There is no way around confronting yourself, your unconscious, your fears, your doubts. I myself haven’t found any magical way around this. We each have to confront ourselves. We cannot simply practice a spiritual technique like meditation or prayer, have some deep experience, and expect it to totally transform us. The experience, regardless of how profound, simply cannot erase all the false influences on your consciousness.

If we thoroughly investigate the matter for ourselves, we see that we have to confront ourselves in very powerful and deep ways. Those persons who have arrived at the balanced maturity of humanity have done so in the form of renunciation, discipline, friction with teacher and community, pursuit of practical tasks, following lessons given to them by their teachers, and in so many other ways that the various teachings have developed. In this work we do it through inquiry into our everyday experience.

Becoming a mature human being doesn’t happen easily or instantly. Although there is grace and there is blessing, it is only to help you confront and deal with your situation. Grace won’t do the whole thing for you. It will give you more confidence, more trust, but you will still have to deal with yourself. The help of the school, the teaching, and the teacher are small things compared to what you need to do yourself. This is part of the educational process of the inner path. The path requires the clarification and the transparency of all that determines your experience and perception of yourself and of the world.

Whatever questions you have, whatever you do not understand about yourself, you have to pursue. If you have any dissatisfaction, any discontentment, you need to pursue it. Teachings and teachers provide help, guidance, and orientation so that you don’t spend too much time dealing with the wrong issues. The teacher saves you time, energy, and effort. But the teacher can’t do it for you. The teacher gives you guidelines to help you do the practice and to help you deal with yourself.

Now I am in no way blaming the world for my problems; I have made some personal choices in the previous years that are still haunting me and need to be finalized as soon as possible because they’re wearing me very thin at this point. The professional repercussions of all of this is that I’ve essentially been forced into a sabbatical for the last few months of work. If you’re a friend, or a customer, this is a fact that is quickly apparent: ain’t nothin’ be done lately.

When faced with such obstacles, one is often compelled to ask for some sort of pill or magical solution that will just make things “go back to normal.” There are a lot of things off the mark with that desire, with the foremost being that there is no way to “go back” in life…life is a one way path where every decision you’ve made and action you’ve taken up until this very moment has dictated exactly where you are. Some of the reason you are who you are is because of uncontrollable external factors, of course. But ultimately, lamenting or regretting or yearning for the past is an exercise in futility; no matter how strongly you desire to “go back”, you’re here and here to stay.

Knowing that, when it comes to feeling better in life, you have to realize that the decision will require real work. You have to force yourself to evaluate your actions and thoughts and force yourself to mold your instinctual reactions to the world around you in order to actively push yourself to where you want to be. This might seem obvious to some. But to others, especially those who have faced depression for any length of time, it’s not as obvious as it may seem. The depressed individual is compelled to inaction, facing the world is never as attractive as just rolling over and closing your eyes. Stephen Fry, famous British doer of everything, describes the lows of depression as having to face a “futureless future”, a sight as terrifying as staring into the blackness of the deepest part of the ocean and contemplating the sheer emptiness of it all. It’s not a feeling of sadness or pain necessarily, but more a feeling of horrifying loneliness.

This is the result of a skewed perspective that comes along with mood disorders. When you’re depressed, your perspective shrinks and only the immediate is visible. You can’t even begin to see past your immediate, painful surroundings. Enter anxiety, dread, and hopelessness.

Now, my way of dealing with this is a mixture of private lamentation and public masquerading. Few would guess upon talking to me that I am internally struggling, which is by design. The question I hate the most in life is “Are you ok?” because I can’t even begin to answer that question properly at this point. If only it were as simply as saying I lost my job or my dog just died or the like.

So I keep up this facade of feeling fine and wait until I can be by myself at night, oftentimes with drink in hand, staring off at the ceiling and wondering how I got myself here. I know these actions won’t get me on a path of recovery but they do get me to the next day, and when your perspective is shallow, that’s enough to keep you going.

Perspective, Perspective, Perspective

The proper way to combat this is to practice molding your perspective to allow for more upbeat and positive thinking. Sounds simple, but the problem arises when you consider that when you’re depressed, you’re unlikely to fucking do anything at all, much less actively focus on your pain and modifying it. It’s nearly a Catch-22. But you ultimately have to pick a starting point or else you’ll forever be stuck in the rut that your mind has created for you.

So, all that being said, I’m now sitting in a coffee shop about 1oo yards from the beach, with enough sun on me to force me to squint to see the screen of my laptop, drinking some pretty good Sumatran coffee, and forcing myself to be surrounded by life. After a year and a half of working alone from home, I’ve started to forget what life looks like. I’m jealous of those who work near a water cooler at this point. So my first step in trying to turn around this tormented life of mine at the moment is to just inject myself back into Real Life and see what happens.

I’ve also decided that I’m going to start pouring myself out via this blog a bit. A few people have asked me to starting writing again (which means the world to me, really) and I have a lot to say about a lot of stuff, and at this point, I have nothing to lose by being as transparent as possible with all of this because who knows what the future will bring at this point. And I plan on getting a bit more personal with some of the things I’ll be writing about moving forward because again, fuck it, nothing to lose.

As for work stuff, what am I going to try and accomplish you might be wondering? Well, here’s what I’ve got so far:

1. I’ve got this startup that just turned 2 years old now. She basically runs herself at this point but my god is there a lot left on the table by my inaction. I plan on actually getting back to work on this.
2. I have the makings of a book coming together. I started writing some more detailed essays based on my 12 rules for building a profitable startup a while back and do plan on getting back to this at some point soon. The prospect of pounding out a book is a tad bit overwhelming so I’m going to try and attack it in small bites at first, but I think the concept behind it has legs and can become a good resource for some.
3. I want to really push myself to learn and internalize a javascript framework, most likely Backbone.js and something like Marionette on top of it. I have a few app ideas that could be really neat if built in a very interactive, single page app fashion and considering how popular JS frameworks have become over the last few years, I think it’s a good professional move all around.

So that’s it folks, that’s about where I’m at right now. Sometimes the ticking of the clock gets a bit irritating but overall I’m still in one piece for the most part and am ready to actually pull myself out of this rut.

Hope you’re all doing well.

I would have given up golf completely a long time ago if it weren’t for the fact that I get to be with friends and I turn my phone off for a few hours and drink beer in the sun. Those are all great things, so I keep playing.

So I suck at golf, but I still know enough about the game to understand the lingo, choose the right club for the right shot, and dress the part. If you saw me grab my golf bag and walk from my car to the first tee, you’d probably think I knew what I was doing.

But the moment that club head hits the ball for the first time, my secret will be out: I fucking suck at golf.

