The SaaS Venture (Aaron Weiche)

Helpful links from the episode:

• UpWork
• Conferences:  LocalU Advanced, Swivel, Content Jam
• Copper CRM
• Pipedrive sales CRM
• ClickUp
• Asana

FULL SHOW NOTES

[intro music]

00:11 Aaron Weiche: Episode 12: Building Process in the Process.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses, shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

00:40 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:43 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:45 AW: And today, we are going to be tackling all kinds of things related to processes, building processes, why have processes, and how you do all those things while you're extremely over your head in the process of building the business as a whole. So that'll be a fun topic to dive into and one that's absolutely never ending in the business. But before we get to that, Darren, What is new with you since we last talked?

01:19 DS: What is new? What is new? Let's see. So our platform is really coming together now. I've probably mentioned this on previous episodes, where we're trying to integrate our software. We're building a new account system with Stripe and it's starting to really look great. We've had Nick, who's taken on a role as a product manager, putting together designs and thinking about user interface and user flow through the software. So now that the dev team has design-oriented development things are moving so much better. And it's a real wake up call for me actually to make sure we never... We have this problem actually at Whitespark where it's like, "Okay, I want you guys to build this thing." So I'll put together a scope document. I define it pretty well. And then they build it, and then it's a lot of back and forth with trying to fix up the user interface, and the look of it and the feel of it and all that stuff. So I want to never do that again now that I'm seeing the huge success with this design-driven development. And so, the platform has been a really valuable thing to build that way, and so we're pushing towards that. And it looks great, and it feels great to use. I'm just really happy with it.

02:33 AW: Now if I remember this right, this is your process of you're taking your tools from being siloed and one-off and bringing them all together?

02:42 DS: Yeah, and it will happen over a series of phases. So, the first thing is we need a new account system. Account means our users, our authentication, like our sign-up, sign-in, all of this like ordering any of our services and software, so if you sign up for anything it happens through accounts. So we're building all of that, and then same with our citation services, we're changing it. Like right now if you order citations, either audit and clean up or building, you're gonna have to give us a spreadsheet with your location data. So it's totally 1998 janky process. And so speaking of processes, it's terrible. [chuckle] And so, we're building what we call the location manager, where you'll just add your locations to the location manager, it syncs with Google My Business. And so that's phase one, just brand new accounts and a better ordering process for our customers.

03:37 DS: Phase two is pulling in all of the functionality so it just all happens in one platform. And so that's GMB management features, Google posts creation, GMB synching, GMB notifications, a lot of that stuff is happening in the platform, is being developed right now. And then things around listings, things around rankings, all that stuff will be pulled into here.

So rather than our rank tracker being a separate tool, we will still maintain that for people, but we're going to have rank tracking in the platform too. And it'll be location-centric, right? So you'll just be like, "Enable rank tracking for this location? Yes." And so you can just... It's like a new paradigm and slowly everything will be built within the platform and other applications will slowly die. People will move over to our platform, and we'll have incentives for them to do that.

04:32 AW: Nice.

04:33 DS: So yeah, that's coming around great. I had this really great success with Upwork this week. So one of our large enterprise clients wanted to do a big audit across one of the sites. I don't know if I wanna say this publicly. So we built a scraper to scrape the site and pull in all the listings. And I've been working with this developer out of the Ukraine on Upwork and I can't believe how well it's gone. The guy is sharp as a whip. He's got seven years of experience doing web data mining projects. He's been so easy to work with, he's been working lots of hours, and it's just been kind of a dream, and I'm like, "Man, I should do more of this." And so I've always wanted to have a side projects guy. And so I think that I'm gonna start putting more time into scoping up projects and putting them on Upwork and having side project development happen. So I was pretty happy about that.

05:33 DS: That happened this week and we're gonna start building some new stuff that way too. And then I'm just really busy getting ready for these upcoming conferences. I have one in two weeks. I have a series... Over the next four weeks, so starting in two weeks, I have three auto-dealer conferences that I'm speaking at. So fortunately I get to use the same deck and the same presentation, so that's good. But yeah, I'm busy with that. That's what's going on for me. How about you? What's up?

06:00 AW: Yeah. Yeah, I get to start there as well. The same conference season, fall and spring are always heavy there, and just speaking a lot, which is always both... It's fun, it's exciting, it's great to get out there, but as we were talking before we started recording, it's like when these come in one at a time, one request comes in in January, and then the next request is in March. But then, all of a sudden, they all line up 'cause the events are just all right on top of each other that following fall. So it's like the next six weeks, next week, Swivel and Bend, and straight to there to LocalU Advanced, speaking to a bunch of Kubota dealers.

One of our customers, I speak at their franchise e-conference, speaking at Content Jam in Chicago in the end of October. So yeah, just a lot of that. And the majority of these based on the structure, a couple of them are workshops. So it's a lot of...

07:01 DS: Oh boy.

07:01 AW: Like new slide deck creation. That's always the hard part as you well know. Presentations don't magically create themselves, and it becomes a job within itself.

07:15 DS: Well, you're a veteran. You've done how many events? I don't know, so many. But, yeah. You won't have a problem pulling it off.

07:20 AW: But it's a catch-22, right? Sometimes that makes me so confident 'cause I've done 100+ where it's like, "Oh yeah, I can wait", like, "Yeah, I'll get that done", and whatever. And then you push it up and then all of a sudden you're like, "Okay, I cannot say that anymore", right?

07:36 DS: Totally. It's hard to make presentations when you're busy running a company. That's the problem. And so, you end up doing all of this presentation work after hours. It's like kids go to bed, and then you spend another two, three hours every nig...

Darren and Aaron discuss the benefits of user feedback. Do you know how your SaaS customers and users really feel? Ways to capture it, when to capture it, getting reviews, and all it provides when you have it. The guys also catch up on their latest feature releases, progress, sales, and more.

Helpful links from the episode:

• MozCon ticket giveaway
• Whitespark's new Local Search Service

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[music]

00:10 Aaron: Episode six. Competitors, obsessed or don't care?

00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:45 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:48 Darren: I'm Darren.

00:49 Aaron: And today, we are going to dive into the topic of competitors. But before we get into the main course of this episode, Darren, I'm excited to hear about all the prep you had to go into the Brighton conference and your travels over to England. I'd love to hear how both the conference went for you and did you get a chance to do some touristy and fun things? How did all that go? 

01:16 S2: Yeah. Totally, yeah. So, it a was pretty great trip. It was grueling trying to get ready for it, actually, because prior to giving my presentation, the day before, I was giving a full day of local search training which I had never done before, just everything up to... You could imagine with local search, so covering the full gamut and...

01:39 Aaron: Did they get a certificate that says "Darren Certified," when they were done? 

01:44 Darren: No, no.

[laughter]

01:46 Darren: I should have that though. I should have a nice stamp to give everybody. Yeah. But it was seven hours of training, so my slide deck ended up been 530 slides of just trying to get everything I could think of. It's basically, "Darren does local search brain in one massive presentation." It was crazy. Also, my flights got messed up. So, I was supposed to fly in the morning on Tuesday and then, I basically fly all day and arrive on Wednesday at 10:00 AM. But then, they bumped my flight from Edmonton to Toronto to leave at midnight. So, I left at midnight, Edmonton time, arrived in Toronto at 6:00 AM, and then, I ended up getting a hotel, so I stayed in Toronto in the hotel so I could get some sleep from 6:00 AM until about 1:00 PM. And then, I was just working in the airport waiting for my flight to leave at around 10:00 PM. While I'm working at this local pub, this pub in the airport, I dumped a beer on my laptop.

02:44 Aaron: No.

02:45 Darren: I totally fried my laptop and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm getting on my flight in two hours and I still have so many slides to make." So, I raced to the little electronic store, I buy a new laptop, I'm trying to get everything loaded on to the laptop before my flight takes off. They're calling my name and I'm watching the ton download of PowerPoint probably has to get a load on my laptop. They're like, "Last call for Darren Shaw to board flight to London." And it's like, I got 1% left and I'm holding the laptop, ready to close it, and ready to run into the gate. It was insane. So I finally got on my plane, worked a little bit on the plane, slept a little bit on the plane. It all worked out in the end, but man, it was stressful.

03:28 Aaron: Oh my gosh, that sounds one of my worst nightmares like, "Holy cow."

03:33 Darren: Yeah, it was really bad. But yeah, the presentation was great. I thought it was fun, and it's a cool case study I'm doing. I'm just taking a business that had zero local search presence and then, slowly stepping through each sort of thing that you would do in a local search, and measuring the impact of that like, "Okay, they got five new reviews. What impact did that have on local search?" We did other citation building, then we did a whole bunch of citation indexing. So, each step, I was like, "What impact did that have on the rankings?" And so, it was cool to do the study and I'm gonna continue that study as I go to MozCon in July.

04:09 Aaron: Yeah, I'm super excited to hear about that. That sounds like such a great piece of research and everything you put into it. And also, if you and I, when we hang out next, if we're gonna have beers, I'm keeping my computer away from you.

04:23 Darren: Seriously, keep it in your backpack. Do not get that anywhere near the table.

04:28 Aaron: Oh, man.

04:29 Darren: Yeah. I did a little touristy stuff, too. In Brighton, they have this i360 thing which goes... It looks like a UFO that goes up on a big stick, "Bzzzzz". Goes like way up high so you can see all the way out to the ocean, all of Brighton, which is kind of touristy and interesting. It was alright. And then, I went to visit a friend. I went up to London, ate some great meals. Yeah, Brighton's a beautiful spot, and London, of course, is awesome. I did a couple of days there. After that grueling work, I just wished I had gone home instead of taking a couple of days in London, actually. I felt like I'd rather be with my family than trudging around London by myself.

05:11 Aaron: Yeah, I can see that but I almost always get like this. I don't know if it's like a high or just relief after when you have something that big and then, it's off your plate. It is such a... There's a lot of decompressing that you have to do. That was something for a long time that I think even my wife struggled with when I would come home from certain conferences or events where you had big talks and things like that, where I was like, I just need to check out for a few days and I feel really great about it but I have no... I don't have any purpose to accomplish big things right now, professionally or personally, so I'm just gonna be happy, have a beer, and walk around without a care in the world for a couple of days because I just had way too many.

05:58 Darren: I totally get that. I feel the exact same. I love it when I go to a conference, say, something like MozCon, and I speak on the first day, because then, I got the next two days to just like, "Yey, I'm having the best time hanging out with all my industry friends and having some drinks and learning some new topics." And I'm just like, "I'm not checking my email for two days." Yeah.

06:16 Aaron: That's awesome. Well, good. I'm glad it went well even though you threw the biggest curve ball at yourself ever, but way to overcome.

06:25 Darren: Yeah, sucked. What's up with you? 

06:28 Aaron: Well, on company-wise, I'm really excited. We just hired a new VP of Customer Success.

06:35 Darren: Awesome.

06:36 Aaron: Yeah. It's someone that I've known for a long time, has a great background and really, we already have a great customer success team. We have three direct reps, and we have had one that served as a lead. But I was directly managing or overseeing our lead customer success rep, and in the 100 ways I'm at, like I'm not giving him enough support. I'm not giving enough guidance to the team. And it just really became aware to me that, even though this wasn't like our number one need, that I knew the right person for this job, and that would be a great fit culturally for us and within our mission and a bunch of other things, and it would really help this team have more experience to draw from and more time with somebody to help both what we do and them individually grow.

07:27 Aaron: I'm really excited about that. One of the things... We already have for, especially our multi-location clients, five locations to into the thousands, we have a really great onboarding process that we've developed and put together and communicate and everything else, but we almost like, Launch is like the finish line. And once they're up and running, then we kinda turn...

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[INTRO music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 20, Big Launches and Big Challenges.

00:16 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses, shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:42 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:45 AW: And we are back in front of the mic and ready to catch up on... It's been about a month since we've connected, and we definitely have plenty to talk about and catch people up on. But I thought a great place to start... Just from some of the things that we've been talking about regarding Whitespark and some of the things on your plate. I definitely wanna hear about your big launch that you've recently had with the Local Citation Finder and get the nitty-gritty details on that.

01:21 DS: I know, it's exciting times. It's been really weird, actually. We haven't talked for a month, I think, 'cause we're both really busy. Kind of in a reactionary mode. With all this COVID business there is so much going on and everyone's trying to do their best to launch some stuff and put stuff out there. So yeah, feels like its been a while since we talked. Oh, yeah. Can't wait to talk about the launch of the LCF? But I guess before we get in there, I just... How are things going, what's going on with you at GatherUp?

01:47 AW: Yeah, well, we can get to some of that. I'm more of the big challenge part. We had a challenging week last week with a little bit of a reduction in staff. A few off of my team and that was incredibly difficult. And talk about, I guess, some of the more difficult parts of that, but within this, it's no different than a lot of businesses. There's hard decisions that have had to be made just based on so many aspects of what's going on in the economy and how it affects when you primarily serve small and medium-sized businesses and, in some industries, they've been so susceptible and have their doors shut and not had a way to even adjust, or if they have adjust, it's been a much, much different look to their business so that was definitely really difficult. We've seen some things leveled out from what April looked like as far as that first wave of panic churn.

02:50 DS: Yeah, totally.

02:50 AW: Yeah that kinda kicked in. And now we're just seeing stragglers in some of those situations from what's there. So just kinda adapting with that. But everything on the homefront is good. Everybody's healthy and the weather's been nicer. So we're getting outside more and just grateful for all of those aspects, and we've done a pretty good job of just shifting the... What we're happy with instead of what is different or what we're missing out on and things like that.

03:20 DS: Yeah, right.

03:21 AW: What about you?

03:23 DS: Yeah, so everything is going alright here. I've always worked from home. So it's not a huge shift for me in terms of my work and family life. It's not that much different. Just not seeing, not socializing as much really. And we had a bit of a health scare at the beginning of this, we were all worried that we had it. So we had to do some distancing in the house, but we've come out of that and everyone's healthy again. And so, we still don't know actually if we did have it. Even though we got tested. Apparently, we hear all the... All the tests are somewhat unreliable, especially if you're only carrying a small viral load. So we don't know if we have it.

We're interested to get the antiviral test, but because of that, we're extra sensitized. And so, we're not seeing anybody. We get everything delivered. We sanitize everything that comes in the house. We're just really playing it safe now for two reasons. One, we had a bit of a scare and was like, "Well, we don't wanna mess with it." And two, we don't know if we're carriers now and so we're extra careful around other people too, right? So we had that, but gosh, now that that's over, it's so nice to just be back to living our quarantine lifestyle.

04:35 DS: I spend a lot of extra time together, really connecting with my daughter these days. We all have really fun play time every night after dinner. So, family life has been good and the business has been surprisingly good too. We had a real big scare in at the end of... End of March, it was getting kinda bad. Lots of cancellations. And so it was like, wow, not looking good, and so we had to make a bunch of hard decisions. Similar to you. We did a few lay offs and we reduced hours across the team. And some of that was defensive planning for what was to come, but in the end, April actually turned out okay for us. So our revenue started to climb back up.

We launched a new Yext service, which is Yext replacement service which was well received, and then we launched the new Local Citation Finder. So yeah, it's all been going back in the other direction. So we've brought our team, many of our team members back up to full-time hours and we're forging ahead with a lot of stuff. The business is starting to come out of it looking healthy, too.

05:38 AW: Nice, that's good to hear. I feel like, on a sales and new business side, that has been... Was really, really quiet and I feel like in the last week or two, we've started to see more of a pulse there, which I'm...

05:51 DS: Same, yeah.

05:52 AW: Excited about so.

05:53 DS: Yeah, like the last two weeks. It really starts to feel like the sense that people are... There was this panic mode at the beginning, everyone's getting defensive, cutting expenses 'cause they don't know what's gonna come, but now they're like, "Okay, well, it's been like this. I think we're kinda getting used to this, and we still have to build a business. So what are the ways we're gonna do that," and then... We both run marketing technology companies, so they start looking to us, and so leads are starting to come back in again.

06:20 AW: Yeah. Awesome, let's...

06:21 DS: Yeah.

06:22 AW: Hope that continues. Ride that wave back up.

06:25 DS: Yeah, definitely. What are some of the things you've been doing at GatherUp? What are some of your offensive strategies that you've been working on?

06:34 AW: The one thing that we've really gotten into is we just double down really heavy on content. I finally got it kind of pulled into a thought process the other day, but we were on a call and talking about shipping product, and the importance of that, and things like that. And I was like, "Well, I think what we're doing, we're just shipping strategy right now," because we have a really robust feature set. And sometimes with that, there's just a lot of elements to it where people don't understand all of the pieces, or how to string 'em together, or how to best utilize the features.

07:15 AW: And I've found it almost cathartic to be writing and pouring myself into teaching. So, a lot of strategy type blog posts, and execution, and webinars. We had you on a local AMA we did. You, and I, and Joy Hawkins, and Mike Blumenthal. Yeah, really great. And we have our monthly customer webinars, and we had our agency webinar. So, we've just really gone all out with sharing things that, with not doing as much outbound, without as many demos things, like that where it's like let's just give people as much education as we can and try to help them through it to do the best that they can and for their business. So...

08:...

Helpful links from the episode:

• Official Press Release from Alpine Software Group (ASG)
• Acquisition announcement and interview on Search Engine Land 
• Alpine Software Group
   

FULL SHOW NOTES

[ INTRO music]

00:09 Aaron Weiche: Episode 16: Selling GatherUp - Part 1, The Why.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

00:41 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture, I'm Aaron.

00:44 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:45 AW: And we are back in the year of 2020 after finishing off 2019 and catching a little bit of downtime. I know I probably got even more than I normally would with Christmas on a Wednesday, New Year's Day on a Wednesday. It was a nice slow two weeks for me. How about you, Darren? 

01:06 DS: Super slow. I touched in a little bit here and there, but I mostly took like a full solid two weeks off over Christmas up until January 2nd, so that was nice. Good little break, spent some time with family, get my mind off work for a while.

01:19 AW: It's one of those great... Like you can count on being able to recharge at the end of the year, because everyone wants to do the same thing.

01:27 DS: Yeah.

[chuckle]

01:28 AW: So, email is quiet, phone is quiet, text is quiet.

01:32 DS: Wonderful.

01:33 AW: I still look forward to it in the last couple of days where it's just like you gotta start getting your mind back in the game and ready to roll, and launch the new year off to a fast start.

01:42 DS: Yeah, it took me about a week to ramp up, too. I felt like my first week back, I was a bit sluggish, not firing on all cylinders, but I don't know, back in it now, got lots to do, I'm trying to time block and plan my week, and plan my day, and really get as much done as possible. So, I'm feeling productive now.

02:00 AW: You're ready to be the most efficient you for 2020.

02:02 DS: Exactly.

02:02 AW: Alright, so as we had teased at in our last episode to close out the year, the big news on my side of things is we announced, I think the public announcement was November 14th from our press release, but as of November 1st, 2019 GatherUp was acquired.

02:22 DS: It's huge.

02:23 AW: Yeah, big news. The finish line you're gunning for, and, yeah, a million different thoughts. And as you and I talked about how best to talk about this, and share things, and just try to put as much out there, I really felt like at least two, and I think we've arrived at now, we're probably gonna do three episodes on this, because there is so much ground to cover.

02:49 DS: For sure.

02:50 AW: So, and looking at this today, we wanna focus on kind of the why, and almost some of this is pre-sale, and then early once you get an offer, and things like that. And the second episode, we will look at what are all those pieces of that 90-day or 120-day window, whatever the deal timeline looks like, and how all that works out and what to expect, at least what I saw in our scenario and things like that. And then doing the third part on post-transaction, 'cause when everything closes, and especially in our case where I stayed on as CEO, one of our other founders, Mike Blumenthal stayed on, and then basically our entire staff stayed on. You just have a ton of logistics work around press releases and customer communication, and internal things, and employees, and so many other things that that post-sale transition, if you are staying on with whose ever purchased you, boys, it's its own episode. There is a laundry list of things. So...

03:57 DS: Yeah, I'm really interested in that process, like all the different moving parts, and how you have to answer to different people now, and how do your meetings go, and how often do you talk to them, and what kind of say do they have. So I'm looking forward to discussing that in part three.

04:09 AW: So before we get all the way to that, we have to get a part one done first. And maybe one of the first things that I can probably offer up that a lot of people have asked me is just like, "Were you guys always looking to sell?" And the answer from that is, yes, that was always part of starting a SaaS company, we were both doing something that we loved, but we also wanted to get it to a certain point and really looked at a sale, at a successful acquisition as being what we wanted to achieve. A time where we could take money off the table and also look at the company having its next phase with some different parameters on it. 

So, that's one thing I've been asked in general a lot and the answer is absolutely. It wasn't like, "Oh, yeah, we didn't know this was possible," or, "never thought about it." Like we definitely had talks over the years on: Are we tracking the right way? Are we valuable? Who might buy us? All of those kind of things with it.

05:15 DS: Yeah, that's interesting, 'cause like, I mean, my company was never sort of... That wasn't a thought when I started my company, it's kind of just evolved into a company that is a potential acquisition target for some of these companies. And so, I'm looking at it now more thinking about that as a potential exit and thinking about all the things I would need to have in place for that if I did decide to sell, but it's not necessarily the end goal for me. Like I will continue to grow the company, but let's say the company is doing $50 million a year in revenue, and I'm happy, and things are going well, and I have good leadership that's running things, it's like, "Well, maybe I don't sell," right? So, it's one of the things that I kind of bat back and forth, I keep looking at it from multiple perspectives, and I guess we'll see as we grow.

06:00 AW: We had a plan B, like that that we brought to the table that we're like, "Listen, if we reach this level of revenue and this level of profit margin, then maybe our best move at that stage is profit-sharing and spreading that success around, and using that to build a very sustainable long term." So it wasn't always, it wasn't sell or bust, but that definitely was the leading one, especially from the early days, that was the big motivator, the carrot that was out there for us.

06:00 DS: Yeah. Like how often were people approaching you and saying, "Hey, would you like... We're interested in your company, can we have some talks about potential acquisition?" Was this happening on like a monthly basis for you, once a quarter kind of thing, every week? I don't know.

