Happily, there are many ways to productize your relationships with customers or your expertise as a consultant.
[Patrick notes: The transcript below has my commentary inserted like this, as usual.]
What you’ll learn in this podcast:
- Why vegetarians do not give great advice on pricing hotdogs, and Hacker News comments about the inadviability of selling information very rarely come from people with actual budget to buy information
- Why having multiple packaging options (for example, at an X / 2X / 5X ratio) increases total revenue from products
- Why you don’t have to be “Internet famous” to build an audience via teaching, and perhaps use that to sell things down the road
If You Want To Listen To It
MP3 Download (~90 minutes, ~82MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.
Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.
[powerpress]
Transcript: Teaching As Marketing
Patrick McKenzie: Hi to everybody. This is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as better known as Patio11 on the Internets. Welcome to the, I think, seventh edition of the Kalzumeus podcast. [Patrick notes: 6th!] I’m joined here by special guest Nathan Barry, author of “Authority,” founder of ConvertKit, and a guy who has a few other things in his expanding product empire.
[Patrick notes: If you sell software, information, or consulting services, take a look at ConvertKit. I started using it recently for one of my businesses. It bakes a lot of acquired smarts into an email marketing workflow tool.]
Nathan Barry: Thanks for having me.
Patrick: Thanks very much for being here. I think we’re probably going to be talking about info products today, primarily. Let’s ask the obvious question first. Do you like the term “info product”?
Nathan: I think it’s a little degrading. I tend to just refer them as courses or books. “Info product” always brings up the scammy Internet marketer.
Patrick: Right. The whole “make money online” niche.
Nathan: Right, exactly. I just try to write things and teach things that provide value. “Info product” doesn’t demonstrate that very well.
Patrick: That’s something I totally agree with. I try to call mine “productized consulting” because the book was like a consulting engagement except delivered with less of my hours of unique attention attached to each delivery. I think you were also a consultant before you got into being a publisher, right? How did the arc of that transition go for you?
Nathan: I did some freelancing in college, and then after I left college, I did a year freelancing full time. That worked pretty well for me, but then I went on an extended five or six week international trip. Didn’t do any work. Came back. It was the beginning of 2009, and there was a recession going on in the US, so nobody wanted to work with me then. I ended up taking a job leading the design team at a local startup, and I worked there for three years. That was a really great experience. Learned a lot of things. Learned a lot of things not to do.
I ended up building a few little iPhone apps on the side. Got those to making a few thousand dollars a month a month in revenue, and then used that to quit my job and go back to what I would call then “consulting.” Where before I referred to myself as a freelancer, after that point I referred to myself as a consultant. I think I brought a lot more value to each of my engagements, having more experience.
After leaving that job, I launched my first book, which was “The App Design Handbook.” That’s when everything changed for me. I went from these iPhone apps that were making anywhere from $1,000 maybe up to $4,000 a month, but really uneven revenue. A lot of it was chance. There wasn’t a great marketing strategy there or anything but then with the first book, things started to make sense as far as marketing and product launches, and I was able to make about $12,500 off of the book sales on the first day, and I never looked back. I actually never took a consulting project after that, because, as you call it, productized consulting pays really, really well.
Patrick: It kind of cannibalizes the business too. After you’re capable of waving the magic wand and getting another one out the door, there’s increasingly less and less impetus to go out and grab another client engagement.
Nathan: Exactly.
Patrick: Keith and I just…the last episode of the podcast was on how this could potentially be a way for people to get out of consulting, which since we’ve already done that topic to death, we’re just going to do more deep dives into how to actually execute on it, rather than saying, “Yeah, it would be a great idea to get away from crazy client issues, and chasing invoices, and yadda yadda.” Can you just refresh my memory, when did you launch “Designing Web Applications,” which was your first book basically?
Nathan: The first book was “The App Design Handbook,” which was focused on iOS applications.
Patrick: Oh, that’s right. Sorry. I’m getting the chronology wrong.
Nathan: That one came out September 4th, 2012, so as we’re recording this, it’s been out for about nine months or so, and then the second book was “Designing Web Applications,” and that came out December 12, 2012, so just about 90 days later.
Patrick: That is pretty impressive. I kind of got the impression from just following your stuff on the Internet that you have been doing this for many, many years, and that I have to break myself to actually do the math. It’s like, “Wait, that’s 10 months.” Granted, you have a career before that, and you’re able to leverage what you learned from that, but the public portion of the career, or “public,” the so-called “Internet celebrity” portion of the career is just the last 10 months.
You Don’t Have To Be “Internet Famous” To Cultivate An Audience
Nathan: Yep. That’s right. There was one key thing or habit that I formed that made that really, really easy to do, and that came from Chris Guillebeau. He writes a bunch of books and has a popular blog and stuff, but he kept telling me the idea of writing 1,000 words a day, basically the idea of making slow, consistent progress on whatever you’re trying to do. I built up a habit of writing 1,000 words a day, and that’s how I actually finished my first book. I tried to write a book in the past, and I’d never made it past the first three or four pages, so by working on it consistently every single day, I was actually able to finish it pretty quickly, and I kept track of it in a little iPhone app how many days in a row, and 1,000 words a day…
What happened is I launched “The App Design Handbook” in September, and I had a streak of 85 days in a row at that point, or 70 days in a row, or something, so then the next day after launch, my phone popped up and said, “Are you going to write 1,000 words today?” I went, “Well, I have 85 days in a row, so I don’t want to break that chain, so yeah, I’m going to write 1,000 words, but what am I going to write it about?”
I thought, “You know, I really like…I talked about designing iPhone applications, but I’ve spent a ton of time designing web applications as well, so I should write about that,” and basically I just rolled right into the next book, because I had this habit of writing 1,000 words a day. Anyway, it’s just continued, and it’s turned into another book after that, and I think I’m about a month away from hitting a full year of writing 1,000 words a day.
Patrick: Wow. Congratulations.
Nathan: Thanks.
Patrick: I really think that the determination and stick‑with‑it‑ness there is valuable to a lot of people. My business was no great shakes back in the day, and the reason that it’s something larger than no great shakes now is just not stopping, even when I was just very, very part‑time in it, and couldn’t muster up for more than up to five hours a week, I was trying to grind out one A/B test every week, rain or shine. I don’t think I hit my streak numbers nearly as often as you did, but that was definitely one of the factors that kept it going in the right trajectory prior to actually quitting the day job, having more time to work on it.
Let’s see. Something that I often hear from people who I advise, “Well, if you don’t love the day job or don’t love consulting, maybe you could try this productized consulting thing,” that, “Well, yeah, maybe that works for ‘Internet famous’ people like you, Patrick, but I do not have a platform, or a reputation, or 7,000 Twitter followers, yadda yadda yadda.” In your experience, do you need to be “Internet famous” to actually make this work?
Nathan: No. Not at all. It certainly helps in some areas, but I was not Internet famous just before I launched my first book. People hadn’t really heard of me. I didn’t have credibility and expertise. I designed a lot of software, but nothing…I didn’t design the Facebook mobile app, or anything for major startups, or things like that. It’s a fascinating topic of how you can gain credibility and authority, and one that I’ve worked on quite a bit, but just by teaching, you gain this perceived expertise. One story that I like to tell for me personally is, back in 2006, I was doing web design, standard marketing websites, so I spent a lot of time getting pretty good with CSS, fixing cross‑browser bugs, coding up everything.
I came across this site when it first launched called css‑tricks.com, and it was by Chris Coyier, and I remember looking at his site and going…I read a couple articles and I went, “Oh, I know that. He’s not much of an expert because I already knew that,” and I gave myself a little arrogant pat on the back or whatever.
He kept coming out with more articles, and I kept seeing that I already knew that, so we were basically at the same level and we were learning at the same pace. Over some time, other web design friends would ask me a question, and I would…instead of answering it, I would think, “Oh, Chris already wrote about this, so I’ll forward on his article,” because it was pretty good.
This continued on. Finally, Chris launched a Kickstarter campaign years later, so he’s been helping people out and writing articles about CSS for years. He launches a Kickstarter campaign saying, “I’m going to redesign css‑tricks.com, and I want to be able to raise $3,500 bucks so that I can focus on it, on doing a great redesign for a month, and I don’t have to worry about clients, or jobs, or anything like that.
Basically telling his audience, “Will you help me out so I can do this? As a reward, I will record all these screencasts of the process and tutorials, and everybody who backs the project will get access to that.”
I don’t have the exact number in front of me, but it was something like $85,000 that he raised out of his $3,500 goal, and that made me really sit up and realize there’s something else going on here. It’s not about skill, because Chris and I were at the same level. We started at the same point.
