opinion it makes more financial sense to start on iOS, unless you're targeting a specific use case only possible on Android (e.g. Launchers) or your target market tends to use Android more than iOS. If you use something like Firebase, or build your own server on AWS, etc. then you can be prepared to scale to the other mobile platform if things go well enough, and to web/desktop if your users are asking for it. In my book, Don’t Hire..., I describe that exact situation as "Cash in the app store, people in the play store" as a very simple reminder - you might not be able to charge up-front so easily on Android, but there are a huge number of users, whilst Apple users are more "conditioned" towards paying for apps up front. Via Android you might look towards in-app purchases, without charging up-front for the app, or consider other ways to monetise larger volumes of customers - advertising etc, as long as you choose your ad types carefully and don't drive your customers crazy with it! (You might also charge a fee to have advertising removed.) I love that! It's easy to remember and makes sense. Great point about charging too. I've heard that free with ads and/or IAPs works best on Android. I'm looking forward to testing it out with the Strides Android app. Where can people find out more about your app? My portfolio is a great place to start: ConquerApathy.com. There are some really great nuggets of information here. Thanks so much, Kyle!  Strides is available online and in the App Store:
Web: https://www.stridesapp.com/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/strides-habit-tracker/id672401817?mt=8 |
WHAT INFORMATION WILL YOU FIND on THE PURPOSEFUL GROUP BLOG?Want to build a mobile, or web app to offer to your existing customers? 
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