06:00 AW: Somewhere probably between weekly and monthly. And it's one of those where it just kinda maybe about two years ago now is where it first started to pop up. I think we had reached some amount of maturity. We were there for a couple of years. Some of the work we're doing was a little bit more visible. And keep in mind, it was... You start getting this interaction from a few different things. Some might be potential acquirers. Some are investors with different capital type programs from venture capital and things like that, but the way I look at it is, it's outside parties being interested in taking part in your growth, whether they end up owning all of your growth or they wanna give you some money and get a percentage to help fuel it or provide some services, whatever that might be. But it definitely, a couple of...

Aaron and Darren dive into the design process for new features and product updates.  Whitespark and GatherUp take different approaches to this process and we look at each process to see what works best and why for each team. 

Helpful links from the episode:

• MozCon - GatherUp is a sponsor!
• Brighton SEO conference
• Invision
• GatherUp March webinar

FULL SHOW NOTES

[intro music]

00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode Five, The Design Process.

00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:46 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.

00:47 AW: And we are super excited to talk this week 'cause it's been a few weeks since we've connected, but we have a common theme. I just got back from a week in London, and you're headed over to England in a handful of days, so we like...

01:05 DS: Yep.

01:05 AW: We almost could have met and recorded a podcast live from London.

01:09 DS: We're gonna do that eventually. For sure we're gonna be at the same place. Maybe when we're at MozCon we should definitely plan a podcast when we're there together, that'd be awesome.

01:17 AW: Genius. And should we have a live crowd and a T-shirt cannon, and that kinda stuff?

01:22 DS: Yes, definitely. And an applause sign, so when we say something funny, someone flashes the applause button.

01:29 AW: There you go. It's you and I, and then hopefully three people and then our T-shirt cannons.

01:35 DS: Exactly. [chuckle] And some guys showed up to get free scones or something.

[laughter]

01:41 AW: Totally. Yeah. If we give enough good free stuff, they'll show up.

01:44 DS: Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I'm going to London in a couple of weeks here. I gotta go to London to do a presentation at BrightonSEO, and I'm also doing a training session. It sounds like you've got some training stuff coming up, too. Tell me about your trip though. How was London, what was the best thing?

02:00 AW: Oh, the best thing, regardless of location, it was the first trip, my wife and I, where we've had seven days together since our first child, which she turns 15 next week.

02:11 DS: Wow.

02:12 AW: Yeah. Plenty of three, maybe even a four-day getaway, but having a full week... At some point midway, it was just like, "Wow, we've gotten so much time together." We maybe ran out of things to even talk about, and then we're like, "Okay, cool, silence is even cool," and then we just found other things to talk about. It was so great.

02:36 S2: Oh, that's nice.

02:36 AW: Yeah. We divided our trip halfway between the countryside of England, so we went out to an area called the Cotswolds, about an hour, hour-and-a-half outside of the London area, and super small little villages, one lane roads to get in between, driving out there was nuts. Man, there were so many times where I thought for sure that one side of the car was gonna be sheared off by the other car.

03:03 DS: Right. Do you ever have to stop and one car has to reverse until the road gets wide enough for someone to pass?

03:09 AW: Yeah, we totally had some of that going on. And just so many times where the locals they're still doing 40, 50 miles an hour on a one-lane road and I'm like over to the side, and then there's stone walls next to every road. There's no shoulder. It was just crazy. I definitely, out loud, shared how I felt a few different times, and I couldn't believe we never even touched mirrors out of all of it. It was crazy.

03:37 DS: It's funny, I had that same experience in Italy for sure. Driving down these tiny little roads between buildings, and I'm like, "How are we both gonna fit through there?" But then you manage to do it. And the locals are like, "What's wrong with you? Just drive your car, man."

03:52 AW: The locals stuck behind me hated me, because I was nowhere... When they would post the speed limit, I'm like, "How can somebody go that fast? I can't go 40 here, that's not happening."

04:05 DS: Totally. Yeah.

04:05 AW: Yeah, it was great. And then just the beauty and the calmness and the serenity of out there was awesome. I really, really loved that part. Then we went into London for four days, and that just such mixture of... We went to the theater, just so much sightseeing, so much history. It's like everywhere you turn is something that you would never see in the States. And that's the cool part about it to me, is just photographic visuals of little alleys and buildings, and little cafes and pubs, and things like that, where it's just like, "Oh, my... " You're in this huge area, but every 10 feet is something to look at.

04:45 DS: Yeah. I saw that on Facebook, your photos were beautiful.

04:48 AW: Yeah. Not even close to all the ones captured, those are just some of them. Yeah, it was really, really great. And, yeah, I'll give you a few tips. There's just so much to explore there, I would love to go back. It was my first time, and I'd be very excited to go back.

05:07 DS: Yeah. Jill and I are in a similar situation. We've never taken a long trip like that away from our daughter. She usually comes with us if we're going somewhere for a while. But just like two nights most... I think two nights is the most we've ever done actually, we've never done more than that. She's eight now, we've got another seven years, I guess, before we can have the seven-day vacation.

[laughter]

05:29 AW: Well, hopefully you get it in sooner than I did, 'cause... Oh, man, it was really great, it was awesome for both of us. You're headed over to London to do a conference, right?

05:42 DS: Yeah. I'm speaking at Brighton and also doing a training thing, so I've been very busy trying to... I'm doing a really interesting case study, where I take a business from nowhere, like the brand new, zero online presence business, and I've been trying to see how wide I can get them to rank in the local results, so tracking their location across multiple zip codes, and doing everything I can, like all the regular local search stuff, and being able to measure the impact at every step, which has been really great. So, it's like, "Okay, they got three new reviews. Wow, look at what happened to the rankings." Just those three reviews gave them a massive ranking boost. And so, because it's so dialed in and they had nothing going on before, it's this clean, clear case study of what happens at each phase and how that impacts local search. It's been really great, I'm excited about that. But it's been taking me too long and I've been putting too much time into it and not enough time into preparing for the local search training I'm doing on one of the days, so I have to spend about seven hours giving a full day training course, so I'm gonna be really slammed all next week trying to get all that stuff done.

06:47 AW: Yeah, so much work all the time to get ready for that stuff. Your study sounds awesome. I'm gonna be excited. Hopefully, you'll share that deck with me when you're done with it.

07:00 DS: Yeah. Basically, I've got four months into it for Brighton, and so I'll have that much data, but I'm also going to show it at MozCon, so I'll have another two, three months of data to present and mo...

Helpful links from the episode:

• Zendesk
• Helpscout
• Olark
• Zapier
• GatherUp app on Zapier
• GatherUp User Guide
• MozCon

FULL SHOW NOTES

[intro music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 10: Building Customer Success and Support for your SaaS.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to The Saas Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of Gather Up and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:44 Aaron: Welcome to The SaaS Venture podcast; I'm Aaron.

00:47 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:49 Aaron: And we have hit double digits, my friend.

00:52 Darren: This is it. We've finally made it, big time.

00:55 Aaron: Let's just shut it down.

[chuckle]

00:58 Darren: 10 episodes; this is our final episode.

01:01 Aaron: But somebody that's just listening thought we maybe meant 10 years, but no, we just mean 10 episodes, but that feels good for five months into doing this.

01:12 Darren: Yeah, we're gaining some traction. I think we're building a following, and I'm having a great time; it's been good.

01:18 Aaron: Absolutely; I agree. So, hey, what's been going on with you since we last talked on the last episode?

01:26 Darren: What's been going on? Let's see... Well, I have a fun story to tell. Just the other day I was waiting for Violet and Jill to arrive at the gym, at the gym that I work out, and so that's also where Violet does her jiu jitsu class. So I'm on the treadmill and I'm running, just waiting for them to show up. And I never ride the treadmill, it's just that it was right by the door so I could watch. So I pressed the Stop button on the treadmill when they pull up and I go to get off. But because I don't ride the treadmill I didn't realize that it has, like, a slow down process. [chuckle] So I turn around to get off the treadmill, I realize it's still going as fast as it was when I was basically running full steam, and I was, like, full... Like arms, legs in the air, and landed hard on my back. [chuckle] And there were like three people come running over to see if I'm okay; I'm totally fine. I go to the car, and Jill is, like, in tears; she can't even speak because she saw the whole thing happening.

[laughter]

02:27 Aaron: Oh, perfect.

02:28 Darren: And she's laughing non-stop. Thankfully I didn't really hurt myself, I just kinda got like a rug burn-type injury on my elbow, but I wish I could get the security camera video for it 'cause I would love to see it.

02:44 Aaron: It would likely be a YouTube sensation, or make it into one of those compilations that you see on Facebook of exercise fails.

02:52 Darren: I think it was worthy of that, for sure, yeah.

02:55 Aaron: Well, I'm glad that your elbow is the only injury because, man, I've seen people... It looks like they... You can get knocked out if you fall on your head.

03:05 Darren: I think so, yeah. So I was fine, just my biggest injury was my pride. I felt like a bit of an idiot at the gym there. But yeah. [chuckle]

03:13 Aaron: Now, have you ever seen people who will walk on the treadmill, and it's set up where they can work... They're on a laptop while they're walking?

03:20 Darren: Yes, I have seen that before, and in fact, one of my employees, a developer that used to work with us, he had a setup like that in his office. And he would walk something like 15,000 steps a day. [chuckle] He was just, like, walk all day long while he was on his laptop.

03:34 Aaron: Oh my gosh, I don't think I could pull that off. I would probably make it five or ten minutes; my focus would go elsewhere, and I would be like you. And then even at a walking speed I would end up down on the ground somehow.

03:46 Darren: Yeah. You gotta really train and get used to that whole thing about working while walking. It would just be awkward, really, trying to type, I think.

03:54 Aaron: Yep.

03:54 Darren: Yeah.

03:55 Aaron: Well, we gotta keep you upright, so let's leave the treadmill alone for a while.

04:00 Darren: So we launched our new service, that Google My Business service that we were talking about last episode, and so I'm pumped about that. We were a little bit... We sent the email out to our mailing list on July 3rd, where I think most people were like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be gone", 'cause most of our customer base is in the US, and so maybe it wasn't the best time for a promotional email, so we're going to circle back on that in a couple of weeks. And we're trying to just do more promotion and build up the service; I'm excited about that.

I'm also very excited about how our new account system is coming together, so with the Stripe integration and rebuilding all of our order forms, and just that whole user flow of signing up for our software or our services. So all that's being rebuilt in Stripe; that's awesome. And then of course, getting ready for MozCon which is next week. Can't wait to see you in person there. I should get my presentation finalized and all done here.

04:56 Aaron: Yeah. By the time this episode airs we'll both be in Seattle and at MozCon; you speaking, GatherUp's there as a sponsor, but we'll get some time to hang out in person, and we're gonna try to record episode 11, in-person as well while we're in Seattle.

05:16 Darren: Yeah, I can't wait; it's gonna be fun. We have to figure out where we're gonna do that recording.

05:20 Aaron: It's gonna be a very top-secret location so that we don't, all of our fans aren't trying to break down the door to talk to us.

[chuckle]

05:27 Darren: Maybe we should at least have a window where the fans can watch.

[chuckle]

05:30 Aaron: Totally. Like some morning news show where they're just, like, screaming and holding signs.

[chuckle]

05:38 Darren: Yeah, totally.

05:38 Aaron: We could pay somebody to do that; that would be the only way that would happen.

05:42 Darren: I think, yeah, we would have to pay, definitely. How about you? What's up with you?

05:46 Aaron: On my side, I'm catching up after enjoying an awesome Fourth of July week where I was out of the office the entire week, just probably spent an hour to two hours each day on email and keeping some things moving, but it was a lot of time off, a lot of time with the kids. Time on the lake, which was awesome. But it always makes... The week you get back and all the things you kind of put off or said, "Schedule the call next week", now I'm basically living with the headset on the last few days, but all good.

06:21 Darren: I was gonna say, it's like you get punished for taking that time off.

06:24 Aaron: It is. It's double the work before you leave, and double the work when you get back, and that's right. You gotta make it count when you're gonna be out. It's like if you're gonna take all that punishment, then make sure you enjoy it.

06:34 Darren: Totally.

06:36 Aaron: Amazingly, we've talked a lot about my need and the work; we've had a specific episode on sales, but we have hired two outbound sales positions that start for us in the next couple of weeks.

06:50 Darren: Amazing.

06:50 Aaron: Yes.

06:50 Darren: Yeah, I'm very curious to hear how this goes. Outbound sales, it's a whole new world.

06:55 Aaron: Yes. So I'm incredibl...

FULL SHOW NOTES

[INTRO music]

00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode 24: Raising prices.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Here are the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

00:45 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast, I'm Aaron.

00:48 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.

00:50 AW: And the best way to sum me up right now is I am malaised in Minnesota, if that's even a correct way to say that.

01:00 DS: I have no idea, I have to look it up.

[laughter]

01:03 AW: I don't know if I should be inventing words, but as we were just talking before hitting record, Darren and one thing, we haven't recorded in almost two months, which is just silly of us.

01:18 DS: It's been a while.

01:20 AW: Yeah. Too long, we need to do better. If we wanna keep listeners going up into the right, people have probably forgotten about us, so we'll try to win your hearts and minds back, but yeah, we were just discussing... I've just been in a little bit of a funk for various reasons, some of the obvious things, COVID and restricted or compressed life of not as many freedoms or...

01:47 DS: For sure.

01:50 AW: Especially, I don't know, I consider myself to be a creative person, and so I feed off of other environments and travel and observation and things like that, and my world just so much consists of home, work, home, work, and work is just pretty much zoom, home, zoom, home. So...

02:09 DS: Yeah. We would just call it Groundhog Day around here, it's like every day, it's like that movie Groundhog Day, where it just feels like you're going through the motions day after day, and there's no variety in life right now.

02:21 AW: And... I don't know, I was trying to talk about it with Marci, my wife, and there's just this little piece of, when you don't... I don't know, and I just might be messed up in how I see this, but when you don't have certain things to look forward to like time with friends or an outing or a trip, or being at a sporting event, things like that. Those are things that definitely provide a little bit of spark and optimism and all those different things and yeah, it's just so severely lacking, and with the season change in Minnesota, we've flipped back to life being a lot more indoors, at least until we get some snow on the ground and then hopefully I can get... I'm gonna... I'll probably do more snowboarding this year than the last five years combined, so...

03:09 DS: Yeah. What are you gonna do about the hill, like when you go to the hill, are you gonna bring your own lunch? Are you gonna go into the lodge? Are you gonna eat lunch in the lodge? Are you gonna use the washrooms in the lodge? Just... I'm all super COVID sensitive, so I'm just wondering how you handle that.

03:22 AW: Yeah. I haven't thought that far yet. The hill that's closest to me literally only takes 25 minutes to get there, and it's super small, it's like eight runs, so going there for two to three hours of runs, and then you can call it a day, but there's definitely... There's a couple of others around here that take an hour, a couple of hours to get to that are worth it, and yeah, then I'll probably... I probably just bring something along and bust it back out to the car and refuel, so...

03:56 DS: Yeah. Yeah, sounds good. [04:00] ____.

04:01 AW: Yeah, that's easily one of the consistent things I just not have been... I have at any point had a meal inside of a restaurant, cafe, anything like that since all this started, I did use... We have some very nice and well-spaced outside patios and things like that, but we've done a few times within the local community, especially to support some of the local business owners in addition to doing take out, but that's been above it.

04:28 DS: Yeah. We've been like all meals all the time, making them at home. No take out either. So it's been... It's a lot of work. This is a, that Groundhog Day thing where we're just going through the motions all day along, it'd be nice to just get a break from dinner where just shows up at the door, right, but we're... We're just extra careful.

04:50 AW: Yeah. No. Totally get it. So anyway, I feel like I'm working my way out of it, I'd probably hit the bottom of it a couple of weeks ago, and just been trying to pay more attention to exercise and alcohol intake and screen time, and just all those different things, it's not... There's not one thing to cure when you do feel that way, you gotta take all the pieces and say, "How do I bump all of these things up a level to contribute to finding a better place to be."

05:25 DS: I think it's just a natural ebb and flow. You're gonna go through really solid awesome months and you're gonna have some time where you feeling a little lower, like, gosh, it's just a constant up and down for me over the months.

05:39 AW: What have you been doing to fight that off? 

05:42 DS: So exercise has been a thing for sure, I'm trying to get more sleep lately, I've been really diligent about my exercise routine, actually COVID's been great for exercise because it's just part of my routine and I have it all kinda locked in and my schedule has gotten really good. I've got a new morning routine, I'm feeling productive and focused and it's going pretty well actually. I'm going through a good period right now.

06:09 AW: Awesome. Good for you.

06:11 DS: I don't feel like I really need too much. I think I might be a little bit introverted in some ways, where I'm like, if I didn't see my friends in person for two years I'd be like, "Oh. That's okay." And then I'll see them in two years, and be like, "Hey. Great to see you." It doesn't wear me down. Really, I've always been... As a teenager, I just spent every weekend locked in my bedroom, playing video games, so I'm used to this. I come from a long history of COVID times.

06:40 AW: See, I'm definitely more social, I would say I was probably in the social extreme in my youth where I was always with friends, always playing sports, always doing things. And then as time has gone on and especially just being more dedicated or turning into the workaholic or whatever, else, that isolation has crept in much more, but I still like if I had to put a time frame on it, every once a month or once every couple of months, I would like to have a day or an evening of adult socialization, something to do conversations to be had to... I don't wanna go for years without seeing some of my friends and things like that, so I need a little tighter cycle.

07:30 DS: Yeah. And I used to get that all the time. Every week there would be multiple things happening because my wife does such a good job of sort of organizing our social calendar, but now it doesn't exist anymore. I guess one thing I'm just noticing is that I guess it doesn't bother me too much, which is, I guess maybe a little surprising.

07:47 AW: Yeah. Well, good for you. You got it under control. I'm working on it and I'll figure my way out the other side, I can see if you raise the light, I'll get there.

08:00 DS: I feel like I'm unusual. I think most people certainly want more social engagement, I want it too, but I'm able to progress without it. What's going on with the business? What's happening with your SaaS company? 

08:16 AW: Yeah. A lot of... End of the year, I always kinda look at like this, you have to face the reality of what you actually can accomplish for the remaining couple of months of the year, and it's usually not what you had planned, so that's the facing the reality part of like, Alright, we still have these five things, and we actually can do two of them now, so that really kind of sha...

FULL SHOW NOTES

[INTRO music]

0:00:10.5 Aaron Weiche: Episode 29, Prioritize or Die.

0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

0:00:42.5 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:46.0 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:48.0 AW: Did you see what I did with that clickbait title of our episode today, Darren?

0:00:52.9 DS: I did actually. I wrote something different, but yours is way better, yeah, that's good. [chuckle]

0:00:56.8 AW: I think I was mostly trying to avoid, right? You had wrote prioritization and I was like, that just sounds like a word that I will somehow mangle when we go to hit record, and then yeah, I just went all-out sensationalism and clickbait and...

0:01:12.2 DS: And I actually think, not only is it clickbait-y, which is great, but it also was accurate. I think that it's really the theme of this episode.

0:01:20.9 AW: Yeah, and it's not... As we get into it, it's not an instant death, it's just probably a slow death if...

0:01:28.8 DS: Absolutely.

0:01:29.8 AW: You don't adhere to it. And yeah, I'm super excited to get into that. But it's been five weeks since we've last recorded, and we caught up a little bit before hitting record. Sometimes I think we should just hit record the second we get on and let people hear all of our small talk, and then maybe wrap that into the after show. We usually have really big... We just had some really big ideas. We'll see if we can put those into play someday. But...

0:01:57.2 DS: Yeah.

0:02:01.7 AW: What has been consuming your time this last handful of weeks?

0:02:07.0 DS: I've been busy with the summit. Just, I've been on lots of calls with the team, planning our software, and lots of summit stuff. So just trying to get all work...

0:02:19.3 AW: So you're talking about, for those that don't always listen to us, you put on a local search summit, virtual last year, it was your very first one.

0:02:29.2 DS: Yeah.

0:02:29.3 AW: Remind me again, how many speakers... I know the attendee number was super high. Like frame up how the very first one went.

0:02:36.8 DS: So our Whitespark Local Search Summit, the first one we did last year, a virtual summit, it's free to attend, pay if you want the recordings, and we had 6,000 registered... People registered for the event. We...

0:02:56.7 AW: That's so awesome.

0:02:56.8 DS: It was huge, yeah. So I was a little bit shocked with how well we did. We had 32 speakers, I think, a three-day event. And so it's a lot of work to put it together. So this year, I'm really excited about how things are shaping up. Our line-up is phenomenal. We've got incredible speakers like Aaron Weiche speaking. [laughter] So it's gonna be fantastic. I can't wait for it. We really put a lot of polish on it this year. I gotta give a shoutout to Jesse Lowe on our marketing team, she is our marketing team, and she...

0:03:29.8 AW: Go Jesse.

0:03:33.2 DS: She's done such an incredible job with the design, and we're building our website now and our sponsor deck, and just everything is just getting really nicely tweaked and polished, and it's gonna be an incredible event, and I think that we're shooting for 8,000 registrations this year, but it really feels like that level of conference quality that you might see at a Moss Con, I feel like we're hitting our stride with it this year and really kinda taken it to that next level. So been really busy with that, trying to get that stuff working out.

0:04:03.5 AW: That's just so incredible, like when you say those numbers. I remember that attendees were in the thousands, but again, first-time event, you pull it off during a pandemic.

0:04:15.1 DS: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:04:16.1 AW: Some of it probably helpful 'cause people were just so hungry for good information, good interaction. I remember, I super enjoyed... So many of the speakers are like friends and people that we see on the conference circuit that you get to see in person and have a beer with or grab dinner with, and it was just like... It was just great to hear David Mihm present. It was just great to hear people that you're used to that are smart and have something different in your day than Zoom calls with your internal team. [chuckle] So...

0:04:50.1 DS: Yeah.

0:04:51.3 AW: Those are some lofty goals, man. 8,000, that's awesome. I can't wait.