Because he was teaching, I think he got better than I did, and I definitely learned some stuff from him over the years, but he wasn’t that much of an expert than I was skill‑wise, but I did not have the ability to flip a switch and come up with $85,000 in effectively product sales, in whatever, 20 days, in what his Kickstarter campaign was.
That made me realize that the difference between he and I is that we both got better at the same level, but I kept that knowledge to myself, whereas he shared it with everybody. He was teaching, and that gave him authority, and that gave him a following. That’s the moment that made me finally sit up and go, “I need to be teaching.”
Patrick: I totally agree with you there. I think teaching gives you both breadth and depth, breadth in that the size of the community and the size of your following increases, and depth in that you, just by the nature of teaching things, tend to learn them better than if you did not have to explain them to better. One of the reasons I originally started my blog back in the day is that I was worried that if I just had to bat an idea around in my head, that I could deceive myself very easily, whereas actually forcing the discipline of seeing that idea in print would mean that I would have to confront the internal logic of it more.
It turns out that when you are routinely confronting the internal logic of your ideas, of the marketing direction for your software product or whatnot, and seeing that, “OK, I posted in January about this being the plan. It is now July. Let’s see if the plan, and the actions subsequent to the plan, and the results actually match up together,” and then course correcting based on that is much, much more effective than just doing natural human thing to retrospectively construct a narrative that supports what you’ve been doing all along.
Yeah, big fan of teaching, obviously for…it’s a good thing to do for one’s self, clearly. I think it’s also a net benefit for the community and whatnot.
I don’t swing quite as hippie as some of the community do, but I think that open source and the cross‑pollination of ideas that happens with the Internet, with the communities that have started on the Internet and moved offline, like the Business of Software forum community used to be just a message board on Joel Spolsky’s site back in the day, and then a bunch of us know each other in person now.
The Amy Hoy crowd of friends [Patrick notes: I’m an honorary member] is growing and meeting each other offline these days. Hacker News meetups are moving offline. The ideas are getting mixed in these groups, and then between groups and whatnot, in a way that combines them to something that’s larger than some of the parts, I think.
Nathan: One thing that I want to add on that, because we talked at a really high level about teaching is important, but when it comes to actually launching a product and building that credibility, I would say the first thing that’s really, really important is to say, “I’m writing a book. I’m putting out this course,” and put up a landing page for it, and just by doing that, as a very first step, you gain some credibility. For me, I was a random designer who occasionally blogged about useless stuff, but when I made the transition to, “I’m writing a book about designing iPhone applications,” I think there were a bunch of people that sat up a little bit and looked, and just because I put up that landing page and said I was writing a book, that gave me the start of some credibility.
Patrick: I totally agree with that, and that people’s framing for value propositions are very important. The same way that people frame a newspaper article is ipso facto worth more than a blog post, someone who’s a published author, or soon to be a published author, on a topic is ipso facto more authoritative, more credible, better informed with regards to that topic than somebody who isn’t. Just putting that “author” word on your sleeve is a better positioning for yourself than having other, less useful words on your sleeve, like, say, “blogger.”
Nathan: You do need to follow up the landing page with a statement of credibility, with something that actually demonstrates expertise, like some really in‑depth blog posts on the topic, sample chapters from your book, things like that. You do need to actually be good at it and show the world.
Patrick: It’s kind of like all marketing. There’s the up‑front promise, and then you have to actually deliver at some point, the promises your marketing is making, because the Internet has a short temper and a long memory. You only get one reputation these days, not to say that your first product is going to be the end‑all, be‑all of every book ever published in the history of man, but you can’t put things which are terrible attached to your name, because you only get one of them.
That conflicts with another piece of advice that I often give, which is, “Ship things even if they’re crappy.” How can I resolve that contradiction? Definitely do ship things even if you think they’re crappy, because I think other people will think they are substantially less crappy than you.
[Patrick notes: This might not have come out entirely correctly during the audio. What I mean is that you shouldn’t let excessive obsession with making the product perfect get in the way of delivering V1.0 to paying customers. One of the worst pathologies of software entrepreneurs is being perpetually 6 months away from the minimum viable release. It is much much better, both for you and for your customers, to ship something in a month and then spend 5 months polishing it in response to real user feedback then either spending 6 months in the BatCave then shipping or, worse, spending 6 months in the BatCave then not shipping.]
I think as creators, we often have kind of that Dunning‑something‑or‑other effect going on, where we see all the warts. We don’t have the view from outside our own head of how useful this is to someone who is just getting started, or has never seen curated resources on this topic, or has not been living this for the last 90 days of 1,000 words a day like we have.
Nathan: I think when it comes to the reputation, if you’re trying hard to put out something that’s good, people will give you a lot of credit for it, and I think if you’re putting out something that’s scammy, or charging a lot for it when there’s not the value there, that’s where it’s going to hurt your reputation, but if you’re earnestly trying, and shipping things often, and trying to deliver a lot of value and help people, then putting out an early version of your product is not going to hurt your reputation.
Information Wants To Be Free Hates Being Anthropomorphized
Patrick: That’s something that prevented me from publishing for the longest time, was just being scared of being seen as taking advantage of people. Partly was due to the natural engineer distrust of charging money for anything, and partly something that I would not have said that I agreed in, but a little voice inside of me was agreeing with anyway, was, “Information is free on the Internet. How could you possibly charge money for it?” Which, being older and wiser now, I’ve learned that, especially when you’re talking in a B2B context, this: Anyone who has employees, and accordingly must pay salaries every two weeks regardless of what they are doing, is literally incapable of finding things for free on the Internet.
Because if you tell one of your lead engineers to spend two weeks researching a topic, and you pay them $10,000, regardless of whether the blog post they were reading were “free,” creates a lot of value to a curated topic, and gives them resources of a known quality and an easy digestible format.
Rather than having them have to spelunk and do the curation step themselves, or do the, “Before I actually get to doing the work that I’m supposed to doing, I’m designing this web application or writing this email campaign, I have to first design a curriculum to teach myself that, and I will take my own curriculum, warts and all, and then I will do the implementation, and then we will actually get back to selling the thing that makes this business run.”
Nathan: That’s where if you’re teaching a skill that other people use to make money, and you’re teaching it to people who have money, so that can be programming, design, marketing, anything, if it meets those two criteria, then people will happily pay to save even a little bit of time, because they’re businesses and they’re looking at profit, and loss, and those factors. That’s how it’s easy to justify a price of $250, or $500, or more if you can demonstrate that it delivers far more value than that and saves far more time.
Patrick: Yeah, definitely. And there will be people, when you announce, that say, “Oh, you jumped the shark. You sold out. Nobody will ever buy this. Yadda, yadda, yadda.” Everything I’ve ever done, from Bingo Card Creator on down, I had at least a few people saying, “Nobody’s going to buy this.” At some point, I’ve just come to accept it. There exists that psychograph of people who just are fundamentally unhappy with the notion that products sell. That they’re empirically not that good at predicting that because all products ever have sold. So, I would just discount that opinion when people say it to you.
Nathan: I’m going to, I think, misquote you when I say this but you mentioned it in a Hacker News comment on…I think it was for my book “Authority,” when it came out. There was somebody complaining about pricing and other things about it. Your comment was something along the lines of, “This is like the vegetarians complaining about the prices from the hot dog vendors.” Basically, these aren’t the people who are buying your product or who have any interest in your product and so their opinion is not really relevant.
Patrick: I released a video course about life cycle emails last October, I think. It was largely focused for people who had businesses at a certain amount of scale. My typical consulting client was, at the time, 10 to 50 million dollars a year in sales. When I had an idea of the person I was writing for, it was really someone who had the official title, “Chief Marketing Officer,” or “Head of Product,” or something like that at a business that was at or near the scale of my consulting clients. Maybe at a million dollars a year of sales or at the low end a couple hundred thousand dollars a year of sales.
And then, there being many folks in the Internet who do not have several hundred thousand dollars a year of sales, people were, in the context of, “I am a $30 an hour freelancer” saying “$500 seems like a whole lot of money.” Whereas it just doesn’t, when you’re selling software licenses and they cost $20,000 a pop.
It was hilarious feedback I was getting because I was getting the, “Oh, it’s crazy to charge money for this free blog post on the Internet. Yadda, yadda, yadda.” And the feedback I was getting from some of the potential customers where it was like, “We are literally incapable of tracking a number this low on our systems. The expected value of a single lead exceeds the price of this course by several times. That is making it difficult for me to convince my boss to buy it.”
Somebody literally asked whether they could just write an extra zero on the invoice. That is two requirements: A, get an invoice but B, write an extra zero on it to convince the boss that it was worth the money. Amazing, right?