You might be thinking “So? Most people really suck at golf. This is not something unique to you, get over it”. I get that, but this is all a metaphor, so just relax and give me a few paragraphs.

I AM capable of hitting a golf ball really well…it just doesn’t happen naturally. I have a decent LOOKING swing (I don’t look like someone who has never touched a golf club before), but if I just trust my body’s natural golf swing, I will hit an atrocious shot. For me to actually hit a golf ball well, I have to consciously focus on each step in the process.

1. I have to align my stance with the direction I want the ball to go
2. I have to align the ball correctly with my stance
3. I have to make sure my backswing goes straight back rather than wrap around my body
4. I have to make sure my swing isn’t inside out or outside in
5. I have to consciously focus on touching my chin to my right shoulder after my swing to keep my head down

Usually, if I do all of those things, I hit a pretty good shot. I’m not giving Tiger a run for his money by any means, but I’m not embarrassed to tee off in front of the club house. Honestly, playing golf is really just me trying really hard not to embarrass myself in public.

This is analogous to so many processes and activities in the rest of my life that I figured it was something I’d like to explore here. I find that even though I have ambitious ideas and goals, when left to my own devices (and with my mind free to do what it wants) I tend to drift towards inactivity, pondering, and procrastination. I get frustrated quickly by this, and soon I’m trapped in a vicious cycle where I am not naturally working on what I want to work on, and that is leading to frustration which is making it even harder to actually get back on task.

However, if I attach a framework to my todo list for the day, the chance of successfully completing my list increases significantly. If instead of just sitting down and saying “I’m going to build X today”, I make a detailed, concise list of tasks and then start systematically working through the list and tracking my progress, I not only feel better, but I also accomplish so much more than I would have if I just freestyled my day.

I can’t stop laughing at this picture

I think it’s natural to assume that our “muscle memory” (whether in a physical activity such as golf or mental activities such as programming) can lead the way and we can just naturally accomplish what we know we need to do. While it might feel good to fly by the seat of your pants and revel in how great you can naturally do things, you’ll end up falling short. By carefully walking yourself the tasks you want to complete, and being mindful of each step at that very moment, you can take control of your success and deliver the results you dreamed of.

And while it might seem that a lot of brilliant entrepreneurs (or anyone successful for that matter) just kick ass at everything they do, the reality is that most people in life need not only a framework to follow in order to complete their todo list, but also a conscious effort needs to be constantly applied to what they’re doing.

From the outside looking in, these successful determined people make it seem like everything just naturally happens for them and they don’t have to develop processes and frameworks to ensure success and productivity. But we’re all human, and even successful people need to employ systems in order to remain productive.

Just because a guy has a really nice golf shot doesn’t mean he isn’t consciously thinking about each step he’s taking to make that shot.

I would imagine this is a problem that startup founders run into somewhat frequently, as you receive a lot of freedom when you embark on a startup full time. You don’t have anyone scheduling your day, and oftentimes you don’t even have an office to go to (if you work from home), so it’s easy to just kind of gently flow through your day rather than adopt a rigid schedule and institute a self-discipline plan that will keep you on task.

With this type of free form day, it’s easy to write out a list of higher level todo items which will quickly lead to anxiety because you haven’t broken them down into bite sized chunks that can be mindfully approached one by one. If you find yourself making a list and then not doing any of it and just procrastinating instead, this is probably why. You’re overwhelming yourself because you aren’t creating digestible tasks.

Break down all of your tasks into the smallest useful size possible. You might end up with 10x as many items on your todo list, but you’re going to feel a hell of a lot better when reading your list than if it just said “Paint the Mona Lisa” on it.

But if you take the time to slow down and walk yourself through each step of your golf swing, or your todo list, or any other multi-step process, you should be able to remain focused and productive. Eventually, as you keep carefully walking through each step, you’ll slowly start developing some muscle memory, meaning you’ll need to dedicate less and less energy to getting your work done.

What I assume White Hats think automation looks like

NOTE: I’m absolutely not advocating automated link building or blogger outreach or anything related to such practices in this post. While I’ve done these things in the past (and quite honestly, they work really well…if done correctly), that’s not the point of this post. I’m focusing on automated data collection for SEO purposes only.

Let’s get started.

Just because spamming is automated doesn’t mean that automation is spamming.

Why am I yelling? Because I am annoyed.

I learned SEO from affiliate marketers, so my viewpoint on SEO processes is biased towards automation compared to most of the mainstream guys. In internet marketing, most SEOs don’t bat an eyelash at automation; it speeds up your processes, giving you more free time to do more work that will ideally make you more money.

Now, automation can take many forms, ranging from automated Twitter feed and Google Alerts monitoring to aggressive black hat link spam. Somewhere in between falls ideas like automated data collection (such as what we do at serpIQ or what every single rank tracker in the world does) and crowdsourcing (such as what Kevin suggests in his blog post about collecting blogger contact information using Mechanical Turk).

SEO is a fairly contentious field when it comes to deciding what is OK to do and what is just spammy spam spam, so there is a good amount of FUD floating out there unfortunately. The FUD is created and spread by people who don’t actually understand the techniques they’re criticizing, and that’s not fun for anyone.

The reason I decided to write this post was specifically because of a response I saw on Inbound.org to my friend Kevin’s blog post. I’ll keep the response anonymous in this post.

First, let’s look at Kevin’s strategy

1. Gather a list of blogs you’re interested in reaching out to. You can use sites like Alexa or Technorati to find high quality, popular blogs for this step
2. Create a job at Mechanical Turk and ask the Turkers to collect all of the contact information they can find for each of the blogs in your list
3. Go do real work instead of mindlessly copying and pasting data into spreadsheets

Simple, efficient, extremely smart.

Now for the response:

“”High quality blogger outreach”? No way. You get what you pay for. It’s more like the good old “submit to 1000 search engines” kind of SEO automation.”

It took me a few minutes to recover from my head exploding, but once I gathered myself I decided to address this very naive White Hat FUD here. This trend bothers me so much that I’ve decided to yell my response with very large, bold text:

There Is No Value In Manually Collecting Any Data That Can Be Automated

I see so many SEO guides floating around that advocate manually collecting all kinds of information, from contact information to broken links, and they almost always consist of digging around the internet for the information and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting. This is creating an entire generation of SEOs who have no idea what good automation is and causes the FUD train to keep chugging along.

Here’s the problem with these manual data collection methods: Once you know what the data means and where the data comes from, you gain no benefit from manually collecting it in the future.

Let’s write that one more time for good measure:

Once you know what the data means and where the data comes from, you gain no benefit from manually collecting it in the future.