0:04:54.3 DS: I'm a little bit worried that instead of increasing our registration count, we might drop, and one of the concerns I have is just virtual conference burnout. It's like we kinda hit it and at a sweet spot last time around, whereas it's been a full year, and I don't know, my inbox is blowing up with virtual conference invites all the time, and so I just wonder if people are a little bit burnt out from it, but we'll see.

0:05:20.4 AW: Yeah, could be, but I would say in the local space, other than local you, nothing else comes close to the level of content that you put into that event. So I think no matter what, even if you stay the same, even if you're a little bit lower, like you've put something great in motion that I can't wait for it to be like an in-person, just imagine like... Imagine if you're able to pull off a 1000-person in-person conference event in local, that would be nuts.

0:05:54.7 DS: While we plan to do it, I actually have already looked into doing the conference at the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, and so one day we're gonna go to... It's like castle in the mountains, in the rocky mountains, it's so beautiful. I wanna do it there. I've looked into pricing. I would have done it if I felt confident that by 2022, we wouldn't have weird COVID variants locking us down again, but their cancellation policy is like, "You gotta sign that contract, and if you back out, you lose 75 grand." So it was like, "Okay, I can't commit." But 2023, I feel like we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it in the mountains, it's gonna be great.

0:06:35.1 AW: Oh my gosh, that sounds epic to say the least.

0:06:39.1 DS: Yeah. I want that to happen.

0:06:45.3 AW: On my side of things, you and I talked during this as friends, and then professionally on a couple of things, but I had a hard two, three weeks of being able to focus on work, which is really strange for me because I'm definitely a workaholic, work is a hobby, I just love being immersed, but the short of it is, my mom has Lewy body dementia, and it's gotten to the point where she can't live on her own, and so we had to transition her into assisted living, and the combination of visiting facilities and finding the right one for her and organizing everything that goes into a transfer like that and to some of the medical things and records and application and process, and then she was living in a town home that we owned, so cleaning that out, and then my wife and I decided to sell the town home as well, with my mom moving out of it, we just felt like the timing was right, and real estate market's great.

0:07:46.3 AW: So it was really hard. I'm normally like a lot of hours, 50, 60 hours easily of high-output work, I was probably more in the 30-hour range and having a hard time focusing 'cause of these bigger things, and it was really hard on me for a little bit because I'm just so not used to it. It was just jarring off of my normal schedule and what I usually put myself into and everything else.

So it's nice to be on the other side of that now and feel Mom has moved and settling in and that's a really... That's a g...

Helpful links from the episode:

• Whitespark's Google My Business Service
• Whitespark's Local Rank Tracker
• GatherUp's Insights Report
• 100+ Online Review Statistics resource 
• FreshChalk: 150k small business websites teardown
• Getting started in public speaking and presentations
• Whitespark Local Pulse email
• Whitespark weekly videos (YouTube)

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[Intro music]

00:11 Aaron Weiche: Episode 11, Marketing your bootstrapped SaaS.

00:16 Show intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:42 Aaron Weiche: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:47 AW: After a nearly month hiatus and a failed podcast attempt, Darren we are back hopefully in the groove of things and can return to a more normal schedule of recording.

01:00 DS: Yes, that was quite disappointing at MozCon. We thought we were gonna get a nice podcast recorded while we were in person. That was gonna be really exciting, but so many technical difficulties, that was quite frustrating.

01:14 AW: Yes. Mark us down as being complete newbies in live in-person podcast recordings. We made a lot of attempt and just ended up failing, and let's just put that behind us. There's bound to be a failure along any journey, right?

01:32 DS: I thought we did it though, and I thought it was a success, but then I guess we didn't get the file, I think it was all network problems and stuff. It was too bad.

01:42 AW: Yep. No glory to be had at the end of it but... With that we've had literally about four to five weeks since we've talked at length and since we've recorded an episode. What's been going on with you in that time? How have you been living these last days of summer?

02:02 DS: Well, I did go on a family vacation which was amazing. We went to Nova Scotia, we'd never been out East before and it was magical, it was just such a nice, relaxing vacation. We typically vacation in big cities and then we pack our days with going to all the museums and sites, and we've got lunch, breakfast, and dinner planned every single day at all the different places we wanna eat at. Whereas this was just like a we went to a rural type cottages in Nova Scotia just by the ocean and just hung out and it was relaxing and it was awesome. And we loved it so much, we're probably gonna re-book again for next year.

02:44 AW: Nice, sounds like a winner.

02:45 DS: It was great, yeah. It was good. And so, I guess, on the business side, so much going on always at Whitespark. We launched a new landing page for our Google My Business Management Service. It's got better screenshots, and we've kinda tweaked the copy a little bit, talked a little bit about some of the benefits a bit more, and it definitely seems to be converting better. So we're seeing those orders trickle in and our team is getting a little bit stretched thin. So we're gonna do some hiring this week. I have an interview set up tomorrow, so we'll keep building that team and that service, I'm excited about that.

We're also transitioning our citation building team, so we've been working with OptiLocal for, I don't know, seven years now, as our citation building partner, and so we're bringing that all in-house now, so it'll all be managed by our in-house team led by Nyagoslav Zhekov, citation expert extraordinaire. We are about to launch some major improvements for our Rank Tracker, those are finally finished. I had a call with Jessie, our marketing lead today about how we're gonna promote the launch of these new features, so I'm excited about that.

04:00 AW: What are... Real quickly, what are some of the improvements to the rank tracking tool?

04:05 DS: Yes. The Rank Tracker new features are the, basically we wanted to add screenshots. So it's the stagnant that lots of people have been asking for. So we started this, "Okay, we're gonna add screenshots to the Rank Tracker." And once we started getting in there, we found all these other things that we wanted to fix and do and change and improve, and so it's been a fairly significant overhaul, but it's not a significant release. Like the big announcement is, "Oh, now you can do screen... You'll get a screenshot of every search result page." But there's a whole bunch of stuff behind the scenes that we rewrote, reworked, made it more efficient, made it actually accurate. And once you get in and you discover actually, our visibility score is totally wrong. [chuckle]

04:48 DS: We started fixing a whole bunch of things and the release has a bunch of bug fixes, user interface improvements, and the screenshots. And so, I'm pumped about that, that is coming down the pipeline right away and I'm gonna do some videos. This is another thing we've never done on the landing page, I wanna have this overview video where I show people what's awesome in the tool and why it's great, and it's something that I've always meant to do and I've been holding off because I know there's a few problems with our production version of Rank Tracker, so once we flip switch on this one, I'm gonna make these videos and update all of our marketing too.

05:24 AW: That's awesome, and you are great at those videos from the other video work I've seen you do. That's definitely a hole for us, so good for you, and yeah, that'll be great, that sounds awesome.

05:38 DS: Yeah, I'm excited about that. And man, so we're building this one, like a whole new account system with Stripe and all the ordering pages will be done, all the subscriptions authentication, this whole thing's being built, and then it's meant to really facilitate our citation services. Right now when people order, they have to send a spreadsheet of their location info, and then we do the job and we send them the spreadsheet back. It is so 1998 janky, crappy unprofessional stuff, it's bugged me forever. So we're building what we call the location manager where you can add all of your locations, and that's pretty much built and done. And when you place an order now, it just... You select which location from our location manager you want us to do work on, and then everything is just nice, and in the platform.

But in the process we decided we're gonna... Well, allow it to sync with GMB, and so we did that. And honestly, my part-time student developer was like, "Oh this GMB API is great." And the dude has already built Google post scheduling, Google Q&A monitoring, Google review management, he's built Google photo management, so we actually have a full GMB management platform that we're about to launch too. So all of that stuff is coming together so nicely, and I'm excited about that.

06:53 AW: Isn't it amazing when you have a good API, good documentation? Although my team might argue how good most of Google's APIs are.

07:02 DS: Right yeah.

07:02 AW: But when you have those things, and then you have someone ambitious t...

Helpful links from the episode:

• Stripe
• MnSearch Summit
• MozCon
• a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO
• David Ulevitch on Twitter
• 
  

FULL SHOW NOTES

[music]

00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode nine, The CEO Journey.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to The SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Here the experiences challenges wins and losses, shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:45 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:47 AW: And we are back in front of a microphone, sharing our business secrets, our love secrets, everything in between, and making them public, so that we can share them with our listeners. And, if anything, sometimes it's probably cathartic and healing and everything else, wouldn't you say?

01:07 DS: Yeah, definitely, I have not yet shared any love secrets, so I'm not sure where you're going with that, but...

[chuckle]

01:15 DS: May be a future episode. I don't know.

01:17 AW: I'm just trying to keep things broad, all the time, right?

01:20 DS: Broad, yeah. 'Cause you know we never know what we're gonna talk about.

01:22 AW: Yeah, no, if this turns into a relationship podcast on how you and I get along, and our friendship and being there for each other and everything else, we could pivot right, like, software is all about pivoting at different times.

01:35 DS: It really is, yeah, and I think we should definitely keep that in our back pocket.

[chuckle]

01:40 AW: Alright, so with that, we'll both get up off the davenport and the attempt to talk on a few different topics today, especially the deeper content we want to get into on kinda the CEO journey. We have a lot to cover there, we will probably, once again, have a hard time keeping ourself to 40 minutes but hopefully the content is appreciated. But what have you been up to since our last episode on churn a few weeks ago, Darren?

02:12 DS: What have I been up to? Well, we've talked about this Local Search service a number of times, and how we're re-pivoting that actually, speaking of pivoting, into a Google My Business Management Service. And so I hired someone new for that. Basically Allie is my primary person that is running that service and she's at capacity, so we need to hire, and so can't really launch it until we have new people hired and trained and ready to do the service. So, I hired Sydney, she worked with us in the past, she's pretty awesome. And so she started yesterday.

And I put out a job posting too. And so we're just trying to get the people in place to be able to service the service because we have a waiting list of 30 people that are interested already. I don't even... Honestly, I worry that we might never even launch the landing page because we'll just keep picking people off the waiting list, 'cause the waiting less seems to be growing faster than we can hire and train people to build the service up.

03:10 DS: So, it's very interesting to me that there's that much interest in the service, I think it's gonna be very successful for us, and I think we've dialed in our processes really well. So, the next thing to dial-in, is hiring and training and scaling it up so I'm excited about that. That's big for us, for sure.

03:24 AW: That's awesome to have that type of demand. That part has to feel really good.

03:29 DS: It feels great, and I think it's like... I had read a tweet or some one... Some luminary of the modern age, had tweeted that the biggest success factor for companies is not really product or anything, it's timing. And so having the right product at the right time, that people need, and I feel like that's precisely what we're doing with this service. So I'm excited about that. And I know there's competition out there, but it's early stages. We have a great reputation that we've built up in this space, and so I think we're really well positioned to do well with the service.

04:01 AW: I'm interested, you seem to be comfortable in productized services and things like that, where the whole reason, not the whole reason but one of the reasons I got into SaaS after well over a decade in agency is I wanted to get away from services and I wanted to be strictly product-focused. But you have a good comfort level with that. But yet, man, I would be really, I would be frustrated right now. Like really, I gotta wait on services to get this awesome new thing launched?

04:32 DS: Totally. And you're like, you have a software, you just flip the switch. "Okay, sign up everybody." And so there is something beautiful with that. There are two types of services. There is a complex agency, SEO service where every case is different and everyone's got different needs, and some clients are more of a hassle than others. Same thing with something like web design where you're building out a website. There's just so many touch points with the client that it's really hard to scale that.

And what I have found is with a very simple streamlined one thing type of service, so citation building, for example, it scales really well. It's like, this is what it is, you buy it, you basically get a product, really, it's a very specific thing. And there's not a lot of back and forth, there's not too much... Not to many questions about it, right?

05:22 DS: And so everyone gets the same thing. And that's where the pivot happened actually, 'cause I had turned the Local Search service into something more complicated than it needed to be, which opened the flood gates for all of that like different clients and how do we handle practitioner listings, and just lots of complication. So scaling it back to just this really helps us to build something that's scalable. And so I am comfortable with this as a productized service but I totally hear you on just services in general. They can be a real pain in the ass and very hard to scale.

05:53 AW: Yeah, well, good for you. You are a braver man than I am and totally... Nothing wrong with it. Not in my wheelhouse of a fit right now but how is it right? You said you're posting, and I know this, I've talked a number of episodes on hiring, especially for sales positions, which I'll give an update on and we're continuing to do. But in talking before the podcast, you kinda have a few little tips for people in hiring and posting to job boards.

06:27 DS: So yeah, this, this job posting I actually forgot to do it when I first launched the job posting. I put out... So I posted the job and I had done this last time, but we use Indeed.ca, I think, I'll see if there's any indeed.com, but we post our jobs to Indeed and so, we get a flood of applications and most people, they just press the button to apply through Indeed.

I have a very specific note that says, "How to apply," and it says, "Include your resume and cover letter," and it says, "and email it to darren@whitespark.ca." It also says right in the, "How to apply," "If you just apply through Indeed, instead of emailing Daren directly then we'll know you didn't read this and it'll be really helpful for us for filtering our candidates."

So this is awesome because I get... So far I've probably had about 40 applications for this job and only five of them read this instruction. Most of them are just like, it's like ...

Helpful links from the episode:

• Local Rank Tracker
• 
  

FULL SHOW NOTES

[intro music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 14, working on and working in the business.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges wins and losses, shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron and I'm back from vacation.

00:50 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren and I don't know when I'm gonna have a vacation.

00:56 AW: There's a clear separator between us. I feel your pain. So, how have you been man.

01:01 DS: I've been great, thanks how have you been? .

01:03 AW: I am newly relaxed after my first real vacation since earlier in the year, in March, my wife and I went to London for a week and that was definitely a vacation. We left all the kiddos, all four kids at home for that though. So this was a family vacation out to San Diego, so left behind 30 degrees in Minneapolis and enjoyed 75 sun and a perfect breeze every day in San Diego right on the beach.

01:37 DS: Wow.

01:38 AW: And yeah, had a great time. And finally, this is sad to admit, plays into our topic today. But I had my first two days straight of not opening my laptop in probably six months which is kind of scary right when you look back at it.

01:54 DS: It's pretty good to do that though. I find if I go away for two weeks, then I do always have to bring a laptop so it's like when you have it, it's easy to open it and get caught up on a few things. Maybe if it's just like for a half hour before bed or whatever. And it's just nice to not do that at all for a couple of days and really take a break.

02:14 AW: Yeah, no, my backpack was there and I set it in the corner, I basically put it in a time out in our room.

02:23 DS: That's right.

02:24 AW: I would walk by it and I would just look at it and I'd be like, "Not today, my friend, not today".

02:28 DS: That's good, that's the way to be, nice. So it was pretty short though it was how many days.

02:35 AW: Yeah Friday to Wednesday so, five days, travel time in there, but it is so fun... One thing that I love is I travel alone so much and when I'm traveling alone, I often look at other families in the airports, and kids are usually... They're going somewhere fun, they're excited and I can't help but wish my kids were with me, and when we get to all travel together to go on like a vacation, it's often somewhere warm to break up the monotony of Minnesota late fall, winter pre-spring kind of deal, and yeah, my kids just love it, they're happy, it's so fun to be with them. My little guy right now, my youngest is three, and everything... He met the pilot, and he got a sticker and...

03:30 DS: Awesome.

03:30 AW: And he's telling everybody, he's a pilot, and riding the bus to the rental car center, he was then their bus driver, and just watching everything through his eyes and the beach and the ocean, and everything else. So rewarding it's so fulfilling that. I just love it.

03:48 DS: Three is so cute. Oh man, I look back at videos of Violet when she was three. Just adorable, love it. That's a great age.

03:55 AW: Yeah, no, it's a fantastic age. I wish I could freeze them and I have all the others, my kids are 15, 13, 10 and 3. So I've gone through this many multiple times, but I am enjoying his threes more than any of the others because you just, it's known, you understand so many things and you realize just how fast it goes. I can't believe my oldest has her driver's permit and...

04:21 DS: That's crazy.

04:22 AW: Yeah, 10th grade and all of the... She's only gonna be at home a couple more years, which is mind-blowing. So.

04:29 DS: Man four kids and CEO of a really popular SaaS company. How do you do it? 

04:35 AW: Because I have an awesome CEO at home that runs the ship there. So that's exactly how I do it. She makes my life easy. So that's how.

04:44 DS: Yeah, I've got a similar set-up here, so yeah, it works out pretty well.

04:47 AW: Yeah, you gotta have that support crew.

04:49 DS: Yup...

04:49 AW: What have you been up to? 

04:52 DS: Well, I've just been busy with work stuff lately. Our next vacation won't be until March, we've got a four-day trip, planned to Jasper, we go skiing in the mountains every year, and so that will be awesome. We do that. I love to ski, yeah, but so at work, we finally launched a huge update to our Local Rank Tracker." It's a crazy update, because it's... The big thing we're announcing is, "Oh, you now have screenshots in our Rank Tracker, so you can actually look at the results on each day, right? But behind the scenes, we rebuilt that whole thing from scratch, it was a complete rebuild. So internally, it was a huge job, and we've got it out the door now and I'm really excited about it, because we can iterate so much faster on feature updates, now, so it's gonna be fast and furious pulling out new features over definitely one or two feature updates per month are gonna be hit in that Rank Tracker. So I'm excited about that.

05:51 AW: That's awesome.

05:52 DS: Really good growth potential for that software. And I know a number of people who are in the industry are excited about it. So I'm excited about it too. Sounds good, our GMP service continues to grow, it's we'll keep adding clients at a pretty decent pace and we're gonna have to hire again pretty soon. The next couple of months, so that's great. That service is doing very well, it just feels like I'm on the hamster wheel right now with all of this end of year work, and it's like all of my team is totally tied up, and so, I just find... Getting to our topic of the day, I just really feel like I'm working in the business so much right now. 

I've got so many projects that I have to allocate time to and actually sit down and work on them, and it's just so hard because all day long, I'm just dealing with the business, and then so in the evenings, I have to sit down and actually work on the projects. It's just... It's been tough. Just lots of work right now, and... Which is great, 'cause work is great, but it's just been really busy.

06:53 AW: Yeah, and it's one of those things that... Oh man, it ebb and flows so much, right? 'Cause when we were talking before this and we didn't even have... Nailed down what we wanna talk about today. And you kind of alluded to like, "Oh, I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel." I'm like, "Perfect. That's it."

07:08 DS: It might be a good topic.

07:09 AW: Let's just talk about what's going on right here and right now with it. So tell me a little bit. Do... Other than having this conversation with me, creating some space for you to reflect and be like, "Man, I am just spending a ton of time working in the business right now." Do you usually realize that yourself and pull yourself out to work on the business, or does that only happen when you get a break from working in it? Like what does that look like for you? 

07:42 DS: Yeah, it happens naturally. So it's not like I make some concerted effort to pull myself out, but it's just right now, a number of projects piling up that have to get done and I'm the person that is best suited to get those done, and so I'm just working a lot in the business. But when those wrap up, I think, I've generally got a pretty good set up in terms of company organization and structure, and I have people that can do all of... Most of the things, and so that allows me to just have a little bit of breathing room to spend more tim...

FULL SHOW NOTES

[INTRO music]

0:00:12.0 Aaron: Episode 27: Plan the work, work the plan.

0:00:16.2 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Here are the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

0:00:42.3 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:45.7 Darren: And I'm Darren.

0:00:47.7 Aaron: Darren, I wanted to start today with a little bit of an inspirational quote for us in our planning topic. Are you ready?

0:00:55.7 Darren: I'm ready. Let's hear it.

0:00:57.0 Aaron: So Eleanor Roosevelt said, "It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan."

0:01:05.1 Darren: It's a solid quote.

0:01:07.4 Aaron: I like the positivity of wishing and day-dreaming without the work involved, [chuckle] but I get where she's going.

0:01:15.2 Darren: Just take your wishes. They're all running around in your brain. Just write them on paper and you're starting to plan.

0:01:21.0 Aaron: There you go. One other note. We are also using video recording for this episode. We're gonna test this out and see. When we watch it back we'll [0:01:33.2] ____ if we're cringy or it's just not something that we want or if it's a good second medium for us to distribute our talks.

0:01:44.1 Darren: I think our subscribers are gonna go through the roof. You're so handsome. You're gonna have [chuckle] so many people being like, "Well, I wanna see more of that Aaron Weiche."

0:01:54.1 Aaron: I'm pretty sure there's not enough of a filter to combat that to make that come true, but it sounds good. All right, well, hey, it's been almost two months since we recorded an episode. I'm definitely to blame on that. I've been super heads down with some things, which we'll talk about my side of planning work and working the plan, but how have things been? Are there any changes in your life in the last two months during the pandemic?

0:02:22.8 Darren: No. Pandemic-wise, it's all the same over here. Nothing really has changed. No one's gotten vaccinated in my immediate family yet, so it's all same stuff here. Busy with work. You're definitely not all to blame. I have been heads down on a bunch of stuff as well, and so I haven't sparked a podcast conversation, but yeah, what's new at Whitespark? Let's see. We launched actually a really big update to our Local Rank Tracker. It's not the kind of thing that has much impact customer-facing, but we've rebuilt the whole thing in our standard tech stack. It used to be on Angular, and now we've switched our front-end JavaScript framework to View, which has many positive impacts for us. We're able to iterate on it much faster. The software is more organized, and so it really opens us up to quicker feature releases on our Rank Tracker, so I'm excited about that.

0:03:25.8 Aaron: Nice.

0:03:26.8 Darren: We are finally about to pull the trigger on our new account system that I've talked about on the podcast many times, but it's actually happening. And I'm not even gonna say two weeks. It's actually happening in five days on Tuesday. Tuesday is the day that we're gonna pull the trigger, and actually on that day, we've decided we're going to raise the prices of our premier SaaS software, the Local Citation Finder. We're doing a big price increase on that, that I've been talking you a lot about, Aaron. I'm excited about that. I think there's great potential there. I feel like it's long overdue.