Have Multiple Packages At Different Prices
Patrick: That segues neatly into the next question, packaging. One thing that’s worked out very well for you is having…I don’t know what the word is. One project, one overarching brand for a product but having multiple ways to deliver that product or multiple packages at different price points. Can you walk us through how you got started with that and how you think about packaging?
Nathan: Yeah. Really quickly, the idea is…Or how it’s come out in practice is I have a book. We’ll take “Designing Web Applications” as an example. The book, to me, is the core product. It’s going to be…Not that this matters, but 150 pages of content. That’s where I put the majority of my effort. But then, there are other things, other useful things that could go with that. I’ll price just that book at $39. But then I think, “What other things could I include that will save someone time?” Because there are people who value their time far more than they…They value it at a higher rate. And so, I want to think, “What can I include that will save them time and they’d be willing to part with a little bit more money for?”
And so, that’s things like much more specific video tutorials on specific actions or Photoshop templates, code samples, all those kind of details. I also think about what would provide additional value, just as an educational resource. It may not save time but it’s more things. And my favorite there to do is interviews. I don’t like interviews as the product themselves. I like them as a value add to an existing product.
And so, I’ll get a bunch of different, fantastic people to sit down for half an hour or an hour and I’ll interview them about the topic. So for “Designing Web Applications,” I interviewed Ryan Singer and Jason Fried from 37signals who are fantastic product designers. I interviewed Trent Walton who had just redesigned Microsoft.com. And just was able to gain a lot of insight into their workflow and process, but also bundle that up and include it with a top tier package of “Designing Web Applications.”
And so, what I ended up with taking the book and all that other content and dividing it into three packages priced at $39 for just the book and I think there was a few other little things in there with it. And then $99 for the book plus some of the video tutorials and some of the interviews. And then everything, all the interviews, more tutorials, more code samples at a price like…I went with $249.
What that does is it lets your customers segment themselves. The freelancer who makes $30 or $40 an hour can buy just the book, get a ton of value out of it, hopefully implement all the stuff, and be a really happy customer. Maybe the design consultant who charges a lot more, values his time a lot more, can go with the middle package. Get more stuff out of it, $99 might not be that much to spend for him and the extra value is definitely worth it to him.
But then that $249 package is fantastic for real businesses because to them, once they’re holding that company credit card in their hand, there’s really no difference between $39 and $249, so long as it’s below that magic threshold of, “I have to ask my boss for approval.”
Patrick: Which, FYI for anybody who hasn’t heard me say this 100 times, that magic threshold is generally under $500 or $1,000.
Nathan: Yeah, exactly. If you’ve made a decision to buy this product and it’s just a matter of which version to buy, at that point…And I know this from buying stuff for my design team at the last company I worked for. I would look at it and go, “Is this higher package, a more expensive product, going to save me a couple hours worth of time?” I would do some quick math on it. “How much effort and time will this save my team?” If it was more than a couple hours, then it was totally worth it. There was one time I was buying a WordPress plug‑in that I needed for the marketing site. I only needed a single site license, but I was thinking about it and going, “Well, at some point in the future I might need a multisite license. I could see…There’s a decent chance of that.”
And so, I bought the multisite license for the company well in advance, just to make sure that I wouldn’t have to come back to the site and remember my log in information and sign back in and make another purchase because I knew what my time was worth to the company. I knew what they paid me. And I knew that just me coming back and making a second purchase was more expensive to the company than me upgrading to the multisite license right then.
Patrick: It’s one of those mindspace shifts where people…Both of us come from modest means. We were talking about this prior to the podcast. You get the feeling ingrained in you when you are just doing commerce for yourself that if you’re from modest means and have a very frugal mindset that a $12 purchase versus a $20 purchase is something you think about and consider and weigh the pros and cons carefully because that’s eight dollars that you could save, right? Where in a corporate situation basically nothing under the cost of one week of a fully loaded employee’s time is a meaningful amount to the company. My business these days is running at a fairly high clip of revenue and expenses. I wrote a $10,000 check on less than two hours of thought in the recent past.
Given that as my pricing anchor of how quickly I can spend money when it is justified by value to the business, $49 and $249 and $749 all round to zero for me, basically. That’s not bragging. Bingo card greeter and all this kind of a blip on the scales of a “real business.”
If you haven’t had a P and L responsibility at a company yet, it’s kind of difficult to make the shift and figure out ultimately how little pricing matters from your perspective. It makes a great difference, a great, huge difference from the perspective of the person selling it because being smart about pricing and smart about packaging can really juice your returns from doing the same amount of work.
Nathan: Yeah, and I’ll share some numbers on that in just a second. My favorite story related to expenses and business and that kind of thing is a friend of my dad’s growing up was an engineer at a very large printer and computer manufacturing company. He had a story of in their R and D lab, they had this series of drawers, a whole bunch of different nuts and bolts and all these little parts that were all separated out into 30 different drawers and labeled perfectly and all that. He was walking along and he bumped into it and knocked the whole thing on the floor and made this disaster. Everything’s mixing together of all these parts. And so, another engineer jumps up to help separate it all out and so he fixes it. He just grabs a broom and a dustpan and sweeps it all up and throws the whole thing away. The engineer’s like, “But those parts are worth money.”
He’s like, “How much are they really worth? $15? And we’re going to spend an hour’s worth of time, both of us, separating this out and cost the company $300 or more? Not going to happen. Throw it away and move on.” That just shows how, when you have a sensible approach to pricing, it makes a big difference.
But referring to how it makes a difference on the seller’s end, “Designing Web Applications” made $26,500 in the first 24 hours after it came out. Had I just used a single price point, so had I not given the people who wanted to pay more an option to pay more because if the $249 price wasn’t there then I wouldn’t have had fewer sales, necessarily, or I wouldn’t have had more sales. It’s just those people who would have paid $249 would have just given me $39 instead. Had that not been there, I don’t have the exact number in front of me but it would have been about $8,000.
Patrick: So essentially, for similar amounts of work to develop the product, you made and extra ‑‑ let me do the math in my head ‑‑ 220 percent or so because you were savvy about your pricing strategy for it.
Nathan: Yeah, exactly. Every time I’ve seen multiple packages in use, both when I do it and when other people do it, it consistently doubles revenue if not triples revenue.
Patrick: Right. This is something where it’s very rare to find tactics which are just magic win buttons that work in every situation. This is one of them. Sort of like charge more, which, by the way, charge more. That’s both for the people listening to this and, honestly, I think the two of us could hear it, too. I remember Keith, my co‑host, had to talk me out of pricing my first product at $79 and then eventually went up to $249 for the early adopter discount and then basically $500 for the ongoing sales of the product. That obviously created a significant value for myself and my customers.
So, A, charge more but the multi‑tiered structure for packaging, much like the multi‑tiered structure for Software as a Service, is very, very good at reducing the absolutely absurd amount of customer service that these products would otherwise generate. The case where we’re selling something to a business for $49 which they’re going to turn around into several hundred thousand dollars worth of additional business for the company.
Nathan: Yeah. My favorite part about it is, you can get more revenue based on the value you’re providing. Every company does not get the same amount of value of your product. You could let them pay based on the amount of value they’re likely to get, and you don’t have to exclude the people at the bottom end level. The freelancers can still afford my book at $39. I don’t have to completely exclude them.
Patrick: That’s, also, for some people, been that particular point, has been a way to assuage their inner worries about charging more. For example, some people are very concerned about distributional access to their things. They don’t want to exclude folks who are starting a business or less well off than other people. Given that you know you have an affordable entry point into the product, then there’s no reason to feel guilty to about charging $500 or $1000 to the firms who can afford it. I’ve seen a lot of people be pretty successful at that. Personally, I almost intentionally wish I could. Like Mark, something that I very nearly did last time and I might do this time for my product, was asking a quick four question questionnaire, like “Do you already have a business that is making at least “x” amount of dollars? Check this box. If you do not, check that box.” So it physically not let you buy it because it depends on the kind of product. You’re delivering advice on the product. It’s only going to meaningfully create value for people who are already operating a business at scale. Obviously, both their point of view and from my point of view, I would prefer not to sell to people who are not going to get the value from the product.
Nathan: Yeah. I think that’s good.
Patrick: So echoing your tale of just put a packaging structure in place it being an auto-win, you can do something which we would call in software a “site license.” Instead, you can buy it for yourself or, if you want, to share it with your team. It’s not DRM‑ed or anything. You can download it and put it on your server. Just by the, I think I called it the corporate package, which was four times the price. There was, absolutely, nothing about the product during the implementation. There was no DRM on either version so it was, either, files which you could download, and watch and do whatever you can normally do with files, or files which you can download, and watch and do whatever you normally do with files, but could explicitly show it to other people. Now, I know you haven’t had quite as much success on the site licenses I have. What was my success on that? I was selling these site licenses of between $1000 and $2000. I think just for the cost of putting one extra paragraph on my page I got, I remember, it being like low five figures of marginal revenue associated with that. I would have to run SQL in order to verify that. It was, obviously, clearly, worth doing for me. And, clearly, worth buying for the company because a lot of them said, “Oh. Yeah. We listened to advice and turned it into a six figure campaign. Congrats.”