There’s simply no point. You might feel like you’re doing a lot of work because you’re toiling over your laptop, filling in cell after cell with blogger Twitter handles, but the reality is:

1. You’re not getting better at your job. No matter how many times you paste a Twitter handle into a spreadsheet, you won’t ever become a better SEO. You might improve your ability to press CMD + V, but who gives a damn.
2. You’re wasting precious time. Whether you work on your own campaigns or do client work, you’re simply wasting your time doing manual labor that can be automated. If I ever hired an SEO and they told me they spent 6 hours manually compiling a list of 100 bloggers to contact, I would fire them on the spot. The data is out there, don’t be a dummy and collect it efficiently.
3. Google is an automated system. They crawl the internet in a fully automated fashion, normalizing, indexing, and ranking information. You should be doing the same, otherwise you’re trying to breach a castle wall with a hammer.

If you’re ever faced with a task that is both normalized and repeatable, you should be looking for ways to automate it. Now, a lot of automation tasks require a decent amount of coding skill, I realize this. However, with the emergence of such tools as Zapier and IFTTT, in addition to software like uBot, you can develop quite an impressive set of automated tools that can be used for monitoring and data collection, with very little technical skills necessary.

Automation saves you time.

Automation makes you money.

I see so many White Hat SEOs dismissing anything even remotely resembling automation, and quite frankly, it’s an irresponsible thing for them to be doing. Automation is why we have Google in the first place, otherwise we’d still be clicking manually collected links in the Yahoo Directory. By spouting off about how some technique is spam when it isn’t, you’re hurting the SEO community at large.

And because of this, I am going to personally call out anyone who makes such claims. That’s right, I’m coming for you if you decide to unfairly dismiss a useful technique as spam. Disinformation helps no one, and we need to get it under control in the SEO world or else the opinion of SEO will just keep getting more negative.

There are a lot of completely appropriate ways to automate your job. Look for them and use them as much as possible, otherwise you’re just being inefficient.

Comic created by Jameel @ HalfJub.com

Side Note: I’m not exaggerating when I say that this exact scenario above actually happened to Sarah and I a few months ago. It was incredibly awkward.

The Scenario

So you’ve spent months researching, planning, coding, and testing your web app…only to describe it to other people as the “Facebook for Teachers” or the “Craigslist for Athletes”.

The Problem

Your product is YOURS. Describing your product by comparing to other products or companies, even if they aren’t direct competitors, causes a shift of focus from your product to both your product and the company you mentioned.

If someone is giving you an opportunity to tell them about your product, whether by asking for your elevator pitch in person or visiting your landing page and skimming down the screen, you absolutely need to pitch it perfectly and concisely. Given the fact that a pitch garners very short attention spans anyways, you can’t risk mentioning other products or companies in your pitch for fear of shifting your listener’s focus away from your product to an established product.

You might be thinking, “But comparing my product to an existing product makes it easy for people to understand what it is!”

This isn’t a good excuse.

The products you’re comparing to don’t use your product in their own descriptions. Facebook isn’t a “Myspace but better”, it is a site where you can keep in touch with friends. Craigslist isn’t an “Amazon for local purchases”, it is a site where you can list things to be bought or sold really easily online.

Additionally, if you can’t properly describe your product without having to mention some other product you don’t own, you have bigger positioning and marketing issues to deal with. ALL products can be described without having to reference any other specific products or companies.

The Psychology Behind This

The underlying psychological problem you’re creating here is people have trouble focusing on more than one subject at a time. By bringing up another product, you’re introducing another concrete thing that they now have to hold in their minds, which means you have less of their attention than when you started. And When you’re trying to pitch someone a product in the interest of landing them as a new customer, you can’t afford to lose any of their attention.

Here’s another way this can blow up in your face: What if they haven’t heard of your example product?

Sure, everyone’s heard of Facebook and Craigslist, but what if you’re talking to a florist and you describe yourself as the “Basecamp for Florists”…and she just stares at you blankly, making it obvious that she has no idea what Basecamp is. Now you’ve introduced another subject for her to focus on, and she doesn’t even know what it actually is! I can’t think of a better way to shoot yourself in the foot.

The Solution

So, how do you properly modify your pitch to be entirely focused on your own product? Let’s take the Basecamp for Florists example. You could describe it to a prospective customer as “An online system to manage your floral arrangement orders that also allows dead simple communication with your clients by putting all messages and notes in a single location.”

See? That describes exactly what your product does, and it keeps the focus entirely on your product. Any question your prospective customer could ask you will be focused on your product – there will be no split of focus between your product and an example you’re referencing.

This gives you a lot of advantages when pitching to prospective customers:

1. They won’t be asking “Oh, well, does it have to-do list templates like Basecamp?”
2. They won’t be asking why your pricing is different than Basecamp.
3. Most importantly, they won’t start thinking about Basecamp and realizing that they can probably just get by with what Basecamp has to offer and just ignore your product.

In addition to the risk of losing your listener’s focus, you can also possibly get yourself into a spot where you need to justify why your product is actually a better option than the well established example you used in your pitch. You NEVER want to be in a position where you need to justify your product’s pricing or features (or lack thereof) in comparison to some other product, because you’ve now given the upper hand to that other option.

What you want is to justify your product’s value in and of itself. That way, you can position yourself as the premium option and can justify higher prices because there isn’t an alternative to compare to at the time of the pitch.

Why isn’t there an alternative?

Because you never introduced one in the first place.

The Real Goal

The real goal is to grow your brand to the point where other people mention your product to describe their OWN product. If you can become a reference point, you’ve generally hit critical mass and are on the minds of all of your competitors. This is a good thing. Strive for it.

As my product is in the SEO space, I figured I would share a link building method that’s safe, effective, and easy to do…even for someone who has never done SEO in their life.

Let’s Get Started

First, a 17 word SEO primer: SEO is a popularity contest, and you need a lot of votes from influential people to win.

I KNOW THERE’S MORE TO IT.

In that primer, votes = links from other sites to yours and winning = ranking high in the search engines.

But that’s enough for us to get started, so please don’t raise objections to this summary. Let’s just roll with it.

So how do you rack up those votes, you ask? You can:

1. Cross your fingers and pray
2. Write some really good content, tell people about it, then do #1
3. Spam the ever living crap out of the internet
4. Actively participate in discussions across the internet, slowly increasing your brand awareness and reach

Again, I KNOW THERE’S MORE TO IT. Spare me.

For startups with founders who aren’t very well versed in SEO, I recommend a combination of #2 and #4. I’m not going to cover #2 here because, well, I don’t want to. I’m going to talk about #4.

You’re probably asking, “So, how do I actively participate in discussion across the internet and slowly increase my brand awareness and reach?” Well, I recommend the following.