We've had the same price of that software since we launched it 10 years ago. I've never increased prices, so it's long overdue. I feel like we're just gonna flip the switch and be just all of a sudden, we're making a lot more money, which we should've done a long time ago. So I'm excited about that. And we've got a big new feature to launch. I've talked about this before, I think, on the podcast, which is our citation auditing component that's gonna be integrated into our Local Citation Finder. So that's next on our agenda. That we're gonna be diving deep into that. It's mostly done, but pushing towards launch on that as well, so that's what's new in my world. How is Leadferno going? .

0:04:42.9 Aaron: Yeah, well, one, it's great to be public with Leadferno. I think that's the biggest thing in announcing this. Just Monday of this week, I mentioned to you when we were talking before, hitting record earlier today is having this time between leaving GatherUp and just helping wrap up some things there and whatever else and diving head deep into Leadferno, but not really having it in a place where I wanted to promote or talk about it. That was definitely hard. So it was like... In my planning, it's like I had this plan on how I wanted to announce. I wanted to have the marketing website ready, and I wanted to have it to a pretty like, I don't know, full-blown or at a pretty solid part, to be able to build content around and screenshots and specific features.

And early in the product and planning, there's a lot of that that you still don't even know how it's gonna end up or come true. You don't have visuals for it, things like that. So that was definitely one part of figuring out how do I make the most out of announcing what it is and driving people to something that actually does a good job of explaining it and all those pieces. So yeah, that was just a huge shift this week in being able to say like, "Here it is. Here's what it's called. Here's the link to it." And be able to socially do that in my professional profiles and my personal profiles. That was awesome.

0:06:26.3 Darren: Yeah, I was excited to see the tweet from you and see that you've gone public with it. It's like, "This is the thing. You can check it out now. This is what's coming." So that must be a huge relief and just feel good to get it out there.

0:06:41.5 Aaron: Yeah, I was kind of laughing. It checks the boxes on that social high or that dopamine hit you get when your LinkedIn posts and all the congratulations and the comments and the likes and retweets on Twitter and everything else. It's like this fever pitch. I kind of laughed at myself 'cause it's like, "I want that. I need that. I need word to spread on Leadferno and what it is and what it does." But I also felt like one of my teenagers where I'm worried about how many likes are on my TikTok video and things like that. It's like, I was like, "Oh, geez. Don't get caught up in this." But yeah, Monday was definitely just a rush all day long of people reaching out, people I forgot I had in my LinkedIn network where it's like you build these networks of, I don't even know, thousands of people, and then you get something and then you're like, "Oh, who's that? Where did I meet them at?" You go back and recall all of that so.

0:07:40.7 Darren: Well, I think you coined the phrase, "LinkedIn is slow Twitter."

[chuckle]

0:07:46.9 Aaron: Yes. I'm glad you remember that. It totally is.

0:07:50.7 Darren: Yeah, it makes some sense. You post something on LinkedIn, it continues to gather likes and comments for weeks, whereas something on Twitter, it disappears within half an hour.

0:08:00.9 Aaron: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. The Twitter steam settled down within 24 hours, and you're exactly like, "I'm still getting messages three days later on everything related to LinkedIn and whatever else." So people can check LinkedIn once a week and feel like they really haven't missed out on too much, where if you're really into Twitter, you're on it every few hours at least, so...

0:08:27.2 Darren: Yeah, well, congratulations on going pub...

FULL SHOW NOTES

[ INTRO music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 19. Navigating the Unknown.

00:16 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a Bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

00:43 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:47 Aaron: And the way we usually start our episodes is just by catching up. What's going on? What's happened lately? 

00:56 Darren: Yeah, what's going on, Aaron? What's going on? 

01:00 Aaron: Well, it seems like we're all... Have been doing the same thing for quite a number of weeks now. And it's interesting, until COVID-19 and everything else, anytime someone would post the Bill Murray Groundhog's Day meme on Facebook, or Twitter, or something else, I just never gave it much thought. And, literally, the last... I would say for me the last 10 days, I absolutely feel that way. Like it is such a lather, rinse, repeat of the same day with such little variance, it's wild.

01:34 Darren: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. My days are a little bit all over the place actually. I just keep working on different things and I'm getting pulled in many different directions right now. Things are changing quite a bit actually for me, I feel. Yeah. Things have been really up in the air and I feel a little scattered.

01:51 Aaron: Well, I will take some of your variance. I don't know if it's my attitude, or my outlook, or whatever else, but it definitely doesn't feel like enough variance for me. And I think some of it is just other things that I enjoy, like conferences, and things like that, all shut off. Sports, right? It's baseball season and every night I love sitting down with my Minnesota Twins on in the background, and happily writing a blog post, working on a contract, whatever that might be, just getting some small things done while I'm watching baseball, and that diversion of sports for me, isn't there, and that leaves a big hole.

02:38 Darren: Apparently, there is a huge surge in Marble Runs sports. [chuckle] Have you seen this? They've got a big table and you're watching the marbles race through a track. Massive surge in viewership there.

02:52 Aaron: Can you bet on it? 

02:54 Darren: Probably, yeah. Bet on the white marble.

02:58 Aaron: I need those small sources of joy.

03:00 Darren: You can start watching that while you're doing contracts and stuff.

03:03 Aaron: Yeah? 

03:04 Darren: Yeah.

03:05 Aaron: Interesting, just as we were talking before and prepped some notes, we definitely have some things to walk through, but I think a great place to start is both of us being remote and to some extent work-from-home. Me not so much really work-from-home, but with having a separate office, but has it felt that much different for you? Family life, at home life, what's that been like for you Darren? 

03:31 Darren: Oh, yeah. It's kind of weird really. Because there is the sense that we're not going out anymore, and so a bit of isolation. But it doesn't feel that different to me. I've run a remote company since 2005, I've worked from home since 2005, and so our entire way of working... The way that I work is completely the same. No changes here. The only thing is, I see the Sun a little bit less right now. I'm just in the house and not going outside really. We're not even going for walks really, because Jill and Violet, my wife and daughter, have had mild symptoms, so we're supposed to be really isolated. I've been getting out into the backyard lately, but basically, from a work perspective, it didn't change much for us because we're 100% remote. We've always been that way. How about you? 

04:27 Aaron: Yeah, same for myself personally and the GatherUp team. I've only been remote the last five and a half... Almost six years now, but long enough to forget the days of commuting, and in-office, and everything else. So that shift wasn't that hard, where for the rest of our company, which I should drop in I guess really quick just because I'm trying to get good at my references. 

Our group of products that Alpine Software Group had purchased that are Aramark tech that we used to call ASG MarTech, we actually rolled out a full brand for. So now it's called Traject. Traject includes the seven companies, SocialTools, Cyfe, Authority Labs, ourselves, Grade.us, we're all under this Traject umbrella. So we launched that just prior to everything with COVID-19 taking off. And I need to make that note before I start saying things, 'cause I'm trying to get good in being part of re-brands myself. Re-training yourself on how you refer to things.

05:28 Darren: For sure.

05:29 Aaron: So, for the Traject team, there's about 60-70% of the team as an overall that's all in-office and located outside of Seattle in Bellevue. And so it was interesting to watch. That first week, especially, was a struggle for them in moving from a centralized office to remote work and many of them have not been doing it right, they're working from the kitchen table and things like that, and especially with having others at home, if your spouse works, they might be just 10 feet away, and they're working remote, right? And it's like... I don't have any of those problems, my wife stopped working last year, it's a little different at my house, I have four kids that are home all the time now, ages 4 to 16.

06:15 Darren: Yeah. She's working. Oh, she's working hard. [chuckle]

06:19 Aaron: Oh my gosh. And they've done fabulous with leaving me alone, and they know if the office doors are shut, to cool it with dad. And luckily, in the last two weeks, their distance learning e-school has fired up, and so that occupies anywhere from two to six hours of their day depending upon what's going on and everything else. So, yeah, same as you, I feel really lucky that things haven't changed that much. But, yeah, the same... My 10-year-old daughter just said to me last night like, "Dad, every like hour or so, I'm gonna come get you and just make you go outside for five minutes." She's like, "You're in that hole all day." And I was like, "Yeah, you're right. That would probably be a healthy thing."

06:56 Darren: Once an hour though, that'd be tough. I don't know, how about every two hours? 

07:00 Aaron: [chuckle] I'm gonna try to appease the troops. If they have a suggestion for me at this point I'm just gonna take it because, yeah, I feel for them and all the small things that they're missing out. My kids all love school, but man, they are just missing friends, and socialization, everything else.

07:19 Darren: Oh, man. So much, yeah. I used to have a pretty closed-door policy with my office when Violet comes home from school and stuff the office is closed, you don't come in. But now it's like, she wants to come and say hi to me, I'm gonna stop whatever I'm doing, just take some time to chat with her, "Oh, what are you working on? What are you playing with these days?" And you just hear her stories and just spend that time, because she doesn't have any other social interaction. Gosh, neither do I, so it's like, "Yeah, go ahead, interrupt me anytime, come on in and we'll have a little chat for a few minutes and then I'll get back to work." I think it's the way it has to be right now.

07:56 Aaron: For sure. My kids have siblings to play with. They're very blessed, they have a lot to do. We're not in a traditional neighborhood, it's a little more spread out, so there's a couple of acres for them to be outside and play on without getting into some of those things and whatever else, so I'm more fortunate than not on a lot of ...

Part 2 or 2, what I got RIGHT the 2nd time around in SaaS starting Leadferno. The decisions you make when starting a company can have lasting, even forever impacts on the path of the company, so getting as many right as you can matters. Let's look at the main decisions I feel I got right in starting Leadferno.

Prior: Part 1 on what I got wrong.

FULL SHOW NOTES

00:05 Aaron Weiche: Episode 7. Sales, inbound, outbound, and all around.

[intro music]

00:11 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:40 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:43 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:44 AW: And this week we are talking sales, but beforehand, let's kinda catch up on the last couple of weeks. We went from a month in between almost our last episodes to now, just a matter of less than two weeks, so that's good that we're getting back to our tighter cycle. But what's new from your side of the Canada border this week?

01:10 DS: Yeah, it feels like I just talked to you. I saw this on my calendar today, and I was like, wow, [chuckle] look at us, talking again so soon. Let's see, what's new in the world of Whitespark and Darren Shaw. Well, we launched a new service, I think I mentioned it in the last podcast, called our Local Search service, which I was so pumped about. And now we're gonna trash that service [chuckle] and make a completely different service. The whole point of this service was, I was excited to build something around Google My Business Management. 

So the whole local search ranking factor survey really pumped a lot of these new features in Google My Business and how these are great ways to drive conversion, this whole concept of Google as your new home page. And so I was really excited, we need a good service for this, and so we built it, and then I, like I always do, kept bolting things onto it, "Well, what if it did this? And it could also do this." And so it just really expanded into a full SEO service, which is Google My Business Management plus your citations, your reviews, your website, even some link recommendations, and now we're not differentiated at all. We're just like another SEO service.

02:22 DS: And so I've decided to strip it back to what its core message was supposed to be. I wanna reposition it as specifically around Google My Business, and that's all we do. So we will find duplicates, fix duplicates, make sure your GMB listing is perfected, and regularly keep it up to date, adding new photos, adding posts, managing your Q&A, helping you with reviews, just that whole concept of Google as your new home page, we're completely focused on that. And we're focused more on conversions from GMB, improving your views and conversions rather than rankings by the whole local search picture. So I think it's a much better pivot, and it will be better for the service and better for scaling it, too. It's just much simpler offering, right?

03:09 AW: Yeah.

03:09 DS: You launch an SEO service and you get a million questions about, "What should I do with schema on my website?" The service becomes so much more complicated, whereas when we scale it back to strictly these things, we can become subject matter experts on that, and it really makes it easier to scale and manage. So I'm excited about it; I think it's gonna be a good move.

03:31 AW: There's so many variables when you get into the full-blown service side of things.

03:36 DS: Yeah, definitely.

03:38 AW: What from how your customers were interacting with it or lack of interaction gave you a signal, this isn't perfect, what do we need to do?

03:45 DS: Yeah, so a lot of questions about rankings like, "How soon will I be ranking?" all that stuff. And every time those questions come in, we're just like... We shake our heads, and we're like, "Oh boy, I don't know, [chuckle] is this the right direction?" And then pricing as well, we didn't get a huge pick-up from it, we definitely got a decent amount of clients that... After we promoted it. But I think it's a bit expensive, people are like, "$399, and it's not a full agency service, why would I choose this over the million other things?" Whereas when I scale it back, it's gonna be at a much nicer price point, plus the "Why would I choose this?" we can answer that so obviously, and so I think it'll be much better that way. So it's simpler, it's a better price, and we don't have to worry about rankings, which I really like.

04:35 AW: I also extract from what you shared with this the local search ranking factors report helped influence a product idea for you, and then you put that... You saw that, hey, this is growing in importance and carrying a lot of weight, and so you put something out for it, and then you realized you went too heavy into it in one side, and now you're scaling back. It's just kind of an interesting cycle for me on where ideas come from, and then how you meet them, and then how do you quickly adjust and pivot if you know it's not the right fit is really interesting.

05:14 DS: Yeah, and so I think we're adjusting and pivoting quick enough. And if you talk to my software development team, they will say that I do this all the time, [chuckle] I get excited about something, and I just keep adding, it's like, "It could do this, and it can also do this, and it's gonna be the ultimate magical, amazing thing," and I make it too big, [chuckle] and I make it too complicated. And so I'm really working on scaling things back to the core offering, what is the core offering, what is the core differentiator, and why would someone pick this specific thing? So really trying to dial in on that.

05:50 AW: I don't think you're alone in that, Darren, we struggle with that, too, with features, a lot of times. I have gotten better at it. I actually will push our product team a lot of times and just say, "What is... In the world of good, better, best, how do we have a better version instead of this immaculate conception of the feature that has everything you'd ever need, and every way to customize it, and all of those pieces that then takes you forever to roll it out, and so many other things that complicate it.

06:23 DS: For sure, and there's a place for that in the industry. If you look at software like Salesforce or HubSpot, these things are massive, and they do try to do everything, and they're very successful, but I think for a smaller industry, you're not gonna go and compete with them, you're better off to try and build something that has a very clear differentiating factor, this is the one thing we do better for this specific use case, and that's what you can sell.

06:48 AW: Yeah. So important.

06:49 DS: Yep, so yeah, well, how about you? What's up with you? You've been traveling for a long time.

06:54 AW: Yeah. I've been living out of a suitcase. I am about ready to at least get a little bit of a reprieve next week. I have a speaking engagement that's just a two-day, two-night away. But I have basically been on planes for six straight weeks, sometimes just for a day trip. Last week it was three different cities over seven days, so it is a lot, it's been really hard to find desk time to get other things accomplished and keep things moving. 

But on the plus side, a couple were speaking events, but then others were face-to-face meetings with customers. One of the things that was really important to me when I took over as CEO was getting out from behind the desk and going to meet some of our great customers in person that we don't have a deep relationship with and trying to make that deeper, and...

07:51 DS: Yep. That's interesting, yeah, that really rolls into sales too, right?

07:56 AW: Yeah, yeah. And it's been really fun to do that, to see how they operate, to give them a peek at our road map and what we have coming up, and just to build rapport and be more of a partner instead of just a business relationship with it. So ...

Darren and Aaron catch-up on the last few months of business. Darren shares a new product and pricing ... and get's some "spicy" feedback on it. 

FULL EPISODE NOTES:

0:00:12.1 Aaron Weiche: Episode 28: Vision and Mission.

0:00:16.0 [INTRO]: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

0:00:44.2 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:48.2 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:49.5 AW: And, Darren, I think from our conversations that we have weekly, you and I, we've both gotten one shot in the arm now, which is nice to report.

0:01:03.6 DS: That is really good to report, yes. I'm just waiting for the second shot and hoping things come back to normal, but a bit apprehensive about things going back to normal, because of variants and whatnot. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, feels good to have some protection that I likely won't die from COVID now.

0:01:26.6 AW: There you go. Yeah, that's pretty much... Once you're fully vaccinated, that's proven to be 100%, your protection, depending upon what you're getting, 50% to 90%, mid 90%, depending upon which shot, what application types. But the fact knowing that it won't take you out is definitely reassuring and that's awesome. And, yeah, I can... I've fully accepted the way things were 16 months ago might never be the case, but...

0:02:06.8 DS: Same.

0:02:07.3 AW: I just... I've come to, like, "Okay, here's how to hedge your bets and to be smart, get vaccinated, all those other things, and... " Yeah, I'm excited to just dip my toe a little bit more into the social world. I'm definitely gonna get on a plane in June, so I'm excited about that. That'll feel awkward.

0:02:32.0 DS: Amazing, wow. What an experience.

0:02:34.0 AW: Both my co-founder and I will be fully vaccinated, so it's like we're long overdue to have a two, three-day jam session in person, melt some white boards and do something more than Slack, Google Meet, Zoom, everything else we've done.

0:02:53.3 DS: I like that, it's a SaaS jam session. Rather than melting faces with guitars, you're gonna melt brains with white boards.

0:03:03.6 AW: Yeah. We're just gonna be so high off of expo markers, it's gonna be wonderful. [chuckle] Other than that, what's new with you?

0:03:17.0 DS: What is new? Let's see. In the world of Whitespark, we did launch our new account system, I think I talked about that in the last podcast, that we were about to launch that. We launched it, and it was generally a pretty great launch. Nice and smooth, team did a great job on that. We have obviously lots of kinks to work out post-launch, as there would be with a whole new billing and account system. With that, we launched our new services packages, which have been very successful, so businesses thriving on a listing service side of things, so that's great. Busy planning the next Whitespark Local Search Summit for 2021, that's coming up right away. We're gonna be having that near the end of September, so we gotta get our speakers lined up, everything pre-recorded, get our sponsors in place, we're working on all that.

0:04:09.0 DS: I've been really busy with these Whitespark weekly videos. I put in a good five to 10 hours every week, making these videos and then getting them published. It's going really well. I think that they're driving business for sure, we definitely feel the uptick. And we're growing our YouTube channel. We're at 1200 subscribers on YouTube or something, so that's been good.

0:04:30.5 AW: That is such a massive undertaking. I would feel that that is so daunting, and you do such a great... I mean, when you tackle these topics, it's not just, "Hey, here's a few things in this direction." You are pretty exhaustive in what you're putting together on these, and great long-form content, blog posts, the videos, I see it all on my social channels. These things are legit and take a whole day out of your week, too.

0:05:03.3 DS: Yeah. They might take me five to 10 hours to build and to actually prepare the deck, prepare my notes, figure out what I wanna do, all the research, record the video, then... I don't know how much time my video editing team spends on it, then I got Jesse working on getting it all up on the blog and doing all the promotional stuff. This is just a ton of work, but I believe in the rewards, particularly believe in the long-term rewards. If you can stay with it consistently week after week, month after month, year after year, you end up hitting this point of... It's like the TSN Turning Point, where all of a sudden now we have 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. And the thing is just a snowball that continues to drive value. So, I'm just gonna keep at it a good two years in. If two years we still don't have more than 1200 subscribers, then I'll totally give up, but I believe in the power of this, particularly long term.

0:06:04.5 AW: We talked outside of our podcast recordings on this, and I think... And it's something you agreed and you're gonna implement, finding more calls to actions within this content. Because it is so great, it's attracting eyeballs, and it's taking it that last mile and giving people a clear next step on how to get a little bit deeper, start using one of your tools, investigate one of your services, but really working not just a traffic tool but a conversion tool as well.

0:06:40.1 DS: I have already started implementing that, yeah. So, that's already... We're going through our content and finding good spots to drop, like little subtle banners. It's not like in-your-face blinking, but it's like, if you're looking for help on this particular aspect, hey, we have this software, we have this service, whatever it is. And so we're definitely integrating that into the content. And again, speaking about long-term value, that content will continue to drive views and people checking it out, and so that's getting our products in front of more people all the time.

0:07:14.7 AW: Now, I feel that's especially important with the amount of time you and even the team is sinking into this, for you to have clear metrics that even go past traffic acquisition. I think you need to see... You can definitely tell, right? You feel there's a relation between putting these out and seeing just spikes in sign-ups and things like that. But you definitely wanna get probably pretty confident in the data that's there when you're gonna peel a quarter of your week off on to one thing, right?

0:07:52.7 DS: For sure. And we have... All the little ad placements we'll put within the content will have GTM tags, and they will track conversions in Google Analytics, so Analytics will be able to see if you can go to the campaign and see actually how much money they generate. We're getting all of that technology connected, making sure that we're tracking it well and pulling it into a dashboard. That is another thing we're working on actually. Within the launch of new accounts, we had everything, all of our subscriptions, in Payflow, which is a PayPal product, and we have since launched on Stripe, which offers a ton of benefits to us. And I didn't realize this, but you can send an email to PayPal and say, "Hey, we've moved to Stripe, can you please send us a dump of all our subscription data?" And then you can... Stripe will import it. We're gonna get everybody off of our legacy payment provider and put them on Stripe, which is phenomenal, so that gives us... Within the next week, we're gonna have everybody on Stripe, which means I can set up their metrics, gonna have excellent reporting. Can't wait.

0:09:01.5 AW: That's awesome. That's a big win, and not having to cycle through users and have them re-add credi...

Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about how they run their sprints and release features in their products.

Helpful links from the episode:

• Whitepark's free Google review link generator tool
• SaaStr Annual conference
• GatherUp GMB integration launch

FULL SHOW NOTES

[music]

00:11 Aaron Weiche: We are back with episode two, Sprints and Features.

00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp, and Darren Shaw of White Spark. Lets go.

[music]

00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, episode two. I'm Aaron.

00:50 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:51 AW: And we are excited to absolutely 100% what we're doing because we're going from one to two episodes, and that’s pretty exciting. I felt good about getting one episode in the books. I don't know how you felt about it.

01:05 DS: Yeah. I think that, okay, one in the books and now we're recording two, that tells me this is a thing. It's happening, we're doing it.

01:12 AW: Everything from here is hockey sticking up, and to the right.

01:17 DS: Yeah, it's amazing. Our growth, from zero to where we've come, has been pretty impressive.