At that point, the $1,000 price tag really isn’t all that much compared to how much they got out of the advice.
Quick Tips on Selling Team/Site Licenses For Your Products
Patrick: Anyhow, the reason why I think the site license worked better for me than it has for you is, both, mine was competing with less options. You already have the sophisticated tier structure in place with three different tiers. Then you had the up sale to the site license which was presented in parallel to those three.
You didn’t give it the same weight in either the copy, or the visual presentation or anything. You would have, really, had to work to find the site license on your site.
Whereas on mine, it was given equal visual weight to the core product. Also, in terms of who we sell to, your market is largely designers, mine was by construction just B2B software firms. B2B software firms have a very particular notion about the importance of intellectual property in terms of the makeup of the people who work with them, their business models, the way they treat things internally. A lot of them will err on the side of caution when given, even, a nudge in the direction of “BTW. This is intellectual property, you can’t just put it in the company drop box like I know you’re going to want to do, but that’s something you could buy.”
And then a lot of them, seeing that will be “Oh. That is something I can buy. That is something I will buy.” This comes naturally to folks working at a software company.
Nathan: I think it’s important to think about, like you said, who the target is and how much they care about intellectual property and copyright. That said, I think that my audience, there’s enough design teams, that would be interested in the product, that I think it could have been a good fit. I think the area that, maybe, not as many people would have gone for the site license as a percentage as with your products just because of the fit and focus. But I think the biggest mistake that I made…And this copy is still on Nathanbarry.com/webapps if you want to look at the copy and design for that part. Pay attention in order to find the site license. That’s part of the mistake is that I just said one line about, “If you like to share this with your team, buy the site license for $1000 dollars.” I went with the 4x price, as well.
I don’t think it triggered any red flags for people as far as on the copyright side of things. Like, looking at your copy, it triggers something of, like you said, “Hey, this is an intellectual property issue. You need to pay attention.” Whereas mine says, if you want a site license go buy it. It doesn’t trigger any thoughts of if you share this with a lot of people, it’s a copyright violation. So copy matters.
Patrick: Copy definitely matters. That’s something that we see over and over again in our work, both, for ourselves and for other people. I’m going to read out the copy that I use for this because I like it. You can see it at lifecycleemails.com if you plug that into your browser. My sales page is still up and still making sales. It’s probably something we should talk about in a moment. “Do you have a few people at your organization who would benefit from taking this course? No, problem. We sell group licenses, too. You can either grant your coworkers access to the course on our site or you can download the material and host it internally. One corporate license covers up to 100 people within the same organization. We trust you not to abuse our confidence. No DRM is involved.” That positions it as it mentions like obliquely the IP related thing. It doesn’t wham them over the head with it.
As long as we’re talking about IP, and DRM and whatnot, what’s your stance on piracy? I know a lot of people are like, “Oh. God. You’re selling files? People can copy files? You’re going to lose all your money to people copying it for free.” Empirically, how’s that working out for you?
Nathan: I make money from my products. People by them. They’re quite available on torrent sites. You can go check them out. Go Google “Designing web applications,” I don’t know, “Free download.” Whatever you would add on to the end of that. Actually, you can just probably Google the product name, and click to the second page and you’ll get free downloads. You might get some viruses along with that. It’s widely available to pirate. I didn’t add any DRM. I am quite happy with the amount of money I’m making. I just don’t worry about it. I don’t want to give my customers the idea that I don’t trust them. I don’t want to frustrate them with DRM or anything like that. Basically, I don’t want to potentially jeopardize a relationship with somebody who I care about and who cares about me in order to potentially stop somebody who will probably never buy my product.
That said, it might be worthwhile to hire a freelancer to get Google to delist some of these, at least so they don’t show up on the first page of results, but otherwise, it’s just not worth the effort.
Patrick: I think more than the minimum of effort placed to secure things is probably a loss. Especially, in our industry/things we are selling. I’m a heretic on DRM with regards to software programmers in that I understand why it’s valuable for people in the content industries like video games, and movies and whatnot. They have a sales cycle which is dominated by the first 48 hours and first one week of sales. Even if they can delay the appearance of a crack by six hours, that makes a meaningful amount of revenue for the business. For sole proprietors like us who have products like these, it’s basically, anything above the minimum amount of work to keep honest people honest is a net loss to you. The minimum amount to work is requiring a credit card to download and don’t make the link copy, pastable to other people. I think you use Gumroad for fulfillment, right?
Nathan: Yeah. I do. They’re fantastic. I love the team over there and highly recommend them.
Patrick: I met them through the BaconBizConf where they were one of the speakers. Ryan Delk, I think he’s the founder, came out to there, we got to… [crosstalk]
Nathan: Yeah. He’s the head of their business development.
Patrick: Got you. Yeah. It was great fun and they’re style of folks. I did all of my delivery/fulfillment through an application which I coded largely because, at the point, where I was launching this list year, I hadn’t done any hard core programming in a while and really wanted to. It’s absolutely the wrong choice. Nobody, is not buying your thing because it doesn’t have the custom coated shopping cart.
Nathan: Right. You hear people, somebody said this the other day where they, really, liked Gumroad’s implementation of the check‑out process, which is fantastic. But what they didn’t like, is government charges a five percent fee so that includes the credit card processing plus, I think, 25 cents. Whereas “Stripe” charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents or 25 cents, somewhere right in there. So “Stripe” is 2.1 percent cheaper. So this person was going to rebuild on their own, because they had the technical skills, the Gumroad checkout process almost exactly in order to save 2.1 percent on each transaction.
Patrick: Right. It’s absolutely insane like you’re committing yourself to doing the barebones implementation of doing something like this is between three to five days of work. If you figure you’re first info product is going to sell so you’re fairly successful with it because you’ve heard from Nathan, and Brennan and myselfand you’re not making all the mistakes we did on our first one. So you sell $100,000. You saved yourself of $2,000 of tax write‑offable costs for a week of your time. Whereas, if you had spent that week, you know your existing consulting business, you would presumably have made a lot more. Or if you had spent that week rather than duplicating the table stakes to entrance, you had just worked on your copy, you would be at a multiple. It’s absolutely insane how important copy is, like headings and whatnot, the calls to actions on buttons.
I’ve seen people who have coded their own shopping cart and it was more important to them that it worked than all of the little details received adequate attention. They left the button on the buy page be “Submit”. [Patrick notes: Elements of this story have been changed to protect the innocent guilty. And, as always, I will cop to having made mistakes at least this forehead-slap inducing before.]
Nathan: [laughs]
Patrick: Where, I’ve got eight years of A/B testing experience, at this point. I can pretty much tell you that if you had thought to change that button, that would be worth like 20 percent of sales. But you didn’t think to change that button because you had just spent a week building a shopping cart when you should have just been pulling one off the shelf from Gumroad or any of the numerous scripts you could drop in and get this to work.
Nathan: Yeah. There are all kinds of other factors. Like its fascinating talking to Ryan from Gumroad about all the stuff they do on fraud prevention. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into processing payments that you don’t see in an interface.
Patrick: Yeah. I tend to think, and again, do what I say, not what I do, unless you are very sure you’re going to add value to your implementation, go with one of the people you can buy to do this.
Nathan: Unless you really want to code a shopping cart.
Patrick: Unless you really want to code a shopping cart.
Nathan: Go for it.
Patrick: The Gumroad guys did try to sell me aggressively a few times. I told them, one of the reasons I said, “No,” was I said, “Look. It’s my professional competence to build check out flows because I do that for consulting clients.” So the experience of coding one more where I can actually share the results of doing it adds value to me. I don’t think that’s totally a self‑serving excuse because I wanted to build a shopping cart, but there are perhaps those two things together in solution.
To change topics briefly, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you threw interviewers into one of your top tiers on your packages. I want to talk a little more about interviews because, I think, interviews are underappreciated as a promotional tool. One of the reasons that a lot of people do interviews to either supplement a product or as the product itself is that, candidly, the creation costs for interviewers are less than writing an equivalent amount of stuff yourself.
Nathan: Absolutely.