The Really Easy Link Building SEO Strategy For Startups

Step 1) Brainstorm Some Keywords

There are lots and lots of ways to gather lists of keywords, from just scribbling down a list on paper to using fully automated tools (like serpIQ! </shameless-plug>). The method I’m going to recommend here is simple enough that anyone can do it in 5 minutes.

1. Obviously, write down your product name and any variations thereof.
2. Write down a few short phrases that define your product well enough so that if someone typed it into Google, it’d be reasonable for your product to show up in the results. Let’s take Basecamp as an example. Some keywords that we could describe Basecamp with include: “project management”, “small business project management”, “simple project management”. This really isn’t rocket science, it’s pretty easy to come up with these. Focus on simple, straight forward keywords.
3. Be specific, but not verbose. “simple project management web app for small businesses with fashion conscious founders” is not a good keyword.
4. Write down some keywords related to the problem your product solves. Again with Basecamp: “project management for remote teams”, “how to use milestones”, “shared todo lists”. These can be a little bit more verbose.
5. Write down as many competitor related keywords you can think of, including both brand and product names. “Asana”, “Active Collab”, “Planscope”

Step 2) Find Related Keywords For Each Keyword In Your List Using Google

Go to google and search for each of those keywords you wrote down. Scroll down to the bottom of each results page, and more often than not you’ll see a related keywords list. These are keywords Google has decided are very relevant to what you searched for. PAY ATTENTION TO THOSE. Grab all of those keywords and add them to your list as well.

At this point, you should have a few dozen keywords in your list. Read through it and throw away any keywords that are obviously not good.

Step 3) Generate RSS Feeds From Google Blog Search Results For Every Keyword

For whatever reason, people don’t talk about this much, but here’s a neat little trick. Every time you search for a keyword in Google Blog Search, you can generate an RSS feed at the bottom of the page to subscribe to that keyword. Then, whenever anything new shows up in their index, that will also show up in your RSS reader. Automated keyword mention monitoring? Yes please.

First, search in Google Blog Search for your keyword:

Then scroll down and click the rss feed link at the bottom of the page:

Grab all of these links for all of your keywords and put them into a spreadsheet list or just a text file for now.

Step 4) Add Keyword Feeds To Google Reader

(Note: You can use any feed reader, I’m just using Google’s for this example).

Go down your list of keyword feeds and subscribe to each one. After you add your first one, click the arrow next to it and select “New Folder” and make a folder named “Keyword Feeds”. As you add all of the rest of your feeds, add each one to this same folder.

Step 5) Put On Your Blog Commenting Game Face

You should now have a bunch of blog posts in your feed reader that you can visit and comment on. What you’ll want to do here is visit the posts that seem interesting or relevant, ACTUALLY READ THE BLOG POST, then leave a legitimate, insightful comment. Don’t just say thanks, don’t just pimp your product out. Contribute to the discussion.

Bloggers love comments. Especially on their brand new posts (which is why this method is so powerful). If you leave a good comment on a post, that blogger is going to love you forever. So do a good job here. Also, you don’t have to agree with the blogger necessarily. If you want to nicely object to what they wrote, that’s a great strategy too.

Another little trick is to reply to someone else’s comment. Play Devil’s Advocate or just enter the discussion from their comment instead of directly off the post. Just be natural.

Once you’ve left a comment on the post, you’re going to want to copy the url of that post and save it to a new spreadsheet or text document. You’re doing this because:

1. Most blogs have comment moderation on
2. You need to check and see when your post gets unmoderated

Finally, grab the rss feed of this blog you just commented on and subscribe to it in Google Reader. Put it in a folder named “Commented” like in the above screenshot.

Step 6) Monitor Your Comments

Periodically load up the list of urls you’ve saved of posts you’ve commented on previously. Go to a site like urlopener.com and open them up in your browser in batches of 10 or so. A trick here is to use a different browser (or incognito mode) than the one you commented in; reason being, most blog platforms will drop a cookie on you, so you’ll see your comment even if it’s in moderation.

Go through each url one by one and see which ones have been approved. When a comment has been approved:

1. Remove it from your list of urls in this spreadsheet
2. Move the feed in your feed reader from the “Commented” folder to an “Approved Comments” folder.
3. Do a little jig

Step 7) Rinse And Repeat

This strategy only takes about 15-30 minutes a day and can have a very nice positive impact on your bottom line over time both in traffic and (hopefully) conversions from that traffic. There’s no excuse not to do this. So long as you have a good amount of keyword feeds in your reader, you should be able to post 5-10 comments a day very easily.

The Inner Workings Of This Strategy

So there are a few reasons why this is a good strategy to follow for beginner SEOs and Startups.

1. It’s safe. Don’t listen to people who say building links is Black Hat. It’s perfectly ok to manually comment to your heart’s content. You won’t get slapped by Google for this.
2. Once you’ve gotten approved on a blog, you usually won’t get moderated any more. That doesn’t mean you should then just start shamelessly promoting your product or spamming every single post on that blog, it just means that you can comment on that blog in the future without having to go back and check to see if your comment got approved. Easy links at that point.
3. Repeat commenters on blogs makes bloggers happy, which means they will take notice of you and possibly write about you or just mention your product in their own lives.
4. Comments can send traffic too. Yes, links are good. But the traffic you get can also be great.
5. The benefits compound over time. The nature of Google and Page Rank and link sources is that they generally get stronger as they age. Getting a comment on a post on the day it’s published means that one day that comment might evolve into a very strong link as that blog post grows in strength itself.

So that’s it. You can get this strategy up and running in under and hour, and act on it every day in about 30 minutes a day. This is very much worth your time and every single Startup out there should be doing this.

You might be thinking, who cares? Well, I guess I do. And everyone who uses the title Growth Hacker instead of Marketer does, as well.

The internet startup world is typically drowning in buzz words at any given time. As of 2012, some the big ones are Lean Startup, Cloud Deployment, Growth Hacker, and a few others. Typically, they’re fancy phrases attached to not so fancy ideas (In order: talking to your customers early and often, hosting as a service, and marketing with data) and honestly, they’re just plain tiring and unnecessary 99% of the time.

So, why is the title “Growth Hacker” a bunch of BS?

Because it’s just a way for marketing averse startups to hire marketers without having to publicly say they’re hiring marketers.

The Hacker News startup world notoriously scoffs at anything to do with Marketing (just feels dirty), SEO (SPAMMERS!), or user tracking and conversion optimization (omgmyprivacy). So when these companies all of a sudden start realizing they need to actually, ya know, make some money, they also realize they need to bring in some people who specialize in growing customer bases: Marketers.