01:22 AW: I've actually had some fun figuring out all these little wrinkles of podcast recording, and getting your feed submitted everywhere, and finding an editor and a voice-over talent, and all that kind of stuff, that was an interesting process to get to learn so much about a new medium. It's been a while since I've had to... It was like learning WordPress all over.

01:44 DS: And you've really done it. I've basically been sitting back and you just tell me when to show up. So, thank you, Aaron, for managing all that stuff.

01:51 AW: Yeah. Well, like I mentioned, that's a personal issue. I need to delegate more and do less, but I love to learn, so it's definitely exciting. But I probably need to hand some of it off to you to get you to feel involved.

02:03 DS: Sometimes you're gonna be busy, and I'll take the reins of organizing everything.

02:08 AW: There you go. So, what have you been up to the last couple of weeks since we talked last? 

02:11 DS: Well, we're trying to get this one tool out the door. We've been building this new tool, which we call Review Checker, and we were so confident. After last Friday, we're like, "We're definitely gonna launch this thing." And then on Monday, we start stress testing it and it's like, "Oh, yeah, oh right, there's this problem." That's the trouble, you always think you're done and then you just have a bunch of people poke at it, and you're like, "Wow, there's still so much more that we need to do before this thing is ready for prime time." 

That's been taking up all of our time, and I'm really excited about it. I think it's gonna be a great project. I think it's going to be a nice little tool that will bring lead gen into White Spark stuff. We have built that review link generator. Do you know that, on our website? 

02:54 AW: Yep.

02:54 DS: That thing gets so many mentions and tweets and links to it. It's a really great tool that drives a lot of attention to Whitespark, and so this will be something kind of similar.

03:05 AW: Now, do you guys have a formalized process as you're getting ready to release a feature or a new little tool like this that you follow very closely, or is it just like every day, see where you're at, see if it's done, next step kind of deal? 

03:20 DS: It's the latter. It's like we're always just picking away at it. So, it's Dmitri will finish the last round of edits, a request that I made of how I want it to look, and then I'll take a look at it or Jesse will take a look at it. It's basically been Jesse and I testing the tool out and writing up a list of things that we want different. And then he'll finish that round, and then we do it again and take another pass at it and think about it some more. So, it's been growing like that over the last little while. And then we had a bunch of our team members take a look at it and we found some problems. The biggest problem... First, I'll explain how the tool works. Basically, it just scans your business name. It'll search Google, it'll find any sites that have review schema with little stars that show up in Google search results, and then it will track that and give you a report, saying, "Hey, you have this many reviews on Google, and this is your rating. You have this many on Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, etcetera." So, it just gives you this nice little report of how many reviews you have.

04:23 DS: And so if you were an agency on a budget, or a small business, and you just wanna keep track of this, you could just come back to the tool once a month or once a week, and run it and get a little report back, and you can say, "Okay, this is how our reviews are going." It's this free little once-off, check your reviews tool. In terms of the development, yeah, it's basically just been that we keep plugging away at it. And one of the problems that we're finding is, let's say you put in a really generic name, well, Google returns a whole bunch of stuff that's actually not your business. It's someone else's business, it's some weird business. So, if your name is really generic, you can get a whole bunch of what we are calling false positives in the tool, so we're trying to figure out a way to fix that before we launch it.

05:02 AW: Nice. How far into the results does it go? Is it mostly looking at page directories that would rank page one, or does it go further than that? What does that look like? 

05:10 DS: Yeah, we do the first two pages.

05:13 AW: All right. So, you're looking at, what, page one, and then page two, where the SEO joke is. That's the best place to hide a dead body, is page two of Google search results.

05:21 DS: Exactly. And we run about 10 different searches, and then we combine all the results, so we do a whole bunch of variations to try and find everything we could.

05:29 AW: Yeah, awesome. You're looking at this as more of a marketing and lead gen tool, at the same time you're building it out? Are other people on the team taking care of the marketing pieces, and how you're gonna promote it? 

05:41 DS: Well, promoting is pretty simple. We don't have a huge promotion plan. Basically it's a free tool, so it's this new little free tool. We're going to tweet about it, obviously, put it on our social stuff, we'll put it in our newsletter, and that will mostly be the extent of it. And we think, generally, my experience is, if you launch a free tool that is cool and useful, the marketing does itself. People will just share it because it's free, it's like, "Oh, this is a great new free tool." And we might do a little poking around people that talk about free tools and have free SEO tools. We'll make sure we get listed on those, so just a little prospecting and outreach fo...

I take a look back at 2023 for Leadferno and share some of our numbers. We doubled our MRR over 2023, but I still feel we left a lot on the table. I also cover getting to meet with my co-founder Joel Headley in person last week to plan our 2024 and how much he matters to our business. Lastly we are giving the Leadferno website a big refresh for the first time since launching.

Links from this episode:

• Whitespark Local Search Summit
• Summit Beast
• Pricing expert Patrick Campbell on Twitter and his company ProfitWell
   

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 22, SaaS pricing. Is the price right?

00:16 [INTRO]: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

00:41 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:44 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:45 AW: And I think summer has just about set for me as we are in the last week of August here, and soon enough, hopefully, we'll be enjoying long weeks of Minnesota falls and then the inevitable winter abyss, but...

01:04 DS: Yeah.

01:05 AW: So so far, I've been doing a pretty good job this summer on spending my weekends up at the family cabin, and out in the boat with the kids, and on the water and things like that, which has made my July and August feel really great, much different than how like March, April and May felt. And how has that been for you, Darren, since... We haven't really talked in well over a month on the podcast anyway.

01:30 DS: Yeah, it's been a while. The summer's been nice, we've been trying hard to get our backyard all nicely set up, so we got things like a new swing, and we got a hammock. We just recently invested in a nice projector and a screen, so we can do backyard movie night, and so...

01:46 AW: I saw that.

01:47 DS: Yeah, we're trying to take advantage of the summer, and because this particular summer is the summer of COVID, we're mostly staying home. We're not going anywhere and so we're trying to make the most of our backyard, and enjoy being outside because we have such a short period here in Edmonton. It's getting cold, I'm wearing a sweatshirt right now. It gets cold the end of August. September is our only month of fall, we start seeing snow in October, so yeah. We've tried to cram it in, as much as we could.

02:19 AW: No, we're not there yet. I do... Fall's my favorite season, but we've still been doing 85-90 degree days last couple or so.

02:27 DS: Yeah, yeah it's getting cold here already.

02:30 AW: No, no good. Well, I know you have been extremely busy, Whitespark is putting on a local search Summit with 30 speakers?

02:41 DS: Thirty-three or 34 in total. So yeah, basically, if you are a somewhat known local search speaker or writer, like you kind of write about local search, you're mostly speaking at our... You're pretty much gonna be speaking at our conference. So I'm so excited about that, we have a huge lineup and yeah, it's been busier than ever trying to get all of these talks recorded, so the whole thing's gonna be pre-recorded, so I've been really busy with that. I'm also super busy trying to set up the local search ranking factor survey for 2020. That's getting put together right now. Aaron, you should get an email in your inbox this afternoon with an invite to take the survey, that's what my talk is gonna be on so I've been busy trying to put that together. And also another thing is, we have three different, sort of mini product launches that we're trying to time with the Summit, so...

03:37 AW: Oh. Wow.

03:38 DS: Dev is busy and yeah, it's been busy as hell.

03:41 AW: Yeah, what would you say, what's your weekly time commitment to the Summit so far?

03:47 DS: Yeah, over the last couple of months, it's probably been 20 hours, 20 hours a week for the last eight weeks-ish.

03:54 AW: Wow. Yeah, a considerable...

03:56 DS: But I would say the return on investment is going to be huge 'cause it's already big, we are already feeling it and it's because we're doing the marketing for the Summit, and so that ends up generating a ton of buzz. All the speakers are talking about it, everyone's sharing it, everyone is seeing the Whitespark brand everywhere, and so our business is better than ever right now, and we're seeing really good growth right now. And I think it's just gonna continue to grow up until this sort of pinnacle of the conference, and then we'll have a really good drop off from that, but then it's evergreen content, we're gonna keep using it. We'll do it again next year, and then we have like a year's worth of content we'll be pulling out for more marketing, so I think it's gonna be kind of nuts. I really think this is gonna be a great Whitespark.

04:43 AW: That's awesome. And I think that's a great little marketing tidbit in there, even... You can look and see right, the event itself, the day it's carried out and you play all the presentation over those days, that's the marketing and that's the buzz, but just as you alluded to, it's like it's all of the pre-marketing with it right, where you guys are... It gives you a ton to post about socially on Twitter, I know you guys have been using LinkedIn and seeing great traction at LinkedIn, and then you have 30 plus speakers that they're all putting it out on their channels, there's some really great ripple and carry effect on this, and you're still a couple of weeks away from the event itself.

05:27 DS: It's just kind of amazing, and I'm gonna have to give a shout-out to Summit Beast. We've been working with this company called Summit Beast, run by Matthew Hunt and Edyta McKindsey. And they've been really instrumental in helping us put this together in terms of getting organized, what we need to do, helping us develop our ads, our sponsorship packages, our outreach, everything, it's... They've been really great to work with. So if this is something you're thinking about, I couldn't recommend them more. They're awesome.

06:00 AW: Yeah, well, I think I heard through the grapevine that Traject, who is our kind of group of products for GatherUp is likely gonna be a sponsor.

06:12 DS: It's gonna be great. Yeah, I had a talk with Katelyn about that, and we're looking at a sponsorship program with them. That's actually another marketing vehicle too, because these sponsorship packages, they end up getting the Whitespark brand in front of their audience too, right. And so... And then what we're doing is any sponsorship dollars we get, we funnel right back into advertising for the Summit 'cause our goal is to get as many attendees as possible, so it's not a money-making venture in its own right, we don't care to make cash from the event, but it's the brand building and authority we'll build through doing it.

06:51 AW: Well, make sure you take detailed notes on some of this stuff 'cause I think this would make a great topic of conversation after everything wraps up when you're able to do a post-mortem on it. Kind of break down all of those things and to see like, "All right, what did the 30 or 60 days after the event look like as well as pre, for how it impacted our marketing and sales and things like that. I think there's a lot there.

07:17 DS: Totally will do. What's going on with you these days?

07:20 AW: Probably, if anything, right now, just kind of sitting in this holding pattern 'cause the kids start school the second week of September, and my two oldest ones are in the high school, so they're on what's called a hybrid, so they'll be in school two days a week, and then they alternate an additional Friday every other week, and then the other days they distance learn. And then my third daughter, ...

FULL SHOW NOTES

[INTRO music]

0:00:12.2 Aaron Weiche: Episode 26, A Big Change.

0:00:16.0 S?: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

0:00:44.6 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, and welcome to 2021. I'm Aaron.

0:00:50.3 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:51.6 AW: And Darren did you know that 99% of the time for lunch, I eat a turkey, pepper jack cheese, mayo and avocado sandwich?

0:01:05.9 DS: For how long, is this for the past seven years, you've been eating this for lunch every day? [chuckle]

0:01:11.4 AW: I would definitely say the percentage has kicked up highly during COVID, so the last year now, but yeah, just because I'm home just about every single day that's kinda... If I'm home, that's the sandwich I'm making. And my kids just laugh at me, they ridicule me about just how basic, boring and the same I am.

0:01:39.1 DS: Oh, that's funny 'cause I'm exactly the same. This is a life hack, Aaron, it's like you're reducing your decision fatigue, you don't have to think about what you're gonna eat for lunch, you just know what you're gonna eat and you just go and make it, and it's one less decision to weigh on your brain. It's like the Steve Jobs thing, he just wears the same thing every day, he gets up, puts on his outfit. [chuckle] So yeah, it's a smart... The smart move.

0:02:02.6 AW: Right. I'm gonna choose to look at it as an optimization then. I just got done eating lunch before this, that's why it was on my mind now is just like, I make the sandwich, I have a basically... What do they call it? I think they call it a sandwich cut or a deli cut pickle. So it's not a dill pickle spear, it's like the flat slice but ridged, so it's got some texture to it so...

0:02:28.9 DS: Okay, good.

0:02:29.7 AW: Every day.

0:02:30.0 DS: So that's what we're talking about today, just we're talking about sandwiches [laughter] on the podcast.

0:02:34.2 AW: Totally, I love sandwiches. Someone tweeted this week talking about that they forgot to exclude mayo on a sandwich that they ordered from Jimmy John's, the sandwich franchise. And I was like, "No, it's not a sandwich without mayo, that is the ingredient, that's like sandwich glue. You need that, without it, it's just bread with stuff like." [chuckle]

0:03:00.6 DS: I used to love when I was a kid... This is really weird. [chuckle] When I was like, I don't know, between the ages of 10 and 13, I used to love to eat... This is the weirdest sandwich, it was just two pieces of bread, mayonnaise and jam. [chuckle] It was just this disgusting sandwich that I ate all the time when I was a kid, really weird.

0:03:21.9 AW: Wow, yeah, the mayo and jam combination that definitely... I was waiting for peanut butter, bananas, there's definitely some variations. I don't think I've ever heard jam and mayo. [chuckle]

0:03:34.1 DS: And mayonnaise, I don't... I was just on a jam and mayo sandwich kick for a while.

0:03:39.6 AW: Oh my gosh, for me at that age, it was like peanut butter and jelly and nacho Doritos. I think that was my lunch, especially during the summer at home as a kid, I made that every day.

0:03:52.5 DS: Well hey, you and I, our next SaaS product is gonna be sandwich related.

0:03:56.5 AW: Oh, this is brilliant. I would love a company that was named after a sandwich or something like that, I'm all in, so.

0:04:03.8 DS: Alright.

0:04:07.1 AW: Right, well hey, let's catch up on some other things besides our sandwich habits and our sandwich secrets. I hope our listeners feel really good about what we bring to the table...

0:04:18.4 DS: They've all stopped listening at this point, I think.

0:04:22.9 AW: This is what you got for 2021, sandwiches? [laughter] Anyway, catch us up on how the year started for you, Darren.

0:04:31.6 DS: Alright, it's been a good start. We kinda went out with a bang at the end of 2020. We had a big launch of our Rank Tracker, and it was, I guess, probably in June, we launched our updated local citation finder and man, we've just been on a roll, it continues to grow. We were going through some declines on our subscriptions for a while, and that trend has been completely reversed and yeah, every week numbers keep going up, so it's been great on the software side of things.

Great on the service side of things too, I've just been so busy doing marketing and lots of presentations because of the local search ranking factors, which I officially released at the end of the year, so just been doing tons of webinars and podcasts and presentations around that. So that's been... It's been good and it's been driving business for sure.

0:05:24.5 AW: That's awesome.

0:05:25.8 DS: Yeah, so yeah, it's been good. Got lots of stuff coming up in 2021 as well. It was a good end to 2020, a good start to 2021. And man, we have so much in the pipeline about to launch for in the next month or two, and I think it's just gonna be a great year. Yeah, it's looking good. Lots of optimism.

0:05:50.3 AW: Yeah, that's a really great feeling. One thing, you and I, we did a non-recorded call, just catching up and seeing how things were, and one thing that obviously really stood out to me just 'cause we'd had many other conversations about it, but you were commenting on your engineering team has really found its sweet spot in efficiency and what they're kicking out. And that was great to hear just because prior months we had had talks, it felt like things were... Something was missing structurally or process, or even possibly people, and you were working hard to get your finger on it and change some things up, and it sounds like that's worked.

0:06:32.3 DS: It worked really well. So step one for me was getting myself personally tuned into it, because the software team is busy doing stuff all the time, but I wasn't really hooked in, and I didn't know what they were doing, and so as the founder I just always had these lingering doubts. I'm like, "Are they doing anything?" I'm like, "Why is this taking so long?" But I wasn't really involved enough to know how things were progressing. So I started a daily stand-up. So we now do a daily stand-up. It takes about 10-15 minutes and everyone just kinda outlines what they do.

We're recording all of this in Confluence, which is Atlassian, same company that makes Jira. So record that every day, and it's just so... That immediately dissipated any doubts I had. It was just like, okay, cool, I'm now in this. I'm involved. I know what's happening. It was really helpful for me, personally, to be able to see what was happening, and I think it was helpful for the team too, because it just sets the day every day. Every morning, we set up, like, "This is what we're doing. This is what I did yesterday, these are things we're doing today."

0:07:38.6 DS: And then at the end of the year we did annual reviews for all of our staff, and I promoted one of our developers to a team lead position. So that's been really helpful too, because I'm not the best person to be the team lead, and I was kind of the go-to person for all software team-related decisions, and I was a bit of a blocker in a lot of stuff. And so putting Troy into our team lead position has been really helpful too, and so now we've got processes in place and we got the daily stand-ups, and then we ended up hiring two more people too.

So we've got one more full-time guy, and we have a part-time student developer, and it's just like, "Wow, it's all... " All systems are firing, and the dev team is building stuff faster than I can review it. It's like I got...

Leadferno is my 2nd time around the block in SaaS. While I wasn’t a founder the 1st time, I came on as a partner to lead sales and marketing a year in. I ultimately became CEO and then led GatherUp to an 8 figure acquisition 6 years later.  So I think that qualifies as a first trip combined with cofounding and leading multiple digital agencies for over 15 years. I saw the early decisions, made some of them, and had ones I wish I could “re do”.

This episode, part one of two, is a look at core decisions I made solo, or with my cofounder, that we didn’t get right for Leadferno. My experience makes me feel like I should have gotten more of these right. They are all costly in different ways. Some will still work themselves out or have had additional moves made to lessen their impact, while others led to additional bad decisions. That's just how it works.

This wasn’t my first rodeo, but I still got bucked a few different ways. Hopefully sharing these might help you lower your list of "wrongs" … first time, second time, or whatever time founding your SaaS company you're on.

Helpful links from the episode:

• Zoom
• Pipedrive
• Copper
• Typeform

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[intro music]

00:02 Aaron Weiche: Episode 13: Running a Great Sales Demo.

00:06 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:32 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:36 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:37 AW: And this week, we are gonna dive into what goes in to running a great sales demo. How do you demo your SaaS product and break down a number of aspects regarding that. A very important piece really, I view it as kind of the absolute cornerstone and the biggest value prop within the sales process. And we'll break that down but first, Darren, let's play a little bit of catchup. What have you been up to lately? 

01:08 DS: What have I been up to? Well, lately, I've done a couple auto dealer conferences, I had one in beautiful Banff, Alberta so right in the Rocky Mountains there. That was fantastic.

01:19 AW: That place, I have not physically been there but every time I have a friend go there, and they post their photos to Facebook, I'm like, "That place cannot be real."

01:27 DS: It's insane, it's so beautiful and it is like... The conference was held at the Banff Springs Hotel, which is basically this amazing castle in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. It's so beautiful. So yeah, it was wonderful, I brought the family, we drove down and spent a few days there, the conference was easy, I spoke to a bunch of auto dealers about getting the most out of Google My Business, and it's been nice 'cause I have this run. So I did the one in Banff and I just got back from Montreal, also a fantastic Canadian city. I did another auto dealer conference in Montreal for a brand called Kijiji. They have this thing, Kijiji Autos. And then I go tomorrow to fly to Vegas for DrivingSales Executive Summit, which is another auto dealer conference. I'm now officially the new Greg Gifford of local search.

[laughter]

02:25 AW: And Vegas, Vegas baby! 

02:27 DS: Yeah, that's right. All I'm doing is auto dealer conferences, it's just been like this string of three in a row, but it's nice 'cause then you can use the same deck, right? So that's fantastic.

02:36 AW: Yeah. Well, when we go to promote this podcast, I'm definitely gonna put out a tweet that says there's a new Greg Gifford of the auto industry, and that will quickly catch his attention. That's awesome.

02:45 DS: Definitely. Yeah. So I've been dealing with that and that's over and I'll have a lot of free time not doing any more conference speaking probably until January, February, so that'll be nice to have this really good break where I can just be in the office focused on the business. We're building an API for our rank tracking software so a lot of people wanna just pull that data into their own systems or into Google Data Studio, so we're working on that. That should be done right away here, where we're putting the finishing touches. 

We are also working on a revision of our Local Citation Finder software, it hasn't been updated in a long time. We've had new designs, actually a whole new system built on staging. It's been sitting for months while the team has been distracted with other things. And so once this API is out the door, we're shifting to get that thing done. So I'm excited about launching that.

03:41 DS: Another thing that we've been really working on is some customer service things. We've been reviewing our template reports. So if someone asks about this or that, we have these like, "Oh, well, here's some information on that," and then we often end it with like, "Well, please let us know if you have any more questions." And it's like, we really need to do a better job of being like, "When can I set up a demo?" That's a good question. "Can we jump on a call next week?" Being more proactive with encouraging that next step with a customer 'cause so many of our customer support requests that are coming in are actually sales leads, these are people that are like, "I'm interested in that service or product you have, I want some more information on pricing, or whatever." They give them the information, they're like, "High five. Good luck to you. Hopefully one day you become our customer." Rather than hoping for it, we're working on our language and especially how we're closing all those emails to move it to the next stage of the sales process. So I'm excited about that, too.

04:46 AW: Yeah, that singular question is actually just a buying signal that you need to capitalize on that like, "Yeah, here's the answer for that, but let's jump on a demo and take a look at things as a whole, as well as dive into your specific question."

05:00 DS: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. How about you? What's up? 

05:02 AW: Oh, man, I have been wearing out runways around the country. I'm on the end of seven different conferences in six weeks. So yeah, between all those. I just got home yesterday from Philly. I was at a client's conference where I gave three talks in one day there, that was at least nice and concise, and I was only gone from home three days this week. Next week, I'm gone all week, Monday through Friday with three more talks. 

It's one of those, it's like when I said yes to these, it's like one asked me in January, so I said yes to it in September, and then one asked me in March and so I said yes to it, and then a couple other things, a client travel sprinkles in and then a new conference pops in, it's like, "Oh, that'd be really great exposure." I have over-committed massively and I'm not gonna do this again, I've survived it and there's been a number of great things that come out of it, but when you are spending so much time creating different decks and customizing them and all those things, just way too much at once, I really made it hard on myself.