Patrick: I guess, you turn on the camera, get an expert in front of the camera, hit record, talk for 30 minutes, stop hitting record and that has a certain amount of perceived value which, generally, tends to scale up with the perceived expertise of the experts and what they say in the interview. In addition to the content creation costs being lower, if you are interviewing experts, experts typically already have their own following. The first thing they do when you release your thing and say, “Hey. Thanks for being a participant in my designing web applications. Your interview is in the top package, and I released it today.” They will promote that to their audience/their community, which since they typically have a larger audience community than you do, and many of that audience community will follow them wherever they go, that gets you exposure to people who are willing to buy your thing because that expert or that person they trust was in it.
Nathan: Yep. Absolutely. You give them a copy of the whole product, which since it’s just information, that doesn’t cost you anything, and you include that with an email of, “Thank you so much for being a part of this. I really appreciate it. Here’s a free copy of the book and everything. Here’s the link if you want to share it.” In general, that’ll get, at least, 50 percent of the people you interviewed to share it. At least, and that’s worth a ton.
Patrick: Every time I get interviewed in something, I, at the least, tweet it out and I generally send a brief notification on my email list on the next scheduled email, “By the way, if you guys want to hear more from me, I was interviewed in this book thing.” I’ve heard from people who use unique tracking, everything, that just the tweet can be worth 20 sales. It takes me a minute to compose, and then all of 10 minutes to compose the email to me asking for it so worth it at the margins right?
Nathan: Yeah. It’s also a fantastic way to get to know people who can deliver a ton of value to your business and all kinds of things.
Patrick: Because after you’ve done something together, you’re no longer strangers.
Nathan: Actually, a perfect example is you and I, where I think we exchanged some comments on “Hacker News” and, maybe, an email about pricing. I think your exact comment was something like your pricing is the first non‑stupid pricing I’ve seen on “Hacker News,” or something like that.
Patrick: Yeah. I was very impressed with it going on.
Nathan: [laughs]
Patrick: That’s right. This trajectory has happened a lot for me in recent years. Get to know someone through “Hacker News,” swapping an email occasionally. Then you interviewed me for one of your products, I think, “Designing Web Applications?”
Nathan: Yeah. Because I wanted to cover the business marketing side of it. I always give people an introduction to that. So we had that brief exchange about pricing. Going back to the pricing conversation for a second, I had lower prices for the “App Design Handbook.” Based on your feedback, I increased them to the 39.99 to 49 prices that we talked about earlier. Yeah. We did an interview, included it with “Designing Web Applications.” It’s just a great way to get to know people because you and I have talked a lot since then, hung out at conferences.
Patrick: Yeah. We’re definitely moving past Internet buddies into that professional acquaintances/friend stage of the relationship which it sounds a little odd, sorry.
Nathan: [laughs]
Patrick: I can be a little socially awkward at times. I’ll own it. It’s a real thing, right?
Nathan: Yep. Exactly.
Patrick: There are definitely people who…Some of my good friends are people who “I met on the Internet.” If you hang out with somebody for a few years, there’s no other word for it. You’re friends or you’re not. Anyhow, obvious to the two of us, but perhaps not obvious to the people listening to this. When you’re approaching 10 different people to do interviews, what sort of monetary incentive, are you offering them to do these interviewers?
Nathan: I get this question a lot. The answer is zero.
Patrick: I think we’ve both covered this topic in depth with other people. But somebody, not you, but a different person who was asking me for an interview for a book that they were launching which they were going to price it like $20 asked what number they would need to offer me from that to make it worth my time. And I said, “Look. I like you. I like the idea for this project. It was something I’m doing, making a SaaS in a sense like a sideline, side project. I said, “I like you. I like the project. I will do the interview. Candidly, there is no amount of money that you could reasonably offer me from this project that makes a darned bit of difference to my financial situation for this year. So don’t.” I think you got Jason Freed to do an interview with you. You could ball up your entire business and my entire business and drop it in the 37signals bottom line and I don’t know if anybody at that company would notice. Offering $3000 to get on the phone with you would not necessarily move any needle for Jason Fried et al.
Nathan: Yeah. Exactly. He’ll do it because he wants to help out, business people, people putting out products, and he’s a nice person and generally wants to be helpful. But as soon as you start talking money and how you’re going to offer him five percent of your product that may or may not make anything, it just gets weird. Don’t ever bring that up.
Patrick: It’s that thing, predictably, irrational where people have one schema for evaluating monetary transactions and they have the other schema for evaluating non‑monetary transactions and they operate in different fashion. I’ve got a rule…This is by the way a hack around for me having issues with socializing when I was younger, I always say yes when people invite me to do things. Unless I can articulate a good reason to say no, I say yes. If you invited me out to a party that was happening later today, I would say yes. Then maybe think about whether there should be any reason for saying no rather than doing the thing that I would default to when younger which is saying no just because my brain would cook up some rationalizing, but it was really I’m terrified of going to the party.
Nathan: [laughs]
Patrick: So if you ask me, “Can we hop on a Skype chat and I’ll record it and put it in this product?” Like 99 percent of the time, unless I have a date with my wife or something that you’d be bumping, the answer is yes. But if you ask me to do a business proposition, then the cold blooded business man in me comes out and very few business propositions are going to be worth my time.
Nathan: Well, a classic case of this is with people doing open source software development, you’ll get some really top notch developers who will pour hundreds and hundreds of hours into these projects, all for free, never get any money directly out of it. So somebody will come in and go, you’ve put all this time in, I just need something slightly different. Can I pay you $25 to make this change? As soon as you say that, “Well, hold on. I’m a $200 an hour consultant.”
Patrick: It’s like boom, slapped in the face.
Nathan: “Not only am I not going to do it, you’re offending me. You don’t value my time at all.” If you ask them to do it for free, chances are they would do it, but you’re right, it’s that two totally different mindsets. If you want to interview people, if you want to help somebody, ask very nicely with a pitch very specific to them, that you didn’t just copy and paste to a whole bunch of people, and most likely they’ll do.
Patrick: The single best thing that can convince me to give the rest of the email some thought is some serious thought in the first few sentences I follow you, I’m familiar with your work, and have a reason why you in particular should be contributing to this thing in particular, rather than, “And clearly I wrote a list of 10 people who have a name in our space and am emailing it out to all $10.” I hate to sound like I’m an Internet celebrity, because I’m not. There are people like…Nathan and I are much closer to you, podcast listener, than we are to the 37signals or the Joel Spolskys of the world. But, it is a fact of nature, we do have a certain amount of audience.
If you are doing a product on A/B testing, conversion optimization or running a small software business and you can tie that to things that I’ve written before or things that I’m clearly passionate about, than I want to say “yes” to that.
Whereas if you’re just doing “How to Start a Start Up,” or “How to Get Venture Funding,” than I don’t know if Paul Graham is too busy to get interviewed for something like that. But Paul Graham would be a much better person to interview than I would be. “How to Get Venture Funded”…I don’t know.
Nathan: You have a lot of experience that area…not.
Patrick: Get into Y Combinator. That will help grease most of the skids for that. If you had a question then, “How to Get Into Y Combinator,” and being on “Hacker News,” like it’s my job, might give me some idea of what to tell you. I don’t think that would be something that I would make people pay for the advice for. Anyhow, wow, D, we’re at about an hour and we got more to cover, so mind if we move on to the next topic?
Nathan: Sounds good.
Patrick: The beating heart of both of our businesses is an email list. I think that even when I say that it is the beating heart of our business and probably, in my case, I think if I were to produce a formal statement of assets and liabilities, my email list would come in right under the accumulated value of my IP. For the business I think, you might…with circumstances for your business it might actually be the other way around. And yet people do not understand this, so let’s wax rhapsodic, or whatever even more about how you should have an email list and be sending stuff to it. You first.
Nathan: I put having an email list as the second most important business realization that I’ve ever had, the first being that you should teach. Email lets you teach to people in a reliable way, and reliable and consistent. What you said about business assets, I would consider my email list, and it’s not massive, right now it’s 7,000 people, to be the most valuable asset that I own. It’s probably more valuable than everything else I own combined, more valuable than my cars and whatever else, not that I have a lot of assets, but it’s worth a ton, and I can’t understate that.
I can’t say that too strongly, but I should point out it’s not that I have 7,000 emails separated by commas that I can download and do something with. It’s that I’ve built up a relationship, and I’ve taught useful things to 7,000 people over time.
Patrick: I think, when we talked about it in marketer speak, that just the phrasing of list, it gets people…like that obscures the fundamental relationship, which is that… Maybe the better way to think about it is not that you have a list of 7,000, but that you have 7,000 relationships created with people who trust Nathan Barry as their go‑to guy on these subjects, not just any 7,000 people, but largely 7,000 people who have a deep amount of interest and need for the sort of thing that you make, and ability in many cases to pay money to buy it.