But since marketing is taboo, startuppers just came up with a new name, “Growth Hacker” and ran with that rather than just facing the fact that a Growth Hacker IS a Marketer.

Let’s grab a definition of “Growth Hacker” from Andrew Chen:

Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.

I’ll give you a second to digest the buzzwords and fluffiness of this definition before we continue.

…

Good? Alright, let’s go.

The internet is a fantastic landscape for marketers. Why? Because you can track your efforts extremely quickly and extremely accurately. Gone are the days of timing a Radio ad correctly and crossing your fingers. We can now look at our usage data for our products, refine our offering and marketing message to cater well to our customer base, and then split test various ideas programmatically and let the data speak for itself. This isn’t hacking, this isn’t magic…it’s just plain ol’ Marketing at a much more advanced and accurate level.

NOT ALL MARKETERS LOOK LIKE THIS DUDE

I have to assume that most people’s idea of what a Marketer is is cribbed from some hybrid of Mad Men and Vince the Shamwow guy. Slimey and fluffy and not really worth the money or effort. And from this assumption emerges a need for a new title that wipes away all of the cruft and ickiness of “Marketing” and instead makes it cool and hip and developer friendly by calling it “Growth Hacking”.

The example tossed at me for why a Growth Hacker is not a Marketer was this (I have no interest in starting a flame war so I won’t mention names):

“This is not inbound marketing but building product that, at its core, is focused on growth. LinkedIn, Zynga, Quora, Twitter, and Facebook all have growth teams.

Do you know Dropbox’s brilliant referral strategy? That was the brainchild of Sean Ellis (growth hacker), Ivan Kirigin (growth hacker), and Dropbox leadership.”

To which I replied:

“The goal of a marketer is to grow a customer base. That’s what these growth hackers are doing, they’re just doing it in a more technically advanced way via data confirmation and split testing.

Referral strategies have been around for decades, the Dropbox guys didn’t hack anything they just applied an old principle to a new technology.

Growth hacker and marketer are synonymous titles.”

The two guys mentioned as “growth hackers” in the comment above just so happened to be coders who implemented a very effective referral system for Dropbox.

Am I saying what they did wasn’t amazing?

Absolutely not.

Was it a brilliant example of growth hacking?

Absolutely not.

It was just a referral incentive system implemented in a very smooth and simple way, something used in marketing since its inception because it’s highly effective. And we can tell if it’s highly effective instantly nowadays with the technology that now exists for tracking and testing.

Marketing has traditionally been a discipline that constantly requires one to think outside the box and come up with new ways to introduce new products to existing markets or to build new markets for existing products. It’s not black magic nor is it hacking at all. Just because you use cohorts and automated funnel analysis and multivariate testing and referral schemes doesn’t mean you’re no longer a Marketer and all of a sudden a Growth Hacker…you’re just a really good Marketer.

So please, Startup world, drop the fluffy BS “Growth Hacker” title and focus on growing your companies rather than coming up with cool new job titles.

EDIT (08/28/2012)

I have to admit, I had two motivations for writing this post:

1. I wanted to point out how ridiculous the pretentious title of Growth Hacker is
2. I wanted to see how successful (in terms of traffic) an incendiary post would be

Well, I think I did a decent job of #1, and #2 as well, seeing as how this post got about 4500 unique visitors in about 3 hours yesterday.

Really what I’m trying to say here is that “Growth Hacker” is a smug, pretentious title to use. You should feel embarrassed introducing yourself as a Growth Hacker, because after you explain what the hell a Growth Hacker is to the person you’re speaking with, they will respond with “oh, so you’re really good at marketing?”

It’s the same as all the BS ninja and pirate titles for coders. Would you ever introduce yourself to someone as a “Ruby on Rails Rockstar”? Good god no. And if you did for some reason, after explaining what a rockstar coder is, the person will just respond with “oh, so you’re really good at programming?”

The startup world is constantly trying to separate itself from the traditional business world with new job titles and business techniques. It’s all just a waste of time, there’s no need for the separation.

Now before I even begin to go into the story of the post and the subsequent traffic it has received, I want to start by thanking everyone for reading, commenting, and sending over such kind feedback. It was really a great experience overall for me to see the response from you all.

The Traffic! Look At All The Traffic!

So I would imagine most of you are interested in what kind of traffic being in the top 5 of Hacker News can actually send to your site on a relatively normal day. Below are some screenshots of the traffic over those days, along with the referrer and social breakdowns:

Now here are the referrer stats for that same time frame along with bounce rate and all that jazz:

Pretty neat eh? Lot’s and lots of traffic, more than this blog has gotten all year combined I think. Sweet.

Also seems that I picked up another 60 or so RSS subscribers and roughly the same amount of twitter followers. Very cool.

A Journey Down Fail Blvd

I woke up Saturday morning to many reports of my blog hitting a Bandwidth Limit, effectively taking it down for most of the weekend. I reached out to my host’s 24/7 support line and didn’t get a response until late Sunday (I don’t think they know what 24/7 actually means). That was frustrating as I probably missed out on a whole extra day of traffic, but oh well.

On Sunday I was able to move this site over a fresh Linode running behind nginx and using W3 Total Cache. You can probably already tell it is much snappier. I still need to tweak my nginx settings to make sure the site won’t buckle under heavy load again, but since everything is cached, it’s pretty rock solid now. I might even hook things up to CloudFlare soon as well for that extra security blanket.

Lesson to be learned from my mistake:

So What’s Next?

Well, I have a few plans:

• A few of you asked if I could expand on some of the rules in my last post, to which I responded “absolutely!”. Now I should probably actually do that. In speaking with some friends, the idea of expanding each rule into its own few thousand word post could be a really nice way to fully capture what I’m going for with each idea, as well as provide a means of giving both good and bad examples of each rule.
• Even cooler is that if I can expand each rule into its own post, I could compile them all and clean them up into a single eBook that I would just give away here for free (I might sell a printed version I guess, mainly to cover the costs of printing and to say that I’ve officially printed a damn book). We’ll see, that will take some time to fully see through, but would be a fun project.
• I have plans to write out a Manifesto of my own personal beliefs when it comes to life and business that will extend far beyond these 12 Rules I wrote out. I have that fully outlined out, I just need to start cranking out some content. I’m hoping to start writing and publishing a post every other day from now on throughout the summer, so we’ll see how that goes.
• I have a few other random blog post ideas that go along with startup mentality and strategy that I think will be good to share here as well.
• Finally, I’ve been thinking about trying to contact and interview fellow startup founders and posting the interviews in a similar fashion to how UsesThis.com does their posts (a site which I am obsessed with)

So those are my ideas for the time being. I’m always open for suggestions, so send them over. You’ll probably also notice the snazzy new WordPress theme, gotta love ThemeForest

Happy 4th of July to all my American friends.