06:13 DS: Yeah, wow, that's a busy schedule. Packed it on. And then it's tough to manage all of the other stuff that's coming up in the business when you're traveling so much. I was like...

06:22 AW: Yep.

06:22 DS: I was feeling stressed for the last week just because like, "Ahh." You wanna be at the conference and talking to people, but your emails are piling up at the same time. You got all these employees that have questions for you and customers that have questions, so yeah, there's just a lot to deal with.

06:37 AW: Well, and the life balance with it, too. It's like, I have four kids, and so, I'm gone Monday through Friday. My wife, that's the real CEO in my house. She's getting everyone to their sports, all kinds of other things, whatever else. And then, when I'm getting home on the weekend, I'm so behind that I'm going into the office for full days on Saturday and Sunday, if not more. And so, I'm not getting quality times with the kids, I'm not helping my wife out. Yeah, so it's just one of those... Luckily, we have a couple of family getaways that I've promised I will be offline, I will be trying to make up... Let my kids remember they have a dad, and get caught up in that side of life. But it's a lot to balance, and I really... I gotta learn to say no. It's great to have those opportunities and to take advantage of them, but I do need to balance it out.

07:28 DS: So, are you working from home at all? Or are you mostly are in the office? 

07:32 AW: I have an office that's all of 5 mi...

Full show notes coming soon ... 

Helpful links from the episode:

• Alpine Software Group
• Steve Kozachok, Attorney and Partner at Taft
• Lost and Founder, book from Rand Fishkin

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[INTRO music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 17, Selling GatherUp - part two, the process.

00:16 [INTRO]: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go! 

[music]

00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:47 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:48 AW: And we are diving into part two of our three-part series on the acquisition of GatherUp from the end of 2019. If you haven't had the chance, part one of the series is the why, laying out things within the decision process, how to, things to consider and think about prepping your company to sell, just a number of aspects with this and today we're kind of hoping to transition into some more of the process items and small things, and being able to share just even how some of those things felt at the time. So looking forward to that but before we dive into that, Darren, it's been a few weeks since we've talked. What's new with Whitespark? 

01:30 DS: What's new? Let's see, it's not really too much new. We just keep forging ahead with a lot of our product developments. Man, we have so many things that are so close right now, I'm just really excited about these launches that are upcoming, brand new local citation finder, a whole new account system. These are just on the cusp of being launched and it's funny because we have this local citation finder and it's been quite neglected for years as we build other things in the company. And it's truly... We get 300 free users signing up for that every week.

02:04 AW: Nice.

02:04 DS: And a lot of those are converting, but it's amazing to me that they're converting to the existing product because it's old, it's outdated, the data's not great, but and so, I look at that and I think I can't wait to launch the new one. And I think when we launch the new one, our churn rate will plummet. Our sign-up rate will drastically increase. I think it's gonna be huge for the company. So yeah, got lots of things on the go right now, busy with that, I don't have any trips planned until June. So yeah, I'm gonna see you in Minneapolis in June, that'll be good.

02:37 AW: Yeah. Minnesota search will have a great time as always, have a few beers.

02:41 DS: Yep, looking forward to it.

02:42 AW: Maybe come up with another crazy idea to start a podcast or something.

02:46 DS: Yeah, we'll start a different podcast.

[laughter]

02:50 AW: That's awesome. And I know the feeling with where you're at when your right on the cusp of launching things that was me towards the end of December and then January whereas we had three, four features that were kinda log jam together and then they were starting to shake loose. And then really we just had to start mapping out like, okay, what's our cadence of releasing one of them kind of every two weeks so that we have the right marketing message. And the team could focus on launching it the right way and landing the right way, and then calm the waters and then cycle back to the next one. 

We've been in that sequence here from mid-January and it'll keep going through the end of this month, so it's so fun when you have features coming out that you know will make an impact in getting to put them out there.

03:37 DS: It's a funny thing that I'm trying to get better at but I have this tendency like once we start building something, I just wanna keep adding stuff to it. I'm like, "Oh, we could do this, and we could do this, and we could do that," and then the project scope just keeps creeping and we never launch the damn thing. [chuckle] So I'm trying to get to this part where like, "Shut up," it's like, "Okay, Darren, you got ideas, you put them on the phase two list and we're gonna get this core functionality released." And then the beauty is you've got multiple releases and you got multiple opportunities to push more marketing and more just promoting of the product every time. 

So if I just kept working on it, then we'd have one big massive release or we do the basic release and then five other releases after that as we keep adding all these extra functions that I wanna build.

04:24 AW: I've actually gotten a lot better at that in the last year. I used to be very similar to what you're describing where it's like, "And one more thing, and one more thing, and one more thing." And now, I've done a much better job of saying like, "No, this is gonna be the V1 of this. Here's the dates we need to hit and then we will look at fast follow items or V2 items," things like that. And if anything I've found myself saying no to some of the things that the team is like, we should do this or consider this or whatever else. And it's been a strange reversal 'cause I used to be the one where they are just... I could see their eye, I could feel their eyes rolling when I was like, "Hey, I got one more thing we need to squeeze in here in the next few days."

05:10 DS: Yep, totally. Yeah, we implemented a new process in our development on our dev team. So it's like a Monday planning call and a Friday retrospective call and we try to keep them short and it's just like on Monday, it's like, "Okay, you guys, what are you doing?" We have our ClickUp boards where we look at all the potential tasks we could do, and they just, they pick the ones that are doable within that week. 

Then on the end of the week, we look at it and we're like, "Did you get it done? If you didn't, what went wrong? Where were some of the challenges?" And sometimes they get more things done, and they squeeze it in. But this weekly really focused, "This is the goal for the week." I'm trying to block out everything else. It's like if something else comes up, it's like, "Put it on the list. We'll look at it next week." And so we're really trying to keep the team focused on the core goals and the core milestones and it's been helpful.

06:03 AW: Yeah, awesome, good for you, keep it up. The discipline and prioritization and saying no is so powerful.

06:11 DS: Yep, anything you just go on the list and we'll get to it one day, but right now, this is what we're focused on.

06:16 AW: The ever-expanding list. That's something we can talk about some time.

06:20 DS: Yep, totally. How's everything going with you? How's everything at GatherUp post-sale? It's all going great and continue to grow the business. You just had a huge feature released. The social sharing stuff looks awesome.

06:33 AW: Yeah, super excited about that. We started that feature late last September. It was one of those where made a call. We had it slated later but with the drop of schema stars in search results from the review widget, we really felt like we wanted to get a marketing feature back out there that was a visible and tangible, got people excited. So social sharing was probably more slated to start work right about now but instead, we push that ahead of some other things. 

It's a great feature, basically gives you one more way to use your reviews and that we created a feature so it would turn your review into a visual image that you can then share on social media channels. And it's fun to have... I'm kind of putting together a post where what we're really saying is a review just ...

2023 is off to a fast start. Aaron and Darren catch up on what's happened to start the new year. New features, growth, marketing, demo challenges, and more.

FULL SHOW NOTES

[INTRO music]

0:00:11.4 Aaron Weiche: Episode 31, SaaS is a marathon, not a sprint.

0:00:16.2 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno, and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

0:00:42.2 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:45.4 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:47.0 AW: And if SaaS was a sprint, I would just already be collapsed at the finish line. And I probably wouldn't have finished first in my heat anyway Darren just...

0:00:58.4 DS: Yeah, me too.

[laughter]

0:01:00.6 AW: COVID has taken its toll on my physical well-being. I need to keep working on getting that back under control, so... How have you been?

0:01:10.9 DS: Oh, I've been so busy. I've been...

0:01:14.6 AW: Yes you have.

0:01:15.4 DS: It's... The last few days have been nice 'cause I'm like, "Oh, just got so much free time now." But the summit, yeah, so we put on another local search summit, 30 speakers, three days, Holly, that is an endeavor. It's a lot of work to put on a virtual conference like that. And so it was all-consuming for the last couple of months, for sure. And all consuming for Jessie Low our marketing manager for the past six to eight months, for sure. And it was very successful. So I thought it was great. We had 3000 registered attendees. Lots of fantastic feedback. I think we did an even better job this year than we did last year, incredible speakers, an incredible talk. So I thought it was great. We came out profitable in the end. So, we're happy to break even because it's more of a marketing play than a money-making thing.

0:02:13.2 DS: And a brand exercise, and we're really just trying to build our brand with the summit. And so we definitely got that and we didn't lose money on it. So there was some profit in the end so that was good. We're all a success. I have a post-mortem call scheduled with Jessie this afternoon and Sydney to discuss what went well, what didn't go well, and what changes we'd make for next year. That's what's going on with me. That's it.

0:02:40.8 AW: Yeah, no, and I totally get... And you and I were texting a little bit last week during it, and even inside of those three days you had highs and lows, right?

0:02:51.6 DS: Oh man, it's the roller coaster of emotion. It's just like, yeah, I felt kind of low on the second day. I was like, "Oh, why are we doing this? My life is a failure."

[laughter]

0:03:05.7 DS: And then like day three, at the end of it, I just felt like just so elated with how well it went. That's just the life of a founder.

0:03:15.0 AW: Yep, no. Same roller coaster as being a founder, right. I probably should have just taken a screenshot where one of your text was like the low, like, "Oh I'm second guessing everything." And then a couple of texts later was the next day and you're like, "Everything is awesome."

[laughter]

0:03:34.1 DS: Totally. Yeah, that's how I felt about the summit. Now I've kinda settled somewhere in the middle. Just trying to evaluate it logically and think about like, alright, is this a valuable thing for us to do and do we wanna invest so much effort into it next year?

0:03:48.6 AW: Well, one thing that I definitely noticed from the sales side of me is you put in a lot more calls to action for your products and services and things like that, and the breaks and slides and different things like that. Do you have zero visibility... Right, we're on the couple of work days outside of the event ending, do you have any visibility to... If that's made an impact or will it be something that you'll let run a little bit and then evaluate?

0:04:23.0 DS: Yeah, we've had a couple of really big days since the summit. And so I do think like I could tell just straight up finances being like, "Well, that was a good day." And then a couple days later, "Well, that's another good day." And so seeing that and noticing how close that was to the close of the summit feels definitely like there is a direct business boost. More sign-ups that kind of stuff. And so I wanna give it a bit more time because a lot of people don't take immediate action.

They're like, "Oh, I saw the summit, I learned about this thing at Whitespark summit." And a week or two, or three or four later, they finally get around to signing up for the thing or trying our software. And so I'm gonna give it a month and then I wanna do a comparison of our accounts, like new accounts and new sign-ups from that period... From the last period and cross-reference it with attendees at the summit and then we'll see. Yeah.

0:05:21.1 AW: Awesome. Well, I can only think or feel that it will be stronger than other things you've done just because I have either been a part or have watched other things that you've done all the way from your weekly videos to things like that. And this by far in a way was your most sophisticated or visual call to actions with what Whitespark offers and does. So I think that's a really good step forward, as you and I have discussed in some of our conversations like, "Man, you crush at education, you crush it, putting stuff out there." You have a lot of opportunity in the trade. I'll give you all these great things. Please just listen to how our tools and services can support you in some of these things that you're doing. And just being a little more firm in asking them to do a free trial or to look into your services and tools. I felt like you really... I was looking at that and part of me was like, "Oh, this is good. This is good, do those things Darren." So good job.

0:06:30.5 DS: Yeah, calls to action. You gotta call them to action, if you want them to take action, you should give them a call.

0:06:36.3 AW: Yes, it's great, it's great to be top of mind because of all the goodwill and how you've positioned yourself as an expert... Yeah, those things are totally great. And so in six months, if they have a customer that needs something specific that folds into that. Yes, you will likely be top of mind because of how you've established yourself. But there's a lot of people that you can get to take a next step, while they're also feeling that euphoria and feeling like, "Oh, I'm learning new things, it's time to do new things, it's time to change a tool I'm using or to start using something like this, and now I have trust and I have excitement and I wanna do it right now." So just make that road really... Or that bridge really easy for them to cross.

0:07:19.4 DS: Totally. Well, you're a master at all of that, so I always appreciate your advice and yeah, I agree that that's a key thing that I'm really trying to get better at, and I appreciate you pushing me on some of that.

0:07:32.3 AW: Yeah, well, like I said, if you look at the world of like, you can only get what you give, you give. So I totally think you asking for a little get, that's no problem at all. And speaking of that, you had to compile and put out the local search ranking factors report as well, which is a massive undertaking.

0:07:56.1 DS: That... Yeah, so that was a big part of what consumed me leading up to the conference, 'cause not only did I have to deal with some organization. Jessie, of course, took care of most of it. But it was really just compiling the data and analyzing the data and putting my own presentation together. That was a ton of work for sure, and so now that that's off my back, I just feel very light right now, but I do have to get around to writing up my findings into a blog post and get it published.

0:08:26.3 AW: Yeah. When do you exhale harder? When you log off the summit on the last day? Or when you wake up the...

Full episode show notes:

[INTRO music]

00:13 Aaron Weiche: Episode 21, Frameworks.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, I'm Aaron.

00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:46 AW: And I am currently living summer to its fullest the last few weeks. How about you?

00:55 DS: I wouldn't call it to the fullest. [chuckle] I'm living summer to the "halfest". I'm doing some summary things, but I feel like I need to get out more. We're a little apprehensive about going out, spending enough time outside. We should get out more. More walks, more bike rides.

01:10 AW: There you go, I think it's a good idea. In regards to COVID, I would say that the easiest way I surmise our family and definitely having kids with high school activities and sports and those things are like on their own trajectory, but we've moved from isolation to limitation. And a lot of it's just limiting like what are bad ideas? Going to a bar, for me, I'd rather not go get a haircut, I'm lucky Marcy's been cutting my hair. I'm in no hurry to jump on a plane. I'm not going to the health club. I'm doing long walks just about every day, but no weights or strength training or any of that but yeah, just trying to get back to as much as normal. If I'm in a store, I'm in a mask, just that kind of stuff, just trying to be as smart as possible and distancing and preventative things without... Yeah, the bunker life in a family of six and when you have a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old, it just won't work.

02:10 DS: I can imagine, yeah. Yeah, it's not that dissimilar from what we're doing, so pretty much every night after dinner, I get outside with Violet, and we'll go for a walk or bike ride and Jill comes for most of those, too, so we're doing that, we're getting out and just sort of going outside when the weather is decent. Yeah, and definitely, mostly not going into any stores. If I did have to I would bring a mask. But for the most part, I haven't been to a store in over a month 'cause we get everything delivered. Our groceries are all delivered or curbside pickup and so it's been really easy that way.

02:42 AW: It's an interesting thing when you're out, and when you're wearing a mask, and just the human energy between those wearing masks, those not wearing masks, just all... You see the collision in people's eyes of political views and personal views and their rights and oh, so many things, I don't know.

02:58 DS: My freedom?

03:00 AW: Yes, it's quite an interesting thing.

03:02 DS: Yeah, totally. I follow this group on Nextdoor for our neighborhood and wow, some of the posts over there are really blowing up with the two sides clashing, people talking about their freedoms to not wear masks, and people trying to educate them on the benefits of masks. But man, there's that one group that can't get their head around the mask only being for them, and they don't see the benefit of it from the other perspective, which is you wear the mask to protect others. And it's faced with all of the information being presented to them, they still can't wrap their head around that. It seems to me. There's probably lots of people like that.

03:36 AW: Yeah, it's tricky folks. Definitely, I don't know, I don't know if it's pride. If it's vanity, I don't know if it truly is freedom or just being told what to do, or the fact that there's just so many people not willing to believe anything from any source at any time, right. The... I don't know, I can't handle all the conspiracy theories, what a hole to go down these days right.

03:57 DS: Oh my God, yeah, I know, I haven't really gone down the holes, but I've seen glimpses of them and I'm like, Wow.

[laughter]

04:04 AW: Who knows?

04:05 DS: Some things they're thinking, yeah.

04:06 AW: Yes, you'll never get out if you go in. So I think what you're doing is why it's just kind of walk around the edge and find a new path.

04:13 DS: Yeah, totally, totally. How are things going at Gather Up these days, what's going on?

04:18 AW: Good. I think the easiest way to state it is just stability, things have become more stable from what's gone on as we've talked. We've had over a month since our last episode and things have really stabilized. The things that you see more than anything is, one, for me personally, like new sales are just slow and I'm mostly dealing with larger multi-location all the way up to enterprise-type deals, and really more than anything, it's like taking on something new, implementing a new tool and building process, or some companies would call change management. That's the obstacle right now. More so than spending budgets. And when you look, it's really easy to understand, it was the same for our business, especially the first eight to 10 weeks of COVID and what was taking place, it was like every minute was filled with a special meeting or a task force, or talking about how things were trending, what numbers churn, paused billing.

So you can understand that inside of these other businesses that not only have that, but then have entered a reopening phase and changing protocols and health measures and communication and all these other things. So it's easy to see why they've probably just said like, "Hey, just keep on keeping on right now and let's not introduce anything new, look we have enough to deal with."

05:45 DS: I think that's exactly it. Everyone's busy and they're getting back to business for the most part, but some things are lower priority and that concept of stability makes perfect sense. Let's just keep things going as they are, so we can focus on all this other stuff.

06:01 AW: And as I pointed out with our stand-up team meeting today is what has really spoken well for us is just retention. Our April was down, but our May, we were not down, we were on the plus side, very little, but still on the plus side, which was really encouraging. June, as we record this headed into the last few days of June, is trending nicely for a percentage point or two of gain, which sounds fantastic, right now.

06:29 DS: Any gains, sounds pretty good.

06:30 AW: Exactly, and all of that's being done with basically almost no new sales, we have some of our resellers and agencies are expanding, our partners that resell us are expanding, but as far as things direct with us, that really isn't happening. So it's having just a high level of retention and you've already peeled away some of the people that were very fringe customers, not heavy users, don't find value, things like that, but overwhelmingly, the massive core hasn't needed or wanted to make any of those changes, so that's really sound. And I just shared with our team, that's a compliment all the way around, 'cause I really do believe that we have an outstanding product, but we have a phenomenal service layered over the top of it, and those two things combined absolutely lead to retention.

07:19 DS: Yeah, totally, I think there's also some nature of the business too with yours, I notice certainly, 'cause we're a GatherUp reseller white label version of it is like that always stayed relatively stable. We certainly saw some drops at the end of March, early April, but then it stabilized and we didn't see much because it's the kind of service that you just will always need, it's one of the ones where you're like, Yeah, okay, I can't cut that. It's a bit of an essential service, and I think that that's really helpful for GatherUp, and we're seeing it on our side too. Yeah.

07:52 AW: Other than that a lot of small litt...

We last talked churn in June 2019 on Ep. 8:  https://www.thesaasventure.com/episodes/08-churn-figuring-it-out-and-fighting-it 

A bit of a change, it's a solo episode with just Aaron. I update a recent growth plateau for Leadferno. Churn is up some, leads and new accounts are down, and that combination makes for very little growth over the last 3 months. I share what I'm doing in marketing and sales to try to turn the tide and get back to stronger MRR growth in the coming months.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on this solo format, please let me know:  aaron@leadferno.com 

Thanks for listening!

Show notes coming soon ...

FULL SHOW NOTES

00:00 Aaron Weiche: Hey everyone, this next episode was recorded on March 5th, 2020, so ahead of COVID-19 and everything we are all experiencing right now. I just wanted to pop in ahead of that as we haven't published it until now in mid-April (April 15th, 2020), and didn't want the conversation, our tone, or our excitement for certain things to be taken out of context. So, thanks for listening. We hope everyone is well, and we hope to get on the other side of this soon. With that, we'll bring you the third part of "Selling GatherUp" and Darren and I will be back in a couple of weeks to give a further update on how our businesses are doing now, during COVID-19 and the pandemic.

[INTRO music]

00:56 AW: Episode 18, Selling GatherUp. Part three, the Transition.

01:02 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

01:30 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

01:33 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

01:35 AW: And welcome to the month of March. Things are taking off quickly in 2020 for me. I don't know... What's that look like for you, Darren? Has the first two months of the year been a blur, or a little slow progression into the year? 

01:50 DS: It's been pretty blurry. We have a lot of stuff going on right now, so yeah, it's been busy. I'm just really excited about everything that we're building right now. So it's gone by like nothing. Where'd those two months go? 

02:03 AW: Yeah. Do you ever feel like you're already looking, especially at the end of this month, when you're like, "Okay, Q1 of the year is done, and now I only have nine more months to accomplish all my hopes and dreams for the year." Do you ever look at that that early and just feel like, "Oh my gosh, I'm behind the eight ball"? 

02:21 DS: No, I have a really terrible sense of time, and so I always think everything is gonna... Everything, all my hopes and dreams are gonna launch in the next three weeks. That's what I always think.

[laughter]

02:34 DS: But then it ends up like nine months later, right? But yeah so that's kinda... I don't understand how time works and so it always takes a lot longer than I think. So I feel like we're on the cusp of launching everything and it's all just about to happen. But then there's a testing phase, and tweaking phase, and beta testing phase. So it just ends up taking a lot longer. But I just really feel like this is the year, man, all my hopes and dreams, they're just about to burst out of our email newsletter. "Oh my God, look what we launched." It's gonna happen. We've got a few things lined up. They're all really close.

03:10 AW: That's awesome. I love the internal optimism too. That means all the way up until December 31st you're still like, "Yeah, we're gonna get it out there. Just wait."

03:18 DS: Well, even if that rolled around on December 31st, I'd be like, "Guys, two more weeks! We're almost there."

[laughter]

03:24 DS: So close. You just feel perpetually like, "Ah, two more weeks." I'm always so damn excited.

03:30 AW: You've definitely dropped that before in past episodes that you feel like you're always saying, "Just a couple more weeks."

[laughter]

03:37 DS: It's always two more weeks. It's a running joke at Whitespark, actually. Two weeks. 'Cause people ask me, "How long is that gonna take?" and by default I just say "Two weeks" now.

03:46 AW: That's awesome.

03:47 DS: How about you? How has it been the first couple of months of the year in the new company structure? 