Nathan: I guess the important thing that I want you listeners to take away is that how email…the consistency of it. I asked at the Bacon Biz conference, it’s a room full of bootstrap‑ers, and software people, and all of that, and I asked, “Who likes recurring revenue?” and there’s a good chuckle from everybody, as everybody raises their hand. Recurring revenue is awesome because it’s predictable, your customers who love you the most keep paying you, in theory, it grows over time, you’re going to have a certain amount of loss, and so long as you can exceed that with growth, then you make more money than the previous month, all kinds of awesome things.
I had a realization that email is like recurring revenue for traffic and visitors. I looked at my traffic stats for my blog, and they were all over the map until I started building up a good email list. I could have traffic that went up a huge amount one month, because of a story went viral or whatever, and then drop significantly the next month. It was crazy and all over the map, but email, I could just keep consistently growing that list.
I’d lose some every time I sent an email, but so long as I gained more than that, my list grows every time. I have a relationship with each one of those people, so to me, email is the same idea as recurring revenue, but for getting visitors and engaged readers to your content.
Patrick: I totally agree with everything you just said. One of the reasons I created my email list after years of not doing it, which are years that I very much regret now, because there were hundreds of thousands of people who visited my blog over that time that I have no way of getting in touch with ever again, like you, I had a blog. There were many articles which were very well received on it, and there were, on any given day, 500 or 1,000 people would make it a habit of checking to see whether I posted a new thing.
But aside from those folks who are like in the inner circle of really love everything you do and want to hear about it, there was no way for me to grow that number effectively other than just publish, publish, publish, and no way to reach people in any more deliberate manner than just posting something and hoping that it got good distribution on Hacker News and whatnot.
Partly as a business owner, no matter how much you like any distribution channel, you never want to be totally locked into them, and then partly as just like a regular old Hacker News denizen, it’s weird, but I occasionally ask for my things to be on the front page less, just because I never want to burn people out with them or give people the impression that I’m explicitly using Hacker News as the “Me, me, me all the time” marketing channel.
One of the benefits of having the email list was that, by construction, since people have asked to get it from you, it can be the “Me, me, me” show, as long as…well, it shouldn’t be the “Me, me, me” show. It should be the “You, you, you” show, that every email to them creates value for them, whether you’re teaching them new things or potentially giving them some sort of sales message for something that would create value.
It can be a…how do I want to phrase it? It can be rather more focused on things I am doing than, say, blog posts could be without coming off as quite self‑absorbed.
Nathan: Yeah, because they opted in to hear from you, and at any time, they could opt out, so you can guarantee that these people want to hear from you.
Patrick: Right. Speaking of opt‑outs, by the way, a great line I heard from Joanna at Copy Hackers was that the unsubscribed is not something you should take as a mortal insult. It’s just like the email equivalent of hitting the “back” button. We’ve all see the stats for our blogs. We know that a lot of people won’t read it, they’ll just hit the “back” button and whatnot, and we’re OK with that, but then we get the report from MailChimp that says, “You sent out the mail to 7,000 people and five people unsubscribed,” and then we get that feeling in the pit of our stomach, like, “Oh God, what did I say?” It’s not something you have to worry about at that level.
It’s like, one percent of the list on every email, then you have to worry about it, but some people are going to decide that it wasn’t for them, and that’s OK. I’ve said it in various degrees of seriousness, but 500 people who don’t like what you’re doing and three dollars will buy you a cup of coffee, but three dollars might not actually buy you a cup of coffee these days.
Nathan: Yeah, and something…I think this is from Ramit Sethi, where he talks about actively trying to get people to unsubscribe, just because if somebody doesn’t want to be on the list, then they’re never going to buy anything from you, and you don’t actually want them on the list. That’s why you make it super easy to unsubscribe, and Ramit goes as far as sending out email saying, “1,000 of you should unsubscribe.” I think he had that as a subject line.
Patrick: Can we go back in the time machine from…do you remember back when you had no email list? What was the first thing you did to start growing?
Nathan: I put up a landing page saying, “I’m writing a new book called ‘The App Design Handbook,’ and put in your email address to hear about this book when it comes, and to hear about the process,” which, by the way, if you put together a landing page, the email opt‑in form is the most important thing on the landing page.
Patrick: By far.
Nathan: By far.
Patrick: Headline email opt‑in form. Everything else is quite secondary for a page that doesn’t have much content on it.
Nathan: Yeah, and you don’t need a lot of content. An email address is…you’re not trying to get them to spend hundreds of dollars, so there aren’t a lot of objections to overcome, other than, “We won’t spam you. I promise.” I put up that landing page, and I tweeted it out to my 412 followers, and I got 10 or 15 people who went to the page and said, “Yeah, that’s cool. I want to hear about that.” Those 10 or 15 people started at the list. A few people posted links to it. I emailed a few friends who were designers and said, “Hey, could you share this?” Through just kind of that activity, I got, I think, 30 or 40 people who said, “I want to hear about your process making this book, so I can hear about it and maybe purchase it when it’s ready for purchase.”
The great thing about that approach is you’re not getting random people who may or may not be interested in a product. They already told you, “I’m interested in this product,” so it’s not a matter of coming out with a product later and wondering if your audience will want it. If you start with product first, then you’re going to get higher conversion rates from email to paid, just because they already expressed some level of interest.
From there, the landing page got shared around a little bit. I think it made it on Hacker News, on the home page for just a little bit, and that brought in 150 email addresses, so I was sending out like 200 then. Then I wrote a detailed blog post about designing iPhone applications, and at the bottom of that blog post was that same email opt‑in form. “I’m writing a book. If you want to hear about it when it comes out, and hear from me a little bit in the meantime, drop in your email address.”
Patrick: It’s the great underused technique for getting emails. How did that work out for you?
Nathan: It continued to grow, and an important note is that this email list didn’t grow in silence. I knew that those initial 200 people, that they wanted to hear about designing iPhone applications, so I wrote this tutorial and I sent to them, and I said, “This is kind of related to the book. I think you’ll like it.” With that, I said a short paragraph of like, “Here’s how’s the book is coming along,” just so that three months, when I said, “The book’s here. Buy it,” they will have a clue who I am, because I stayed in touch and provided value throughout the process.
Patrick: That’s honestly one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people with email, to keep the list warm by continuing to deliver value to it.
Nathan: Yeah. Those blog posts that you put out…well, first, I guess what I should say is, linking to a landing page for a book, people will do that, and they’ll share it around, but it doesn’t actually provide any value right away. It doesn’t provide any value to the reader. If I share it with my Twitter followers, I tend to do it more as a favor to the author, because I think it’s a cool thing they’re doing, rather than because I’m like, “Oh, my readers really need to see this,” because it’s just an email opt‑in form.
Patrick: I think you can…that’s true, the way most people do it. I think there’s definitely ways to structure the page, even if it’s just an opt‑in form, such that linking it to your audience does provide value to you. For example, so much of social sharing is based on trying to project an image of yourself to people. That’s why there’s like 600 political related thing in my Facebook feed right now, and not so much that someone was like, urgently, “This particular post is the best thing I have ever read about issue X,” but rather, “I have a position on issue X which I want to broadcast to people, so I will share this post.”
If you had an opt‑in form which, even with just one sentence, a really focused copy, like planted a flag in the ground, if that was something people wanted to sign on with, I think they would retweet that just to sign on for that movement, and to demonstrate to people that that represented them. What’s a good example to come up with that?
Somebody I know just recently put up an opt‑in page for a book on Ruby on Rails security, a topic near and dear to my heart, and they said…their one sentence of arresting copy was, “Your Rails application is broken,” like security‑wise, and that’s not the exact copy, but, “All applications are guilty until proven innocent. You’re not doing it right. I will teach you how to do it better. Give me your email.”
A lot of people retweeted just because they endorse that message of, “If you haven’t seriously thought about security, if that hasn’t been the number one issue on your plate for a while, then yes, your application is broken.” Does that make sense?
The other thing that works really well for getting distribution for landing pages is to have some sort of free goodie that you can give people in return for their email address, and then plug that goodie in other places, for example, doing guest posts with a, “If you’re interested in this topic, go here, and I will give you a one‑hour‑long video on blah, if you give me your email address.”
Or for people who do conference presentations, just having a bit.ly URL to your landing page, and put on the last slide of your conference presentation, “If you’re interested in this topic of the conference presentation, you can get…the term of art is a premium, but you can get this free valuable thing from me by going here and giving me your email address.” If there are 200 people in the room, you can get 20 emails like that…
Nathan: They do.
Patrick: You can put that in podcasts as well, do the Rob Walling kind of podcast tour to drum up interest in your thing, which kind of makes me want to ask, do you have any landing pages that people should be on?
Nathan: If I was going to follow up with that right now, I would say something like…it’d be better if it worked into the conversation, but I have this email course on how to launch products, and if you go to nathanbarry.com/launch, you can get in on that free email course, and over three weeks, get some awesome content on exactly how to launch products.