Now, I know for every rule in this list, you can name exceptions. I get that. And I don’t care.

This list is for someone looking to start their first Internet Startup who is interested in bootstrapping a reliably profitable company that can then open the door to the next big project.

That’s my plan; I am running a profitable company, and I plan to use it and the experiences and capital I am getting from it to slingshot myself into the next, probably riskier project. The rules below are compiled together because if you can design a product that follows all of them, you have a much better chance of investing your time and energy into something that stands to be profitable and successful.

I firmly believe first time startup founders shouldn’t be trying to build the next Reddit or Facebook. Yes, I know they’re both profitable (now). However, they’re both exceptions to the rule of both the markets they’re in. They’re great ideas to pursue after you have money in the bank and are not risking everything on your idea. Until you reach that point, I think you should focus on ideas that, while smaller, can much more easily be made profitable.

This is just my opinion and I know many out there will think I’m an idiot. That’s cool. I dig that. But hopefully those who don’t think I’m an idiot and are looking to get started in the world of internet startups will find this set of rules useful.

I have two main goals for this post:

1. To provide a set of rules for first time startup founders to follow to help increase their chances of building a successful, profitable company
2. To use as many tacky stock photos as possible

Rule #1: Sell something

This seems so outrageously trivial to even mention, but there is unfortunately a disease amongst (especially younger) startup founders that all you need to be successful is something that is popular or “viral”. Building a site with a ton of traffic and then slapping ads on it and profiting is something that is an exception to the rule…more often than not, your “business” will fail far before you’re ever able to even attempt to monetize.

I said “business” because by definition, if your company isn’t selling something, you have a project, not a product. The Internet has opened the doors for “companies” that raise lots of venture capital money and grow a huge user base without even beginning to think about trying to be profitable (Ya know, that one metric that trumps all others in the business world? The bottom line? The…never mind).

Now I know a lot of people who make their living exclusively from either ads or affiliate marketing, arguably having never “sold” anything for the lifetime of their business. These people are highly specialized and have niche knowledge that most simply don’t have (hell I couldn’t do what they do). Unless you are starting with lots of capital, focus on profit first. Always. It is risky as hell to target growth first and then monetize later.

Rule #2: Build a product your customer can directly or indirectly use to make money

This directly extends the first item in the list. The best customers to try and monetize are those who will take your product and use it to make money in some way.

There are two types of ways they could make money with your product (There are actually a lot of ways, but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll stick to the two main ones):

1. They either resell your product or sell whatever your product produces (such as a website builder, SEO report tool, etc)
2. They use your product to cut down their own spending or eliminate the need for certain employees (Think automated time tracking, automated invoicing, etc…anything to reduce the amount of administrative work they might be paying disposable employees to do).

Monetizing the average internet user is hard. Yes, it’s possible. Yes, there are lots of startups out there that have figured it out. But the success rate of B2B companies is almost always going to be higher than B2C companies because business owners understand that what they need to operate their company oftentimes costs money.

In this internet world we live in, most consumers are appalled at the idea of having to pay for anything ever. So rather than fight that uphill battle, target customers who are ok with the idea of spending money and you’ll be able to sleep much more soundly at night.

Rule #3: Build a “must have” product, not a disposable “nice-to-have” product

If you frequent any sites like Hacker News, you’ll inevitably see a lot of people posting their “startup” ideas for review by the community, and a good amount of them are really neat projects, but they aren’t mission critical products. If you want to increase your chances of early stage success with your first startup, you need to focus on building products that once your customer has started to use, they will be in pain if they have to get rid of your product.

The idea of building products that solve customer’s pain points is spot on; there are few better ways to ensure success in a startup than by building something that directly alleviates your customers’ problem.

The true key to startup success is to make a product so good that you alleviate your customer’s original pain point, and then make the idea of losing your product the new pain point.

Rule #4: Replace part of your customer’s workflow with a better solution

So after reading the previous rule, you might be wondering how you go about making a “must-have” product. The easiest way to do that is to look at your prospective customers’ current business processes and identify steps or tasks of theirs that can be simplified, automated, or eliminated.

An example: there are a ton of companies launching lately that can do intelligent transactional emailing. What the hell is that, you ask? These products can do things like “Email a reminder to setup a new project to any customer who signed up for a free trial more than 2 days ago who hasn’t already created a new project”. This is an incredible tool, and is sure to increase your conversion rates significantly, and it would be an absolute pain in the ass to have to do such a thing by hand if the product didn’t exist.

Take your customers’ pains and build something that is so delicious they can’t help but pay you.

Rule #5: Have a “no-touch sales process”

I have no idea if “no-touch sales process” is actually a phrase or not, but I like it so we’re going to use it for this rule. A no-touch sales process is the exact opposite of a high touch sales process. A high touch sales process generally consists of multiple steps, lots of hand holding, and a complete inability for your customer to buy your product without having to interact with a human being on your end.

A real life example would be the process of buying a car. You can’t just walk up and swipe your credit card at a car vending machine and drive away, you have to jump through multiple hoops before getting those keys.

The simplest way to think of a no-touch sales process in web apps, and the internet in general, is that if your customer doesn’t have all the information about your product and the ability to buy your product ON THEIR OWN from you while they sit in their pajamas at 2:30AM and you’re sleeping, then you’re just asking for failure. We are living in a global economy, you will have customers in every damn time zone in the world as you start growing. Your customers need to be able to give you money at any time, as simply as possible, without you having to do a single thing.

Rule #6: Build something that can scale independently of your staff

I think the easiest way to explain this is to give an example of what you should NOT do. Think about Groupon. They have tens of thousands of employees. They have this many employees because:

1. They have a massive sales staff to keep deals flowing in for each new day
2. They need a shit ton of customer service people to service all of their customers.

They aren’t running a scalable company. Their growth is entirely dependent on the size of their staff. They aren’t using the advantages technology and automation give us all in any way whatsoever. Hence why their balance sheet is so god awful.

The more customers you can pack into the same server architecture, the more sales you can get without having to hire new staff, the higher your customer-to-engineer ratio, the better you are at winning the Internets.

The internet has given us all the opportunity to launch a company for the cost of a month’s worth of hosting (and with companies like Heroku, not even that anymore). Build a product that’s growth is independent of the underlying staff responsible for it.

In fact, same goes for underlying technology as well. I’ve seen many newer web app developers say that they’ll put each customer on a different VPS or give them each a different database so things are more sharded and secure. For the love of god, stop fighting against modern technology. Centralize everything. Unless you’re building medical records systems or something, follow convention (if you’re building a medical records system, you shouldn’t be taking advice from this post anyways, get out of here).