03:53 AW: Yeah, and that's definitely a lot of what we wanna talk about today is post-sale and what that transition's been like. In the day-to-day business realm though, it's been really good because we had so many things that almost kind of started to log jam and be on the same path at the same time towards the end of the year, and that really caused us to pause and then look at, "How do we release these in the best cadence to start the year?" So it became very much like... Alright, this is gonna happen on January 15th, this is gonna happen on January 31st, this is gonna happen on February this date. And so we're able to take three to four larger things and really map them out ahead of time, and then just a normal plan the work and then work the plan. And that went really well for us.

04:48 DS: Nice.

04:49 AW: Yeah, kinda all wrapped up last week with our new user management system, which is... It's really cool. This is one of those things not to... I don't wanna get too far off on a tangent with this, but when you release certain features, it's a lot of fun because they have a lot of sex appeal to them and it might be innovative or no one's doing it in a certain way and that can be really fun. And when you get into user management, this is one of those plumbing things and underlying fabrics that no one gets all that excited about it. It comes up in conversations and things like that, but it never escalates to the point where it's like, "This has to be dealt with," or "This is a must," or anything else. 

But last year we really started looking at things related to our user management, just because we get a lot of different set-ups and how people wanna handle it, and things like that. And for the life of our product, we basically have always had just two user types. One was the account owner, which could only be one person being the account owner, and then everyone else on the system was just a user. And then that user had, I think we had five different special permissions that would either enable or limit that user in what they could do.

06:00 AW: And it was unbelievably basic, but for thousands and tens of thousands of users, it worked and it was never a big enough... There's never a big enough pain where people were like, "I just can't do this anymore." But last year we really started thinking, "How do we improve this?" One of the things that we've been asked. And we started modeling it out... It really started happening at our summit. 

I kind of put together a really loose structure and brought it to the team as a whole when we were face-to-face and said, "This is how I see this, this is how I think this could work and let's just start poking holes in it, and see what buy is there." And after an hour discussion, everybody was kind of like half-nodding their head like, "Yeah, yeah, I think this can work." The outcome of it, about six months of work. And it turned into a system where we created really six distinct user roles, and then inside of each role, it's an upgrade basis.

06:55 AW: At the lowest end, you have a read-only, then you have a contributor, then you have a team member, so each user level steps up into what you can do. And then, to take it one step further, that type of structure isn't anything earth-shattering, but what we did inside of each role is give you a specific set of on and off toggles that allowed you to really customize the role and change it for how you wanted it to work. 

So, not only did you have these five, six designated roles that you can just switch someone between being an admin and a team, and that will limit or enable what you need them to do, but now I can go into the team member role and I might have 10 options that I can turn off or turn on depending upon what the default is for that role.

07:42 AW: So, it literally made it limitless and it ended up being one of those things that was really cool, 'cause one, everyone on our team touched being part of building that feature, right? We wanted to know... ...

Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about SaaStr annual and billing system rebuilds.

Helpful links from the episode:

• SaaStr Annual conference
• 5 Questions CEO's Struggle With and How To Answer Them - Dave Kellogg presentation at SaaStr
• A Step-By-Step Guide To Revenue Growth (PDF) - Mark Roberge at SaaStr
• Billing systems mentioned:  Recurly, Chargify, Chargebee

FULL SHOW NOTES

00:09 Aaron Weiche: We're bringing you episode 3 - SaaStr Annual Recap and Rebuilds.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. Darren, both of us have... We've been on the road and doing some travel, are you back and settled into the daily desk, in the daily grind? 

00:54 Darren Shaw: I am still trying to catch up on email. Oh man, it's tough to take a week off of email, just piles up. And then every time I look at it, it's this weird thing where when I've got like 300 emails that are real messages, it almost becomes a lottery, where it's like, I go through my inbox and just something stands out to me, and I just jump on it and reply right there. But then there's other stuff that's also important and it's just like, "No, you never get replied to, sorry." It's just this weird thing when you're away for a week. But yes, I'm back, it was a good trip. Local U was amazing. Probably the best Local U ever. It was awesome, you missed it.

01:32 AW: Yeah, well fitting that it was the best ever when a first advance that I've never not been a part of, so that's too bad. I was trolling you guys from just up the road in San Jose, but I definitely missed out. Mostly, I just miss out seeing all the great people that are part of kind of that Local U family and community.

01:53 DS: I definitely missed hanging out with you.

01:55 AW: Yep, there's nothing like beers in real life over talking on podcasts and emails and all of the other ways we end up communicating.

02:03 DS: Sure, yeah, this podcast is a good second best, though.

02:06 AW: It totally is, it's given us a lot more regiment in our interactions, which is a great thing.

02:12 DS: And now we have a schedule of chatting so that's good.

02:16 AW: So, I've been refreshing my Twitter feed every like 10 seconds waiting for you or Whitespark to announce that your review tool, or your new tool that we've been talking about has launched. But did I miss the tweet, or where are we at? 

02:32 DS: Yeah, no, you're probably a little over-zealous with your refreshing there. We're not quite ready to launch. It's amazing, honestly, it's been day after day, where I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm waking up in the morning and we're gonna launch this thing, there's just that one last little thing to do." And so we start looking at that one last little thing, and then we find five other things. It's like, "Oh well, it doesn't work if you try a business in this particular way, or if you search in this way," or it's like, "Oh, it's this weird bug on the PDF export." Just all these little tiny things that keep cropping up, and it feels so close, day after day after day. We could have launched it, but then you get a bunch of people emailing saying, "Oh hey, it didn't work. Or my business... It didn't return the right results." So we keep finding things, and I figure it's a free tool, so there's not like anything pressing to launch it, so we might as well just hold it until it's really polished, to make sure that we found all the bugs.

03:29 AW: Yeah. Do you start to lose your mind at all with that stuff? Where it's... You feel like it's Groundhog Day, and it's always just a couple more things, just a couple more things a couple more things, 'cause I don't deal with that very well if that ever happens to our team.

03:44 DS: Yeah, it doesn't really feel... It doesn't make me lose my mind, but it does feel like Groundhog Day, it's just like, "Oh, man, every day there's something else." Which is quite irritating. I don't really... I just kinda like, "Oh, it's not today." I look at it in the morning for about an hour, or I run a few tests, we try for a few things. I write up the next, the list of tweaks to make, and then I move on with my day. It's no big deal. But it is annoying, a little annoying.

04:13 AW: You have better patience than I do 'cause I really start... I just start focusing... Like I don't wanna wake up another day and be testing this again, or see the same bugs, or new bugs, or anything else. I get to a point where we have this, "Enough is enough," talk and we map out an hour by hour plan on how this is going to change. And most of it's the result of my frustration because I end up feeling like, "Well, we can't get to the next thing, that we need to get to, without getting this out there or whatever." And I get what you're saying that putting out a free tool is probably a lot more excitement over it than a necessity. Like a big feature is...

04:54 DS: Yeah, so I think that's exactly it. There's two things. One it's this free tool, it's almost... It was a side product that gave our new part-time developer employee. He's a computer science student at the U of A. And so, one, he's a busy student, so he's not available to work eight hours a day on this. So I just put in the to-dos and he gets them done when he can. And two, a free tool, it's not that stressful, it's not a big deal. And we don't have any clients relying on this, waiting for it, it's just gonna be another marketing vehicle for us when we launch it.

05:29 AW: Yeah, I would still have trouble with my own excitement, keeping that at bay, 'cause I'd wanna share it with the world.

05:35 DS: No, I do wanna share, like I showed it to people at Local U, and they're like, "It's so awesome." And I'm like, "I know, I really wanna launch it." I'm excited about how it's gonna be received. I think everyone is gonna quite like it. And so I think it's gonna be great from that perspective.

05:48 AW: Well, good, I'm continuing to keep my anticipation level high.

05:53 DS: Great, thank you. I know. It won't let you down, you just gotta pretend I didn't say anything. Pretend I just announced it to you today that we're building this new tool. [chuckle] So you had no prior thing, so you can keep that anticipation high.

06:07 AW: I can fake being surprised really well, so I'm in on that.

06:11 DS: Okay, perfect. I wanna hear about SaaStr. You went to this awesome conference, all about building SaaS apps and all the things that go into that... So I'm just curious to hear, what are some of the takeaways, how was the conference? 

06:26 AW: Yeah, the conference was awesome, it was my best SaaStr Annual experience I've had. This was the third one that I've gone to. All three have been at different venues. This one actually moved, the first two were in San Francisco, this one was in San Jose. And for me, this was the best venue... Each time the venue had its own little quirks on how much room there was to get around, or room sizes, and how many rooms. And it really felt like... Cause I think this is the 5th or 6th year of SaaStr Annual total, but it really felt l...

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[INTRO music]

00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode 23, Course Correcting.

00:16 INTRO SPEAKER: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:47 AW: And I just finished eating a chocolate chip cookie. What do you think about that? 

00:52 DS: It sounds pretty good. I just finished eating a salad. It's the exact opposite. [chuckle]

00:58 AW: If my wife listens to this episode, I'm gonna get yelled at, but when I got gas at the gas station, they have these big chocolate chip cookies, and, yeah, this just looked like a great afternoon snack.

[chuckle]

01:09 DS: Totally, yeah. And now you made me wanna go get one.

[laughter]

01:13 AW: I'll mail you one.

01:14 DS: Wow, I don't know if it'll be good by the time it gets here.

[laughter]

01:18 AW: So what's been going on other than salads and cookies? I know what's been going on. You spent all week last week hosting a massive virtual summit with 4000-5000 attendees. Let's talk about that a little bit before we get into our main topic today.

01:34 DS: Yeah, so it's been huge. This summit was a massive success. We had actually 5500 people register for the summit.

01:41 AW: Wow.

01:42 DS: And pretty great attendance to all the different talks, and so it was big and we've been getting nothing but a steady stream of positive feedback about it. Just people comparing it to other conferences and saying how awesome it was and, yeah, so it was a great success. People love the content, and of course, I had some of the best speakers in the world such as Aaron Weiche, Mike Blumenthal, Joey Hawkins, so we had fantastic speakers. 

Basically, all the most known speakers in local search were there. Some heavy hitters outside of the local specific space like Rand Fishkin spoke. Michael King spoke. Brodie Clark, who was really building a name for himself down under in Australia, he spoke as well. And so, yeah, it was a great conference. We had huge visibility and, yeah, it was good. It was all good.

02:31 DS: It was so much work though. Oh, my God, I can't... I'm glad it's over because not only was it so much work to put it together, I had my own presentation to do, the Local Search Ranking Factor survey had to get done out there, recreated, re-pull all the data, re-analyze all the data, build a slide deck, build a presentation around it and present it. And I handed that in like Monday night. The night before we were going live with the conference, I handed in my recording, and it was just a very stressful time. Glad it's over.

03:01 AW: Yeah. Now, I wanna touch on a few benefits that we noticed in having myself and Mike both from GatherUp speaking at it. Our parent company Traject was a sponsor as well. They used their sponsor slot to tease our social product, which has been rebranded, called Fanbooster. But I wanna get back to seeing if you can quantify the work you put into it all, but on our side, the benefits with two speaking topics, we had great exposure, I can only guess you basically led off the conference with Mike, which I'm thinking was another hit. For a decade, he has been probably one of or the biggest thought leader in the space.

03:50 DS: Totally.

03:51 AW: And, yeah, a great draw and just the reason I love working with Mike is just the levels he can think on, and he gave a great talk around review attributes, which plays heavily into our platform and things like that. And then two days later, 'cause it was a three-day conference, and I talked on some things strategically related to reviews and reputation management. But for us specifically, we saw double the leads last week of what we had been averaging like the four to six weeks prior, which really great.

04:30 AW: Any time you can 2X something is fabulous, and it returned our leads to pre-COVID for a week, which is awesome. I'm probably gonna be a little maybe frowny face next week when they jump down most likely again a little bit, but maybe some of those that paid for the videos and things like that are watching in this week, and then they'll still be interested to sign up. So we had a really great experience. A lot of Twitter conversation, which is always awesome, great, in the moment mentions, new Twitter followers, things like that. So from our standpoint, it was fabulous. From yours, what was the amount of work that it took you to put this together? I guess I just wanna frame up for any of our listeners that might be considering hosting a virtual conference as a marketing vehicle.

05:24 DS: Yeah, I would love to be able to quantify the hours. It's tough to say. We've been working on it for about six months. Heavily working on it certainly through July and August, lots of recording. So there were 34 presentations, one of them mine, and then all the other ones I had to book an hour to record with that speaker. There was a ton of setting up all the speakers, doing speaker agreements, lots of chasing with regards to sponsorships too. So getting sponsors, going back and forth with them on a lot of stuff, writing up sponsorship agreements, getting the platform launched. We used the system called HeySummit, which turned out really well. But getting that whole website set up, my own team, if I think about what Jessie and Sydney put into it, it was almost a full-time job for them. And so hours, probably hundreds, a couple of hundred of hours have gone into launching this thing, and so it was a lot of work. And not only that, we worked with a company called HeySummit, and they were great 'cause they keep everything organized, and they also did all of our video editing, all the videos launched onto the site, and so...

06:40 DS: Between all of us, maybe 300 hours is what it takes to put on a conference like this. If I had to guesstimate at it, maybe 400, 300-400. So that's a big investment. That's a big expense. The expenses broke even, so it's not really a money-making venture. We took any money that we got from sponsorship and we put it back into Facebook ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, to market the conference. So our whole goal was to get that attendance list up as high as possible, and we managed to get 5500 through all of our marketing efforts. And then ticket sales are covering all the expenses, expenses of that company that we worked with and speaker gifts, and so there's really nothing left in the end. It's not a money-making venture on its own. It was completely a marketing exercise for us to just get our brand in front of more people.

07:28 AW: Yeah, and so you did that at a very large scale. You also, too, because of... The local search community is very niche and they're really... There's been a couple of attempts. MozCon created their own local event, and now they've just folded local into MozCon itself, which is a very large event in the SEO community. But I really saw it as you took the opportunity of a premier event in local search has been vacated, and you just claimed it heavily with what you did, and I think that's pretty cool.

08:03 DS: Yeah, I think it's cool that way. And it's like, this one was so successful that we can't not do it again, so it's gonna be an annual thing. There's also some talk about doing spin-off conferences. Because we have all the talks pre-recorded, we could pull in a few new speakers that are specific to, let's say, dentistry. Like we'd get some top dental marketing guys to come in, and we'd do a few presentations with them, and then we'd pull out eight good... Our...

[INTRO music]

0:00:11.4 Aaron Weiche: Episode 25. Okay 2020.

0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

0:00:44.1 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:47.4 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:49.7 AW: And we are here to look back at quite the year that we've had. Wouldn't you say?

0:00:57.6 DS: Let's say, yeah, it was a year for the history books, this one. It was... It was a bad year. 2020 really sucks for most of the world's population. It was a crummy year. But I guess... I don't know, I took some notes before the podcast and I have some positive things to look back on, but yeah, definitely it was a tough year.

0:01:18.8 AW: Yeah. As we break it down, I think for me, at the end of it is like, "Okay, we survived this year," right?

0:01:30.3 DS: Yeah.

0:01:31.3 AW: Being able to just make it through and not be as dinged up in some way or another as others, when you look around and there are certain industries that are completely shut down, have your doors closed. It's amazing when you think what it must be like to be in those types of industries.

0:01:54.3 DS: That weighs heavy on me, I really feel privileged to be in the digital marketing industry, building SaaS software that people still need and are actively looking to sign up for. We're just in such a fortunate position, whereas so many other industries have been devastated. And so I think about that all the time, about like, "Wow, we gotta recognize our privilege here."

0:02:24.7 AW: Absolutely. For better, for worse, however it happened, accidentally, on purpose, it isn't hard to look and be like, "Man, thank goodness, my industry has survived this well." Obviously, some aspects of our industry have absolutely taken off because of what COVID has forced.

0:02:45.9 DS: Yeah, totally.

0:02:47.9 AW: If you are at Zoom, a Zoom shareholder, any of those things, like you know how true that is. Or just probably any product in the video conferencing or live communications world has just sky-rocketed based on immediate demand across the board.

0:03:06.6 DS: Totally. I really wish I had thrown some money into Zoom when, back in like March, early March, be like, "Oh quick, put all of our investments into Zoom, it's gonna be huge."

0:03:21.0 AW: Back the dump trucks up to every tech stock in the last 10 months and you're not doing too bad anyway, right?

0:03:26.8 DS: Yeah, it's true.

0:03:28.5 AW: Oh man. What is your overall... It's like you have the feeling of survival and whatever else, but maybe let's start to dig a little deeper into that. Like when you look back, is there ways... Do you feel like there's any ways you could break down, you know, the year into thirds or quarters, or things like that? And how you feel about, like are there transitions where you guys felt differently about it or adjusted, like what are your thoughts on that?

0:03:57.2 DS: Yeah, that's a good way to look at it actually, because I come to the end of the year and I can think, "Alright, great, we have some... We survived. We even thrived in some places." And I can look back at that and feel overall the sense of, "We did it." But then... Gosh, if I think back to March, April, May, it was a dark period. We had to... We saw massive decline in revenue, we had to do some layoffs, we had to put... We had to get all the government programs in place. And it was stressful and it was like, it was this period of uncertainty for myself and for all of our team members.

0:04:40.4 DS: And so people were stressed and worried about the pandemic, and we came out of that after about three months, things just started to recover. It was almost like people instantly had this fear of the world falling apart, and so everyone really tightened up expenses and weren't spending any money. But then it was like, "Oh, well, I guess this is our new reality and life will go on and we still need to buy things," and so business picked up again. How did those first three months feel for you?

0:05:14.0 AW: Definitely when you're dealing with the unknown, that's one of the hardest things where there's no game plan for it. You can't research your way out of it, you're just taking sometimes hour by hour as it comes. And that same thing, I was just kind of wondering to myself while you were talking, I just wonder how much have people changed or where are they at in that progression.

0:05:44.9 AW: Those first few months were so uncertain and just as you outlined, like you can imagine this Doomsday scenario where what you've built, what you're working on, whatever else, where it almost collapses on itself. You kind of envisioned, "Oh, everybody holds up." Business is just kind of killed off in every way. It felt like, "What's gonna go on and continue on?" You entertain those kind of thoughts, and then as time goes on, some of that regresses in certain areas. In the world of software at least.

0:06:24.9 AW: And then you find, "Alright, well, here's the next thing we can do." And I think we started doing a lot of short-term focus things like, "Here's the 30-day plan, here's the next 30-day plan." And it was kind of focused on just taking small chunks, 'cause you can't predict or look at anything further than that.

0:06:40.1 AW: I think we saw... That was one thing that I took from some of the larger companies at some point when they were like, "Hey... " And I can't remember if it was Apple or Twitter or Google, or whoever did it first, but a couple of them definitely said like, "Hey, we're remote until June 2021." They just said, "Let's stop trying to look at this as like in two weeks, in two months, in two quarters."

0:07:05.9 AW: And they just said, "Yeah, well over a year from now, we're gonna revisit this. But that's not something we need to deal with right now, because it's just gonna be vacillating all over the board." And I almost kinda took that as like, and applied that to other areas and said, "Stop. Stop just vacillating on all the what ifs, you'll drive yourself crazy, and focus on the things that you can control and that you probably should control," and things like that.

0:07:35.2 DS: Yeah. It was funny to look back at some of the emails we got from that time, like in early March, it'd like, "We're closing our shop, but we expect to be reopened in three weeks." [chuckle] People were like, they really thought this was gonna be a short-term thing, in so many ways.

0:07:55.2 AW: Well, we've never experienced anything like it. So you just... No one knew, right? Everything was like... It depends on how much optimism you carried at the time. Or in some circumstances, and you can get this, a business would also look and be like, "Hey, anything longer than this and we are in trouble." That's where I feel with so many of these restaurants is like, they're not built to just shut down for a month, much less... Here in Minnesota, where I live, they're on their second six week to eight-week shutdown of no indoor dining at all, in any capacity, in any way.

0:08:34.8 AW: And then to top it off, there's this time around, there's absolutely nothing that's lined up for support of what they need or helping them out. It's just this really wonky scenario of the government saying, "You can't operate and we also can't help you." And my hope is they should have already had help lined up before they ask them to do this again, or mandated they did it again.

0:09:00.1 AW: But we're really starting to see some rumblings here between restaurants just all saying, "We're not gonna do what you're asking us to do because you give us no ...

Helpful links from the episode:

• Whitespark Review Checker Tool
• Jira
• ClickUp
• IFA 2019 Conference
• LSA Conference
• GatherUp TextBack feature

FULL SHOW NOTES

00:11 Aaron Weiche: Episode Four - Building and Running Remote Teams.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SAAS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SAAS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:42 AW: Glad to be back on the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:46 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.

00:47 AW: We are back to recording action, probably three weeks between our last episode, as we've both been a little bit busy taking on other things.

00:56 DS: Yeah.

00:56 AW: And with that, for me, some of the highlights or things that have gone on, one, we did our first large show as an exhibitor. We were at the International Franchise Association convention in Las Vegas, and that was really great. Probably somewhere between 35 and 50 what I would consider solid conversations where we have the contact info of who the buyer would likely be and understand a lot about where they're at in their scenario and things like that. So that was really exciting, and good to get past, too, 'cause there were a lot of unknowns in not having done a show of that size with thousands of attendees. I wanna say there was 4,000 at the show, so that was really helpful to get through.

01:42 DS: You talk to Andrew Beckman there? He's from Location3. He goes on to me about how awesome that show is, it's great...

01:47 AW: Yeah, those guys... Yeah, Location3 had two or three booths there. I didn't make it over to talk to them. I know a couple others from that organization as well, but I saw their booths, didn't talk to them. I was busy talking to prospects, man.

02:01 DS: That's great. So okay, you said you talked to about 35 solid leads when you were there, and then how many of those leads have converted to follow-up conversations, and have you actually closed any of them since you were at the show? 