Patrick: That would’ve been a much smoother way to introduce it, but yeah, exactly like that. That’s something that you can do in virtually everything. You can also give that pitch to people in one on one, when you’re just shopping around your idea in your local community. I think the AppSumo guys were very smart about it. They said, “How do people get their first 100 customers, or 100 sign‑ups to an email list?” and it’s largely just by banging down doors like that.
Nathan: One thing that I did very recently is I wrote an article for “Smashing Magazine,” and it was titled, “How to Launch Anything.” It’s my exact product launch plan, kind of my formula that I followed for three books now, exactly how to do it, but at the end…I always feel weird in guest posts. It’s kind of lame in a guest post to say, “If you want to learn more about this, buy my book.” That’s kind of an awkward transition, I think, and a lot of editors on sites will be like, “Really? That’s too self‑promotional.”
A great transition, and one I did on the “Smashing Magazine” post, is at the end, I said, “I don’t want your education on product launches to end here. You just read a 3,000 word article. That’s great. There’s much more to know. We could dive a lot deeper, so I put together this email course just for you guys. It’s at nathanbarry.com/launch. Go check it out, sign up, and we can continue this conversation, and we can dive a lot deeper over the next few weeks,” and that did very, very well.
Patrick: I think that is excellent, excellent positioning. There’s multiple parties that have to be happy with that, and the circumstance we’re using, someone else’s audience, obviously the editor at “Smashing Magazine” has to be happy, you have to be happy because, ultimately, it’s your work and your business, and the readers have to be happy, and that’s kind of a meeting of those three. Sometimes conflicting interests where it works for everybody.
Nathan: Yeah. And then, in that email course, later on in the process, I can pitch my products, and that’s totally fine.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nathan: So long as the email course provides a bunch of value on its own. But, two, three weeks in, I can give a, after casually introducing my product, later on I can give a hard pitch for it, and that works great.
Patrick: Right. And people have less, not like memory a human would have memory, but memory in the homeopathic sense that homeopaths think that water has memory, which it doesn’t. But people on an email list have even less memory than water in that sense. While they’re a good source of traffic and bad sources of traffic given roughly consistent user demographics and whatnot, and connection of the need that got them onto the email list in the first place, their behavior downstream doesn’t strongly reflect how they got into it, a guest post versus a post on Twitter versus yadda, yadda. With, again, that very importantly given roughly similar demographic and need fit.
If you assume that folks on Smashing magazine are also designers, they are likely to be just as good for fits with the Nathan Barry ecosystem as folks who are coming in from a hacker news thread or yadda, yadda.
Just to give a story from my own experience, when I realized last May that I wanted to start an email list, not May a couple of months ago, but 2012 May, the first thing I did was put together a 45‑minute video on designing the first run experience of web applications because that’s something I have a good deal of expertise in and went fairly well as a video format and was something that I hadn’t done to death before, to be honest. I said, if you give me your email, I will give you this 45‑minute video.
It was not planned. Sometimes things just seem to fall into place retrospectively. I thought I was eventually going to be releasing some sort of product to the list after I had it. The priority at that point was to have the list and not have a use for it rather than have a use for it and not having it.
But it turns out that I eventually had a product that had a lot of video. By construction, if I’m asking people to sign up for the list to get a free video, it’s going to be people who appreciate consuming video rather than don’t. There are some people who listen to podcasts but don’t do texts. A lot of people will read hundreds of thousands of words from me but hate…
I’ve been told that my voice grates on people, or they just don’t listen to anything or whatever. And similarly, there are video people out in the world, so if you’re going to be selling video, attracting video people is a useful thing.
It also, the first video, you can still see it at training.kalzumeus.com. It was really, really rough. My equipment, my process for taking the video and whatnot were not exactly where they are right now. But that gave me an opportunity to get the kinks out of the process and a 45‑minute free video rather than the five hours of paid video where quality issues would be more apparent and looked on in a harsher manner.
Nathan: Exactly. The takeaway from that is, if you’re using a free incentive to get people on your list, have it be similar in style and media type to a product that you think you might offer down the road.
Patrick: Right. I think media type, character, tone, audience, yadda, yadda. It would be a bad, bad decision to get Magic: The Gathering players together onto your email list if you’re eventually going to be selling enterprise software. There is some overlap there, but the closer to 100 percent overlap that there is between your audience and the people you sell to, the better. Which, that segues into our next topic.
Both of us are kind of weird for business in that we have a product portfolio rather than just the one thing that we do. I have a very, a product portfolio which comprises a lot of disparate groups of people. Like the elementary school teachers who buy my Bingo Card Creator have zero interest in my authorship activities about selling more software for B2B SaaS companies.
Those folks have zero interest in Appointment Reminder, which helps scheduling at doctors offices and other places that need to send automated phone and SMS reminders to their clients to come in on time.
You have a much more focused product portfolio in that you’re kind of Nathan Barry, the person who teaches designers to be better at what they do and are branching out a little bit. But I really like your approach more than my approach just in terms of being able to cross‑sell to the same people over and over and over again, having a focused brand and more focused in your activities.
Nathan: I think focusing in on your audience is really important. I wish I did a better job of it. To some extent, I have taken the approach of this is what I’m interested in. Hopefully I’ll get people who are also interested in the same things. So I’ve got a book on designing iPhone applications. A book on designing web applications. There’s a pretty good overlap between those two, designers. It may not be 100 percent overlap, but it’s pretty high. But then I branch out a little bit. I’ve got an email marketing application called ConvertKit. Some of those designers are going to care about selling products, so they will be interested in using email to do that. If we assigned a random number, there’s maybe 30 percent overlap there in some level of interest.
And then, I also happen to talk a lot about writing and publishing e‑books because I shared all the stats from my books. I’ve got some of those soon‑to‑be authors in my audiences. My latest book is called Authority and it’s on building an audience, building credibility and authority, and then how to write and sell e‑books, information products, I guess.
There’s great overlap with ConvertKit because, if you’re following my methodologies, you’re using email, ConvertKit’s designed exactly for my process. There’s not a lot of great overlap for the design stuff, but there is some. I’ve got plenty of people who have purchased all three of my books. It’s not as tight as I would like it to be. I think the person who does this best is Brendon Dun. He’s been on the podcast before.
Patrick: Right. Brennan just passed a…Freelancers and consultants, they’re his bannermen and they will follow him into war. Sorry. I was watching Game of Thrones yesterday, if you couldn’t tell. But it works very well. There’s a consistent confluence of interest between what he’s working on any given day and what they’re interested in.
Nathan: And the only way he differentiates is maybe what scale they’re on in their business, where he’s got some products for people who are brand‑new freelancers and then he’s got some for people who are building up an agency or a consultancy. He can run that spectrum of $40 product to $1,200 workshop, but it’s all within the same audience. The closer you can get to that the better. I have an iPad application that I made a few years ago. It made some money that helped me quit my job, so I’m very, very grateful for it. I learned a ton from the process.
But now, it’s targeted at speech language pathologists, which has nothing to do with, there’s no overlap whatsoever between them and designers or product marketers, anything like that.
It’s this product that’s sitting out there. It makes me $800 to $1,200 a month, which I’m certainly not complaining about, but it has no overlap in my ecosystem and I just don’t know what to do with it. If I was being smart, I would probably sell it off for a tiny amount of money to get rid of it or just shut it down or, you know, because it just doesn’t fit. As much as you can get a single audience, the better.
Patrick: I think my candid and public advice for you would be either sell it for 10K or try that for two weeks and, if you don’t get any takers, then it’s probably the case that the ongoing focus drain that it requires from you would be better deployed at other points in your business. But given that there’s an installed customer base and whatnot, it would be better for them if you were able to successfully sell it to someone. Maybe someone who wanted to get into the app game and yadda, yadda.
Nathan: Hopefully someone who had speech language pathologist as an audience, as customers.
Patrick: That would be a great choice. Something I often see in small software companies is a husband and wife team where one of them is the domain expert and one of them is the programmer. If there is a programmer out there whose spouse is a speech language pathologist, and given that we know several thousand programmers, there’s at least somebody who’s in that combination.
Nathan: Send me an email.
Patrick: Please send Nathan an email.
Nathan: Yeah, nathan@convertkit.com.
Patrick: Speaking of which, so we’ve been talking mostly about info products, but both of us have significant SaaS experience. You’re running ConvertKit. A lot of people often ask me how you get the idea for a SaaS product that will actually sell to people. I really like ConvertKit as an example for this because it’s not a product that sprang out of your forehead Athena. Wait, no. Was it Athena or Aphrodite that came from the forehead…Athena from Zeus’. It’s a natural extraction from the business you already happen to be running. Obviously the designing web applications and whatnot are a technology‑focused business but they’re not a “tech business” in the way people usually think of where you have this pre‑existing business. It was obvious there was a recurring need in the business that could be better be met with technology than by the existing processes you were doing.