Rule #7: Avoid products that rely on a community to exist and grow

I’m using the example of a community here, but there are a lot of other examples as well of certain products you should avoid building as your first startup. The underlying maxim for this rule is this: don’t build a product that’s value is dependent on something out of your control.

It’s really damn hard to build a community.

It’s really really damn hard to build a community of people who don’t just lurk in the shadows.

It’s really really really damn hard to build a community of people who actually actively participate.

If the value of your product goes up and down based on the amount of participation from the community, you’re kinda fucked.

I can’t stress this enough.

Yes, I know there’s lots of big communities out there that arose from the dirt and are so cool and popular, but few if any got their start entirely organically…so unless you have Paul Graham blogging about you or already have a big following in some form or fashion, stay away from community based startups for your first startup project.

Rule #8: Build a specialized version of an ordinary product targeted at a niche you’re acquainted with

I’m a pretty good coder, and I feel I have a good grasp of startups and how to strategically design a web business. That being said, I would never try to beat Basecamp at their own game. Going head to head with Quickbooks Online makes me want to be sick. “Hey, let’s build a better Youtube!”…just, just stop it.

We all have weird hobbies, or backgrounds, or interests. Smash those together with your technical know how or design talents and build a niche targeted product.

Example? https://planscope.io/ Sure, you could probably use Basecamp and do about the same kind of stuff as PlanScope. However, PlanScope is targeted at a very specific type of customer (namely, a digital consultant or small agency with clients). They specialized the generic project management software we’re all so used to and targeted it at a specific niche.

This limits their market size, yes, but it also:

1. Increases their chances of appealing to and pleasing a very specific type of user
2. Doesn’t force them to attack a bunch of 800lb gorillas all at once.

Rule #9: Don’t avoid competitors

“WTF you just said avoid the big guys!” Yeah, I know. However, I think a lot of founders make a misstep when they’re planning out their ideas when they stop in their tracks if they see competitors out there. Competitors are a good thing. Why? A competitor with customers is a market validator. What does this mean to you? It means you don’t have to spend your time and money finding out if anyone will actually buy your shit.

Piggy back off of your competitor’s efforts in finding the market you want to target and then kick their ass by building a better product. There’s always room in any market for something simpler, faster, or more beautiful.

I’ve covered this in more detail here: Competitors Are Awesome You Dummy

Rule #10: Never compete solely on price

Careful readers might have noticed that I didn’t list lower prices as a way to compete in the last rule. That’s because pricing your product as the cheapest solution simply so you can market it as the cheapest solution is a great way to go down in flames. Your product’s price should be based on the 10x Rule. What is that, you ask? The 10x Rule is that your product should deliver 10x more value than the price of your product. So if your product costs your customers $99/month, you should be delivering about $1000 in value.

You might be thinking “How the hell can I charge so little for a product delivering that much value?” Well:

1. Your product shouldn’t cost a lot to run. Servers are cheap, storage is cheap, bandwidth is free at a lot of hosts nowadays. Something like Basecamp probably costs 37signals less than 1% of their gross revenue to run their technical architecture.
2. Imagine you built FreshBooks. I would imagine FreshBooks has replaced more than a handful of bookkeeper’s jobs since its inception. Even a part time employee can end up costing thousands per month. So your cheap little SaaS product all of a sudden replaced an employee and the customer who bought your product LOVES YOU NOW.

Even more careful readers will also realize from this rule that the 10x Rule is a very powerful marketing tactic. You’ll invariably still get potential customers who will complain about your pricing. But if you ask them if they “Pay more than $3.33/day to their book keeper to do the same job?” you can very quickly change their minds. Spin it spin it spin it.

Rule #11: Build something that you know can exist for at least 2 years

Most startups hit their sweet spot at about 18 months. Yes I know there are exceptions. But don’t pick a fleeting idea for your startup. Don’t try to capitalize on something trendy. Oftentimes the most boring niches and products are some of the most profitable.

The internet allows us to start a whole new company every 2-5 years, which is unprecedented. I plan to start at least 5 companies in my life. That’s a ridiculous notion when compared to even 20 years ago. Capitalize on this ability and build awesome companies that can last 2-5 years.

The internet moves fast, you need to move with it but you still need to give your ideas an opportunity to grow.

Rule #12: Don’t plan for exits or VC money

If your business plan includes the phrases “get acquired” or “raise a big round” you 1) need to stop reading TechCrunch and 2) need to rethink what the hell you’re doing. Exits are the exception. VC rounds are the exception. Focus on selling your product for a profit. Nothing else is as important as selling your product for a profit, I promise.

Focus on selling your product for a profit

Focus on selling your product for a profit

Focus on selling your product for a profit

Closing Thoughts

Of course, it’s entirely possible to build a wildly successful startup that doesn’t follow a single rule in this list. And that’s what makes the tech world so awesome to be honest. My goal with this list isn’t to provide the ONLY set of rules for building your first profitable startup, but instead to provide a SUGGESTED set of rules that will hopefully set you up the best for success in your first startup.

One major misstep I think that we made was back in February of this year. Amongst other things, we switched from a usage limited free trial plan to essentially a freemium plan. Previously, you could sign up and analyze 5 keywords for free, then you’d have to upgrade to continue. Now, you can sign up and analyze 5 keywords the first day, then 2 per day after that. When we made this switch, the mentality was that this would allow for people to have a longer time period to test out serpIQ before pulling the trigger and upgrading.

However, after doing a lot of research (and looking at our numbers) it appears that there was a more subtle thing going on that was negatively impacting our bottom line.

Before I dive into the psychology here, I want to define freemium and free trial and also drop in some cautionary statements. So first, here are the definitions:

Freemium: A free plan (usually limited in how much you can do with a product, whether that’s save pictures, analyze keywords, etc) with premium plan options to upgrade to once you outgrow it. Usually, freemium is feature or usage limited, but unlimited in duration.

Free Trial: These can have a few permutations, but I’ll explain the most common one (and the one we’ll be using in the next iteration of serpIQ): A “mini-plan” that allows you to try all of the aspects of a product or service for a limited amount of time (usually 7 days, 14 day, 30 days, 45 days, or 60 days). Sometimes companies will charge you at the end of the trial, sometimes they won’t take your payment information until after the trial is over. Regardless, the main point is that free trials end at some point.

Now, time for my cautionary statemenst:

1. I am not a psychologist, I just like psychology (and read about it) a lot.
   
2. Most of my post here is going to be anecdotal, I can’t share performance numbers yet as we haven’t launched our new setup yet. I’m merely explaining the mindset behind the changes we’re making. Freemium works. Free trials work. Your mileage will vary, of course.