02:17 AW: Right, so that's the big next phase. The show was just last week, got home Thursday night, and then yeah, this week has been sending out emails, a few responses, and trying to get demos in place. So that's kind of the next piece, and the next of figuring out, "All right, what do those numbers look like?" Because you're totally correct, it's one thing to be excited about... And you need those conversations to start top-of-funnel there, but it is how fast and who are the ones that you can actually get to the table and turn into customers? So I'll definitely have more data on that the next time you and I talk.

02:53 DS: And know what I'd love to know? I would love to know, okay, this is what you spent to go to the show in terms of getting the booth, cost of travel, cost of expenses with hotel and everything while you were there. Then looking at it six months later, and then calculating the lifetime value of the customers that you were able to close from it, and determining what's the ROI on that? Because I always wonder that about exhibiting at conferences. And IFA sounds pretty good, 35 solid leads sounds really good to me, and so I'm curious to know if you actually have a positive ROI in the end.

03:29 AW: Yep, next episode I'll share those numbers and anything of what we're looking at. The really good news, no, it's not cheap to do it, but it only takes a couple of decent deals to easily make that back. And the other thing that I look at, too, is five of our competitors were there, and if we're not there in that conversation and in that room, then we're already losing. So there is some brand awareness and being seen. And this is our first time there, too, we had a lot of people say, "Oh, I've never seen you guys before." So repetition's important. We already signed up for their 2020 event in Orlando. But yeah, next episode, I'll report on where I'm at with those 'cause it definitely is of interest to me as well.

04:08 DS: Yeah, for sure. And there's another side benefit, I think, of these things. So you might have talked to 35 people, but GatherUp was looked at by hundreds, thousands of people. They saw you, they looked at your banner, they got the sense that you do review stuff and that two months later when they're thinking about it, they're like, "Yeah, we should consider GatherUp, we know they're one of the players in this space."

04:34 AW: Absolutely.

04:35 DS: And so there's other stuff, you can't measure that, you don't know who those people were, and you don't know if it's because they saw you at the IFA show.

04:42 AW: Yep, totally correct. And some of the conversations were a little longer term where people are like, "All right, we're in with somebody until this date, but let's stay in touch because I definitely wanna talk to you. It seems like you have more to offer or would be better to work with." So completely.

04:58 DS: Well, that sounds exciting, good.

05:00 AW: Yeah, totally exciting. We were supposed to have a big feature release today on our new inbound text feature called TextBack. We ran into some snags through a carrier, through Verizon this week and kinda had to self-diagnose between Verizon and Twilio, and trying to work with either one of those is almost no help, so a lot of self-investigation. We have a handle on it now, but we had to push back a couple of days till a Monday launch, which pains me, but totally the right thing to do because we couldn't push it out without it working for one of the major carriers consistently.

05:37 DS: Can you describe that feature? How does it work, TextBack? 

05:40 AW: Yeah, so TextBack, each location would have a number, so a local restaurant or a local store would have a mobile number that any customer in the store would see signage or on their receipt that says, "Text the word feedback to this number," And then it auto-replies with the link and says, "Great, now leave us feedback on how your experience was. So it's a easy way for a consumer to self-opt-in, and especially in industries like restaurant or retail, where giving up your email address or your phone number might not be part of the purchase process, but it gives real-time access.

06:14 DS: Oh my god, I love it. That's so good! I really think about that for some of these retail type clients that... They're not collecting emails or phone numbers at the checkout. They don't have time for that, they're not messing around, they're just ringing people's orders, though, right? 

06:31 AW: Yes.

06:32 DS: And so that kind of a thing. And you could also put it on a card that you drop in a bag, right? 

06:36 AW: Absolutely. Any print way or signage way you can get it in front of them can absolutely be used, and yeah, just as you alluded to, you get real-time feedback, you get them through your review process, those are all wins for the customer and the business. And then, yeah, then you can capture their mobile number or their email for future communication as well. So I'm really excited about it, and so that was really hard to know that it was gonna come out today and then be like, "Oh yeah, just kidding, guys. It's gonna be a couple more days," but better to get it right.

07:08 DS: I'm super familiar w...

Hubspot has defined the SaaS sales funnel as Awareness, Engagement, Exploration, and Conversion.  This episode is focusing on Engagement in the sales funnel to move your prospect down further. For me it comes down to two main strategies:

1. Are you easy to work with?

2. Do you work how your customers want you to work? 

I look at what makes for good CTAs, that appeal to all levels of engagement. 

• Questions - live chat, web-to-text
• Get updates - email newsletters, podcasts, blog content, social
• Demos - recorded, live, interactive

Another solo episode with Aaron. I talk about the features we've recently built for Leadferno. It's been 3 years since we broke code (over 2 years to market) and it I'm feeling like we have our true Version 1 - but my definition might be very different than yours or most. I discuss why I love "swiss army knife features" and our new report focused on quality and timing. Plus a marketing and sales update from last episode.

Have feedback or ideas?  Email aaron@leadferno.com 

Aaron and Darren jump into things as we officially launch The SaaS Venture. Our topic for the episode is "The Hard Things" and we each share one of the difficult things we accomplished in 2018.

The full show notes are below the helpful links.

Helpful links from the episode:

• GatherUp
• Whitespark
• Local Search Ranking Factors 2018
• LocalU Advanced conference

FULL SHOW NOTES

00:08 Aaron Weiche: Alright. Well I guess there's no going back. We are officially launching episode one, The Hard Things.

00:15 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture. I'm Aaron.

00:47 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:49 AW: And we have finally decided to abandon or move away from all other ways of communication and get into this podcast thing and super excited to be bringing you guys through our world of trying to lead and manage and grow our SaaS companies, which both GatherUp and Whitespark are bootstrapped, and share just some of our day-to-day and month-to-month activities and what keeps us up at night, or everything else that goes in with it. And Darren I was trying to go through my head and figure out when was it... I know we were at a conference, but we were talking about doing a podcast together. It was some time ago, but I can't remember where it started.

01:34 DS: Yeah, you proposed the idea at MNSearch Summit. It was in the after-event at some pub that was right across the street from where the conference center was. And I was actually FaceTiming with my Violet, so having a little FaceTime with my daughter, and you actually came in and had some FaceTime with her, and then after that little call you're like, "We should do a podcast." And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds fun." And so we talked a little bit about it.

01:57 AW: That makes sense, where it was like some learning, some mental stimulation, being around smart people at a conference and then mix in a few beers. And that's when the big ideas happen.

02:09 DS: I think that's how every podcast starts really. [chuckle] A few beers are required.

02:14 AW: I don't know if I've heard anyone else document that so we might be the first to admit to it.

02:18 DS: Maybe, yeah. Yeah, I'm excited. This is gonna be good. There's so much to talk about and it's a new, I often talk about local search things, but this is talking about running the business, it's a new topic for me to share with the world, so I'm excited about it.

02:33 AW: Yeah, me too. Same thing, both of us speak at a ton of digital marketing and other types of conferences where we're asked to come in and give... For me, it's how to get more reviews and customer feedback and customer experience and it's so tactically driven a lot of the times. And I think both of us were really intrigued by this to share more of running a business, things unique to a bootstrap SaaS company, and all of those other aspects that we really don't get to talk and share a lot about, and it's also content that we're constantly seeking out ourselves through podcasts and articles and things like that.

03:07 DS: Yeah, and I think it's gonna be highly educational for me as well. Just getting a chance to chat with you on a regular basis, and then even thinking about these things like, "Okay, I wanna talk about this process that we're dealing with with our pricing page," or whatever and spending the time... Knowing that I'm gonna talk about it in the podcast, I'll put a little bit more effort into it. So [chuckle] I think it's gonna be great for helping drive my own personal development as well.

03:30 AW: Yep, I totally agree. So even if we only get two downloads out of the gate, we will chalk this up as a success, because you and I are talking on a pretty regular basis in order to make this happen.

03:42 DS: Yeah, definitely. [chuckle]

03:43 AW: There you go. There's a byproduct always of wins in everything you do.

03:46 DS: Absolutely.

03:47 AW: So just as we touched upon this first episode of The SaaS Venture, we wanted to look at the hard things, and this got me thinking. Just this last week, I put out a tweet because I was frustrated to myself. There's a couple internal projects that are just on my plate here at GatherUp and I started looking at all of the external things I do between speaking and selling and traveling and recruiting and hiring, as we're growing our team and all these other aspects. And probably one of the hardest things for me to do are internal projects, for me personally. Where it's working on a better intranet type system is one of the things on my plate. And I was feeling really frustrated because I was having a hard time carving out the time and being able to focus on it and that led me to thinking for our first episode topic and we're starting the year here recording this in January. We'll see when we get it edited and aired. But just reflecting back of like, "Well, what was my hardest thing in 2018?" And when I looked back at that, it was another internal project, it wasn't mine, just personally, but it was an internal project for our company and that was re-branding. We used to be called GetFiveStars for the first four and a half years of our company's life, and we re-branded to GatherUp on September 17th; it sticks out in my head very, very well.

05:13 DS: Why did you re-brand? What was the motivation to get a new brand name? 

05:17 AW: Yeah, it's one of those multi-facets, like many fingers on the hand pointing in that direction. One, I can tell you from day one, I've been with the company for over three and a half years, is one of those things that just as like a gut check never aligned with me. I'd like to say that I'm kind of a brand marketing guy at heart, is just kinda in my core. And so, in my gut, it didn't sit right. Then we had just kind of other pieces where we had... Sometimes we would get someone who would tell us your name feels kind of spammy because it feels like I'm gonna buy five star reviews. If I purchase services from GetFiveStars, I will get five star reviews.

06:00 DS: Yep.

06:00 AW: As we went up channel in our customers and started having bigger customers, we had a couple that were using the company Five Stars, which is a loyalty. And they were like, "Man it's really hard to talk about you guys and talk about Five Stars in the same meeting. And he's just like, [chuckle] "Why don't you change your name?" That was kind of comical but I was kinda like, "Yeah, I kind of agree with you." And then just looking at longevity of things like we have GatherUp now, we just finally got word that we're officially registered, trade marked. That was never gonna happen with the word GetFiveStars and it was just kind of like GetFiveStars felt tactical where GatherUp feels like a brand. So it was kind of a collection of all of those things that really signaled to us that we need to start looking for a new name.

06:47 DS: That makes sense.

06:48 AW: Now the process of that, that's a pretty interesting process, right? There is kind of like all these little steps and hurdles. The first part is trying to figure out a name, that might be the hardest part, because so many other things after that, are steps and processes and things you document and checklist and whatever else, where the initially figuring it out is extremely difficult. At first we tried to do ...

FULL SHOW NOTES

[music]

00:08 Aaron Weiche: Episode 15, a big recap of 2019 and looking forward to 2020.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, I'm Aaron.

00:45 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:47 AW: And we have made it to the end of another year. Just a couple of weeks away from turning over the calendar and Darren and I thought it would be fun to take a look back at 2019 as a whole. A year in which we started podcasting together. We got in... This is our 15th episode and a number of other things, and take a look at what's gone on in the calendar year for us and what we're looking forward to the next year.

01:15 DS: Yeah, it sounds great. I think it's really good to look back, understand what we've learned over the past year, look at some of the challenges and our accomplishments, and look forward to 2020. It sounds like the future. Hey? 2020.

01:30 AW: It is... It is an exciting year to talk about, right?

01:32 DS: Yeah.

01:33 AW: Plenty of plays on words with having 2020 vision for the future whatever that might be.

01:39 DS: Yeah, it's been a full year. Our first episode was recorded on January 15th. So it's been just exactly a year, we've been doing this thing.

01:48 AW: Yeah.

01:48 DS: Yep.

01:48 AW: Wait was it like last December when we decided something that we had talked about months earlier, when we were like, "Alright, let's do this, let's get it going." And then we got all of the ducks in a row, and then just started hitting record on. I think we were hoping... I think I was hoping we'd maybe get past 20 episodes. But I'm also... Considering what we've both had going on this year, I also look at like, "Alright, 15 episodes. We at least got one in every month." We didn't do too shabby.

02:19 DS: Yeah, more than one per month I think is alright. And, I don't know, 2020 is shaping up to be pretty busy too. But so... Maybe we can try to get a few more in next year.

02:27 AW: Yeah... And looking at that, what are you takeaways from 15 episodes, a calendar year of a podcast, maybe you've listened back to a few of them. What's your feeling on what we've done with the SaaS Venture?

02:43 DS: Yeah, I think personally, for me, it's been really incredible to have... To carve out those moments where, "Okay, we know we're doing an episode on"... Let's say, support, or sales and to really like... Okay, before the podcast, I take some time to think about what are our challenges in sales, what are our accomplishments, what are the things that we're trying to do and just having that time to think about it the podcast has been really helpful for me to take that step back and think about it. And think about how do I wanna communicate what we're doing.

And so, that's been really amazing as a driver of new learning and growth for my company. So the podcast has been really helpful for that. And then, of course, it's amazing just having the opportunity to chat with you once a month, plus. Because I think that that collaboration I have learnt do much from you through doing this podcast. It's just been... It's been wonderful. I'm really glad that we decided to do it. And it's been a super fun time.

03:46 AW: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I've enjoyed getting your perspective on all of these different things. I also... Just the ability to talk out loud about some of these things is like... I don't know if it's therapeutic or just helpful to hear yourself say some of these things. But I've learned from stating them out loud and every now and then listening... I'll go and listen back, partly because I wanna... Alright, how can I be better? How often am I saying "umm" or "yeah"?

04:16 DS: Right, yeah.

04:17 AW: Or repetitious words. But also just hearing my perspective, especially when I dive back into an episode from mid-summer or early on, and then just thinking, "Alright, is that the same way I still feel about it? Did my perspective change? Have I done something different with it after talking about it as a challenge, or looking how well we're doing with it?" Yeah, it's been so...

04:42 DS: I've actually taken a number of things that we discuss on the podcast, and started implementing at the company. And it's been great. It's been... Everything is just... Feels like we're tightening up a lot of the areas that we were a little loose in and just constantly growing and improving. It's been really good.

05:00 AW: Nice. Maybe... Just maybe some of our listeners have been able to do a little bit of that too. And I would say, if any of you have, if there's anything that we have sparked an idea or you took a piece of process or whatever else, man, I would love to hear from you on Twitter, email, through our website, thesaasventure.com, anything else. That would be really cool to talk about that or speak to anything that anyone's willing to share on a few SaaS Venture episodes.

05:25 DS: Same. Yes please, feedback requested.

05:28 AW: Yeah, alright. And just as my last thought with it is, it just... It gets into just how much, time is a commodity. There are so many times where we've wanted to record something, do whatever else... One of us has to slide because of whatever... I feel like we've done a really great job of being flexible with each other. We both had our moments we're like, "Yep, it's not gonna work for me today." We gotta push a couple of days or push next week. But yeah, making the time for it really is the hardest part. Once we're on, talking is easy, but just carving out an hour and saying, "Yep, I can make it work, I'll have some prep done." Any of that that that's the hard part.

06:03 DS: Yeah, talking is definitely easy. Keeping it short and succinct is hard.

06:08 AW: Yeah.

[laughter]

06:10 AW: Absolutely on that. Alright, outside of the podcast, and just since we last talked, spoke in November, what's new with you? What's going on in the day-to-day of Whitespark?

06:23 DS: What's going on? Let's see. Well, we've hired a lot of people recently. We transitioned our citation team through an in-house team, so we've been kind of busy with a lot of stuff around that over the last quarter.

06:39 AW: What was behind the move to go from the outside team to internal?

06:44 DS: Well, control was a big part of it, so there were a lot of things that we wanted to do with our citation processes and our work that were not... It was harder to work with the third party on that. If we owned it completely, then we could do whatever we want, and we didn't have to try and convince the third party that this is the way things should be done, and so control over quality and control over specific things that we wanted to be tracking in the process was a big part of it. Also, heating up competition, I guess, in the space. So trying to be a bit more profitable and competitive that way has been a big driving factor for it as well.

07:28 DS: And all of those things have been accomplished by taking it in-house. And so, I think that can happen with a lot of businesses where your partner with the third party, and then eventually, you're like, "It would just be so much better if we did this ourselves." And so, we eventually got to that point where we had to pull the trigger and do it, and it was tough. And we had a great relationship with our previous partner for citations for ages, but it was just time to have complete control over that.

07:57 AW: Yeah, and then how has that transition been?

08:00 DS: It's been great. Yeah, so everything is ...

Helpful links from the episode:

• Hotjar
• Heap Analytics
• Mixpanel
• Appcues
• Google Analytics
• Net Revenue Churn
• Net retention
• ProfitWell
• Baremetrics

FULL SHOW NOTES

[intro music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode eight, Churn, Figuring It Out and Fighting It.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:45 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:48 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.

00:50 AW: And we are back at you with Episode Ocho, which I feel like is, every week I like seeing that or every time we talk, Darren, I like seeing a bigger number. It makes me feel like we're really accomplished and we're almost hitting double digits.

01:05 DS: I know, that double digit's gonna be a huge milestone.

[laughter]

01:07 DS: We should have a champagne party of some kind, big celebration.

01:12 AW: Nice, nice. We'll do a virtual toast.

01:14 DS: Yeah, sure, definitely that.

01:16 AW: So we're at least in a better cycle. We're back to talking every two weeks, the last three recordings that we've done, anyway and anything pop in with you in the last couple of weeks?

01:27 DS: It's been much of the same. It's only been two weeks so we're still working on the same things here. We're working some of our services and I'm excited we'll get in this Google My Business syncing working with our platform so that's gonna allow us to build out a ton of amazing stuff. So that's all up and running and we're working on that, launch of our, update to our Rank Tracker is coming. So our rank tracking platform will now support screenshots, so taking screenshots of your listings so that you can be like, "Did I really rank there?" and checking that out, so I'm excited about that. It's coming down the pipeline pretty soon.

02:05 DS: Designs are all finalized on our Local Citation Finder, so the team that's working on the rank tracking stuff, once that gets launched, which is pretty quick, they're gonna shift over to implementing all of these designs to our new Local Citation Finder. I don't know, lots of stuff in the works, lots of things going on, tons of sales calls lately.

02:29 AW: Nice.

02:30 DS: Yeah. So it's been good.

02:31 AW: Gotta love that, especially since we talked all about sales in our last episode.

02:35 DS: It must have been that, actually. People were like, "Oh, Darren Shaw, Whitespark, we better call them, give 'em a sales call." Yeah.

02:43 AW: Yeah, well, I mean, the things we talked about last time, that's... Now that I've literally finished seven weeks of travel every single week but my number one and I already, from putting a couple things out on LinkedIn today, have a few new intros but I have to find at least one, if not as many as three salespeople to help get us to the next level. We have enough going on and we have the right things and we just need to be talking to more people and I need to get them up and running to have an impact yet this year, which is crazy to think but...

03:27 DS: Sales is so time-consuming. So it's, for you as the CEO, trying to manage so much of that, it's really valuable to bring on some people to help out.

03:36 AW: It totally is and I'm a little bit scared about... Not scared but I just realize how much work it's gonna be to train one, two or three, hopefully all together. But knowing, all right, if I sink my teeth into that hard for 30, 60, 90 days, then it will pay off, right? It's a necessary evil, so.

03:55 DS: Yeah, I would... One thing we're trying to do with training is to group it as much as possible. So when we hire, we try to hire three people at the same time and train 'em all at the same time so that they'll get that. And then we've also started screencasting and recording all of our training sessions. So later we could have someone else do the training and they can refer back to that as a reference or eventually dial it in to the point where it's all recorded, be like, "Oh, welcome aboard, here's your training package. Let us know when you've worked through all that and then we'll have a call, right?"

04:29 AW: That's awesome, that's great efficiency. I need to do a better job of that. I hope I'm able to hire two salespeople at once so I can duplicate the output of that training. I've been trying to, even after this call, to record this today, I have a sales call and I've been recording those as of late just so when we do hire, I can say, "Here's a dozen sales calls in the last month. Now you can listen to all these and pick things out, start to think about your pitch and your story and what kinda questions are asked and things like that. So."

05:04 DS: Do you give your prospects a heads-up that you'll be recording the call for training and quality assurance purposes?

05:13 AW: I usually don't say that. Sometimes I'll just tell them it's for their purpose, right and then I'll send the link to the recording along with the materials I shared.

05:20 DS: That's good to do, yeah.

05:21 AW:  I've found in doing that, why not give them every piece of that? That way if they have to share up or down, they have that available. Sometimes people even ask for it but yeah, I don't always let 'em know the wire is tapped either, so I probably should do that. [laughter]

05:38 DS: Oh, yeah, you should. You're breaking some FTC laws, I think, if you don't.

05:43 AW: Totally. They're coming for me. I'm sure I'm already on their list.

05:48 DS: Yeah, ding-dong. [laughter] Right in the middle of the podcast, all right.

05:53 AW: Other than that, we just wrapped up... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we had our exec team summit. So for us, that it basically ends up being six, seven of us that kind of lead different areas in the company. We try to have at least three or four face-to-face that we just call our exec summit. We pretty much map out the three days solid to get face time, both where things are at hiring financials, what's next, planning, ideation, try to fit all that in, spend some time together, have dinners together.

We actually did it here in Minneapolis this time with having five of our exec team are now in Minneapolis out of the seven. So that made it a lot easier and then those of us that are here in the Twin Cities, we stayed at a hotel Monday night and Tuesday night just so we could spend more time together and not be commuting back and forth and everything else.

06:53 DS: Right, yeah. Sounds great, that's really helpful. I feel a little bit on my own from an exec perspective. It's mostly me as the primary exec. I certainly have some key team members that I lean on for a lot of those decisions and collaboration and discussing things but in the end, I'm the only, I'm the sole director of things really. So it's nice to have that team around you that you can work with in that capacity.

07:25 AW: Yeah, I adopted the philosophy at my last agency when we grew that and I was basically in the COO role but I really saw that our compa...

A recent tweet from B2B SaaS positioning expert and author April Dunford had the takeaway of "why choose you?" from your product demo. Aaron and Darren discuss positioning in your product demo, messaging, and marketing. In a crowded market with many solutions and choices, you need to understand and leverage what makes you unique and win in competitive comparisons.

Here is April's Twitter thread.