So you created that technology and you were basically customer number one for it. Given that you knew that knew that this process that you had been using was generalizable across your industry and across other industries, then you knew that there would be a market for it rather than just throwing something at the dart board and praying it stuck.
Nathan: Absolutely. I know, since I built a tool that I want, for a process that I know makes money as far as how to email market and a lot of the stuff we’ve just been talking about, I knew that I would be a customer at the very least. Even if nobody else wanted it, I knew that I could use this tool to sell other books and products and make money. But the other fantastic thing that I love about building products for yourself is that you can actually use them like a real customer instead of using them in some artificial way. I had a tool years ago that was used by…
It was a SaaS application used by sign language interpreting agencies to schedule and manage all their freelance employees. I would go through, we’d release new features and I’d go through and test it. I would fill in all this fake data. I would click through things, but I wasn’t actually using the tool because I had no reason to use the tool.
It was all artificial use whereas, with ConvertKit, because I’m the biggest fan of the software and the person who is chomping at the bit to get new features in and all of that, I’m using it every single day and improving on it, testing it. It’s just a much better spot to be in then trying to use some tool that you don’t care about in an artificial way.
Patrick: Given that I run Bingo cards for elementary teachers and scheduling software for the office managers at plumbing firms despite no longer being an elementary school teacher and having no experience in office management for plumbing firms, I can definitely tell you that the experience of developing a product where you’re using it “in anger” in your own business is much different than trying to guess what people are using it with. For those folks who are not building something for themselves, and I think that’s a totally valuable way to go about things, you have to have much more of your cycles devoted to being in the room with the customer, whether that’s a literal fact or kind of spiritually in the room with them, seeing how they use it in their business, rather than slinking off to the Bat Cave and coding up features that may or may not actually share on the ground correspondence with the way they use it or the way their business is run.
Nathan: You certainly can, especially if you focus on solving a painful problem, you can definitely build software for other people. You’ve shown it with appointment reminder quite successfully, and I’ve done it on some other projects, it’s just I’m really loving the process with ConvertKit, building for myself.
Patrick: Definitely, that’s still on my to do list. I want to try doing a course through that and see if it…obviously it’ll work. The big question for me is whether it will work in a transformatively better way than the processes I already do for it. Again, the fact that I had processes was not a reason for you not to make the tool, right? There are a lot of people that it’s their first time doing this or they don’t have a consistent way of doing email courses. You kind of get to bake in all the best practices you know from having done it for the last year and had significant success. Kind of a 37signals line having an opinionated product that delivers not just a pleasing UI and a nice experience, but also has like mini Nathan Barry whispering over your shoulder.
“The right way to do it. Here you’re going to do it like this. You’re going to put up a formula that looks like this and you’re going to schedule a course that looks like this.” You hit “go” and it will be magic. I really like everything about the product and the meta‑products around it, the strategy and where it fits in your business and in the business of your customers. On that note, just time check. We are passed the hour and a half mark, so we probably want to be wrapping it up in the next few.
Nathan: Yeah, sounds good. Oh, I’d like to address validating the market for a product before you build it.
Patrick: That could be a podcast in itself, but let’s definitely address it.
Nathan: We’ll try to talk about it really quickly. Jason Cohen and a few others talk about if you can sell your idea and actually collect money from a handful of people before you build it, that’s really, really important. When I was trying to figure out what to build for ConvertKit, or what angle to take and if people wanted it, I went around and asked a bunch of people, “Is this a painful problem for you, with auto responders?” A lot of people said, “Yes.” You were actually the one person who said…I think what you said is, “You should build that software, but I would not buy it.” The reason is because you have all your own processes and that kind of thing. So, I went around and asked a bunch of people, “Is this a painful problem? Would you buy it?” Then I took it a step further and I asked, “How much would you pay for it?” And I got a number. Some people it was 50 dollars a month, some people it was…I think the highest number I got was 300 dollars a month.
Then I went further and said, “Would you pre‑order it? Would you pay for this before it was ready?” A lot of people said, “Yes,” with varying levels of certainty. There was two people that I was 100 percent certain would pre‑order it. The only problem is I didn’t have a way for them to pre‑order it right then. So what I did is I said, “OK, cool. Thanks for your time. I will check back with you in a few weeks, when I have a way for you to pre‑order it.”
I did that. I came back and the moment I came back and said, “OK, here’s a Gumroad checkout page. You can pre‑order it now.” That’s when I started to get real feedback. That’s when I started to get the, “Oh, well, it doesn’t have this feature.”
Patrick: “It won’t actually integrate into my system. I don’t actually have enough time to start running a campaign tomorrow. I’m just not ready for this.”
Nathan: Yep, exactly, and it was, “Well, it would be a lot of work to switch away from my existing tool.” I started to get real feedback and the people that I was dead certain would pre‑order, never did and they still don’t use the tool today. Luckily for me, a bunch of other people did pre‑order it and so I got validation from other sources. But just one of the most critical lessons that I learned this year is that you don’t get real feedback unless you ask for money.
Patrick: Yep and you don’t even necessarily need to be able to physically take the money, but actually asking for it is important. One thing that Jason Cohen did, which I did before, my validation for the Appointment Reminder market. I went to the Gold Coast/Magnificent Mile area of Chicago, which is an area that I happen to know has lots of high end retail. At the time I thought Appointment Reminder would largely be sold to massage therapists and salons and things like that. They’re thick on the ground over there.
I took out $400 from an ATM and would just go in to every salon, every massage therapy practice, ask if the person behind the counter was the owner. If yes, ask if they accepted walk‑ins. If yes, say, “OK, I would like to get your 30‑minute service, but I don’t want to actually have the service. I’ll pay you for the 30 minutes and I just want to talk about the industry for a little bit because I’m interested in it.”
Then we would have discussions about what their scheduling practices were like and what sort of software they used. Most of them were on pen and paper. Did they do reminder calls? What was their no show rate? What percentage of their business was recurring appointments? Yadda yadda yadda.
At the end of this I would demo the two page demo application I had for Appointment Reminder and said, “This will be available eventually. Is it something you’re interested in to solve this no show problem that we’ve established that you’re having?”
If they said, “Yes,” I would literally ask, “Can I put you down for the first month of it at…?” I picked a number. For most of it was 30 bucks. The pricing still is today, on the low end.
A bunch of them said, “Yes” and then I would follow up with, “Can I get a check for it?” That can you get a check question changes the conversation quite a bit, like you’ve noticed.
By the way, when you’re doing pricing, pricing is generally not something you should ask customers for, in my experience. That’s something you should announce to them and get the up‑vote or down‑vote on it. I think you would’ve had better results if you had said, “It’s going to cost a hundred dollars. Is it worth at least a hundred dollars for you?” Rather than pick a number without any sort of anchor attached to it. Because…
Nathan: Yeah, I think that’s true.
Patrick: If you went in to my consulting clients and said, “What’s the value of a lead for you guys?” “Twenty thousand dollars.” “OK, it’s going to cost a thousand dollars. Assuming it generates a lead every month, is the thousand dollars worth it for you?” They’d be like, “Um…” Scratch, scratch, “Yes.” And you’d have a different pricing structure than you do currently and a few people paying you quite a bit of money. That’s neither here nor there, I still really love what you’ve done with the business.
Anyhow, well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground and to avoid boring people with our voice anymore, I’ve kind of cut this short. But we should definitely do another one sometime.
Nathan: Sounds good.
Patrick: Alright.
Nathan: It was a lot of fun.
Patrick: Yep, thanks so much for sharing your insights with us, Nathan.
For the people who are in my ecosystem, but not in yours yet, the easy entry point for them is nathanbarry.com/launch. Then that will get them on your email list and get them all the wonderful goodness that you give people for free with the obligatory there might, eventually be a sales pitch in there. For the two people who are listening to this but are not on my email list yet, you should be on it: see training.kalzumeus.com. Alright folks, thanks very much for sticking with this podcast through our kind of inconsistent schedule and occasional technical glitches. We’ll be back in a few weeks, so thanks much and see you next time.
[Patrick notes: Still reading? I’ve been working this August (and soon to be September — bah, I always underestimate timelines) on a new project, about conversion optimization for software companies. As part of the project I’ve been teaching a brief email mini-course on the subject. People have told me they’re getting the 10% increases in conversion rate we’ve been shooting for. Click here to sign up. Totally free, cancel any time, yadda yadda. There will probably be a more commercial announcement in a few weeks.]