Ok, so let’s get going.

There is a subtle psychological difference between Freemium and Free Trials in the mind of your potential customer.

When a customer sees that you have a free plan, you’re planting a seed in their brain that your product, in some form, is free. This has a domino-like effect on your customer’s mindset that will affect their purchasing decisions from the moment the seed is planted.

What’s happening here is that when a customer gets the idea that your product is free (even if they don’t have all of the features of a premium plan) they immediately start categorizing it with all of the other free products and services that they use online. Over time, friction will begin to grow in their minds towards the idea of ever having to pay for this supposedly free service of yours, and your product will need to overcome this friction in order to convert them to a paying customer.

Additionally, by offering your product for free, you’re subconsciously telling your customer that “yeah, our service is so cheap to run that we can afford to let you use it for free”. This puts your customer into the mindset of “well if it doesn’t cost them anything for me to use this, why should I pay them for it?” If that thought is running through your customer’s head, you’re dead in the water.

Of course, there are thousands of instances where the freemium model works for companies, but the reason it works for these companies is that they have architected the freemium plans very very well to essentially be the equivalent of getting a cheap buffet at a nice restaurant while all the other patrons are eating their awesome steaks behind glass a few feet above your head.

These freemium customers need to be enticed by all of the cool stuff they *could* have if they just cross that divide and upgrade their account to a premium plan. You’ll notice that companies that employ a freemium plan model are usually companies where the cost of offering what they do for free is extremely cheap (to the point of being negligible in the overall scheme of things).

A good example of this is Evernote. The cost of storing the data you could possibly put into Evernote is ridiculously low. That allows them to offer you the whole product for free, where you can fall in love and start incorporating it in your life. But then one day all of a sudden, you’re out of space. You can’t bear to part with Evernote at this point, you rely on it every day. So the friction to upgrade your plan is nearly gone and you punch in your credit card info.

As you can see in this graphic of various Evernote conversion numbers, they don’t reach peak conversion numbers until TWO YEARS after signup:
Now, with serpIQ, we incur costs on every keyword that’s processed in our system. Granted, it’s a small amount, but we’re still paying for premium APIs and other services, where there’s a direct data processing cost for each keyword that comes through our system. And there are a lot of companies out there with similar setups where there are real costs associated with usage (beyond negligible storage and usage costs, like with Evernote or maybe Basecamp). These types of company’s are much better suited for a Free Trial as you can control your costs better and you can position your product better as a Premium Service that costs money to use.

The main motivating force behind the freemium model is that you can use it to grow a very large userbase and then even with low conversion numbers, you can still become profitable. The risk you run is that even with the cheapest services, there are still costs that can add up (especially when you start getting thousands upon thousands of users) so if you don’t start converting like you thought you would, your growth might actually be the death of your product.

Remember, more users does not mean more profit. I can’t stress this enough. You have to monetize effectively to grow a profitable business, otherwise you’re just becoming the popular kid in school.

The Psychological Impact of Offering a Free Trial

The important psychological difference with a Free Trial is that from the moment the potential customer comes in contact with your product (and free trial) they are being reminded that they’re being allowed to TRY your product, and that they have a LIMITED amount of time to try it before they have to BUY it.

Your product is in no way free, you’re just reducing the the initial signup friction. This is a huge difference from using a freemium plan, where a user signs up under the pretense that as long as they stay within certain limits, they can always have free use of your product. With a free trial, the clock starts ticking the moment a customer registers and they’re completely aware of this.

This opens the door to a very different marketing strategy for the Free Trial companies. Let’s say you’re going to offer a 7-day Free Trial to your product. When your potential customers sign up for your free trial, you need to be doing everything in your power to show the true utility/power/greatness of your product in those 7 days.

You need to not only walk them through your product and show them how it all works and make sure their engagement is high, you also need to be emailing them with tips, tutorials, testimonials, videos, anything that will convince them to come back and USE YOUR PRODUCT.

You need to force your customer through your product’s entire workflow repeatedly in that 7 day period so that they can feel what it’s like to actually own your product, and hopefully become dependent on your product to the point where stopping use of it will be a bigger burden than paying for it and signing up.

The advantage you have when offering a free trial versus a freemium plan is that this push to convert your users to paying customers is transparent. They knew when they signed up for your trial that they were doing a digital test drive of your product, and they’ll subconsciously already be in a buying mindset, whether or not they end up buying your product.

From day 1, you’re showing the customer that your product costs something to use, and your job is to show them in that trial period that the benefit your product brings to them blows away the cost they’ll incur by signing up.

Nothing is hidden from your users in the trial period: they can use your product and its features, and if they want to continue, they need to become a paying customer. They get a taste of everything, which opens the door to your customer growing dependent on your product and the benefits it provides them, which is how you convert customers. You gain control of your funnel and subsequently gain leverage in the sales process.

A perfect example is HelpScout (I actually got a trial-ending reminder email while writing this post). I’ve already started using their product, and I like it a lot. And since it’s a time limited free trial, they have me right where they want me. I now need them for my company, so when I get this email:

…my first thought is “OH SHIT my company is going to go under without this, of course I’m going to sign up right now!”

Boom. They converted me.

Now of course, this all will vary widely by niche and market. serpIQ is in the Internet Marketing and SEO niche, where customers seem to be divided between people who want everything for free or who will pay a premium for a product, with very little left in between for a modestly priced product. So I’m in a position where I have to decide what direction I want to aim in terms of acquiring new customers. As I’ve been looking at our freemium option numbers, it just doesn’t seem like the right position for us: customers in this space will gladly use something for free indefinitely if they can.

This is a topic I’ve been thinking about A LOT in the last few months. Freemium and Free Trials seem roughly equivalent on first thought, but the subconscious differences can have a massive impact on your bottom line. You have to look at what you’re offering, what your competitors are offering, your costs, and ultimately your growth strategy to determine what is best for you and your company.

The bottom line is this: with both freemium and free trials, your job is to convince a potential customer that your product is worth paying for. With a freemium option, you will be creating your own friction by making your customer treat you like all of their other free services they use, making it hard for you to ultimately convert them. With a free trial, you have much more control over the sales process and funnel and can architect everything around the VALUE of your product and the BENEFITS it will bring to your customers (once they sign up).

I plan on covering this topic a few more times from some other angles, so I would love to hear your feedback on this post so I can use that feedback with future posts.

Plug: I learned a ridiculous amount of stuff regarding Free Trials and SaaS marketing in general from this course: Free Trial Dominator Lincoln is a smart dude and is super responsive, and this was a great investment considering how much I’ve already taken away from it. I recommend you check it out if you’re into SaaS products.