When I started public speaking in 2008 I was really bad. Nervous. Content didn’t land. Often times I didn’t “get” my audience.

I spoke a few times in 2008/2009, but it wasn’t until 2010 when I made strides towards getting better. As I did it I stumbled upon a framework of how I view public speaking.

My mental model of a talk has 3 aspects that should work in tandem:

• Content
• Delivery
• Entertainment

Content
Content can be inspirational, aspirational, tactical…maybe a few others?

The mistake I made early on was making my content too tactical and ignoring delivery and entertainment. So my talks came across very dry.

This was a reaction to watching speakers like Tony Robbins give talks almost completely devoid of actionable content, but his delivery and entertainment levels were off the charts.

And that bothered me. A lot. So I over-corrected in the other direction.

The key with content is to know your audience and their expectations.

If Tony Robbins took the stage at one of his events and gave an amazing in-depth tutorial on how to run Facebook ads, people would mutiny.

Because that’s not what they expect from Tony Robbins.

I think Tony is a phenomenal speaker for the RIGHT audience (those who need motivation, not those who need specific tactics). Gary V. is similar.

Delivery
Delivery is about stage presence. Energy. Confidence.

You know it when you see it – some people have great stage presence, other people (like me in 2008) seem nervous and meek. Over-caffeinated and stressed.

This one takes a lot of repetition to overcome (for those who don’t have it naturally), whether on your own or with a speaking coach.

Entertainment
Entertainment is the third piece.

If you are funny on stage…I hate you.

I have never been able to pull off “funny.” I am jealous of speakers like Patio11 and Lianna Patch who can rattle off joke after joke from stage. This isn’t me.

If it’s not you, my best advice is to lean into being yourself. For me, this turned into telling super nerdy jokes about programming and physics.

Or showing 60-second videos during a short intermission in my talk. I’ve struggled to be funny on stage so I’ve taken a different approach that’s more inline with who I am.

Not saying it works, but it’s the best I’ve been able to pull off.

After running MicroConf for nearly 10 years we’ve had more than 200 speakers on stage (including attendee speakers).

With MicroConf, I’ve noticed the best talks have amazingly applicable content, good delivery (doesn’t have to be amazing), and a bit (but not too much) entertainment.

But your mileage may vary based on the audience.

Out of Balance
What’s interesting is if you imagine a talk with only great content (but poor delivery and no entertainment) – it’s super dry.

Great delivery and entertainment but shallow content? That’s a motivational speech.

Great entertainment but vapid content and poor delivery? That might feel like a poor stand-up comedy routine.

I have a hard time imagining a great talk that doesn’t have a dose of each of these 3 aspects.

The post The 3 Aspects of a Great Conference Talk first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

Every once in a while I receive an email from a reader/podcast listener that goes a little something like:

I made a change to my [UX/UI/positioning/pricing/terms] and it seemed to go well. But out of my 900 customers, 3 wrote in with scathing emails (1 even raged at me on Twitter).

It had a huge impact on me, and affected my mindset for the next day and a half. How can I handle this kind of situation better so it doesn’t derail me next time?

– Person who’s trying to do the right thing

In this example I’ve chosen to call out making a change to a software product, but this post covers anything you receive negative feedback about: a blog post, a comment on Twitter, or a job description someone decides isn’t to their liking.

I believe that more than half of what it takes to be a successful founder is managing your own psychology.

It’s knowing enough about yourself that you’re able to avoid wallowing in stress and destroying your productivity by turning speed bumps into roadblocks.

Here are a few coping strategies I’ve developed over the years for dealing with public criticism (many with the guidance of my founder whisperer spouse):

#1: Try not to take it personally
This is easier said than done, but the first thing I try to do when I receive angry or critical feedback is step back and say:

This person doesn’t know me. They don’t know the level of thought that went into this change. They’re just typing things because they’re flippant and impulsive.

They wouldn’t say this to my face, at a conference or at a cocktail party. It’s not personal.

– Me, trying not to take it personally

#2: Don’t ruminate
Don’t create a vicious cycle by stressing about this constantly for hours or days. Honestly, it’s not as big of a deal as it feels right now.

#3: Get a sanity check
If you’re in a mastermind group, this is something to bring to your next call (or reach out to folks individually as it’s happening).

When you share experiences like this, and someone else says that it also happened to them, just a few weeks ago, it gives you a sense that you’re not alone. That camaraderie can normalize the experience.

#4: Know that this is pretty much inevitable
It sucks, but it happens to all of us. If you’re putting anything interesting out into the world, you’re going to have people get mad about something at some point.

This is par for the course if you are doing interesting things in public.

#5: Don’t send flippant responses
Boomerang or snooze those emails/Tweets for a day to give yourself time to think about it. I have never once sent a hurried/outraged/flippant response that I was happy about the next day.

#6: Just because someone is mad, doesn’t mean you did something wrong
Depending on your personality, this can be hard to remember.

If this is more than an isolated complaint – such as a public outcry from dozens of people – it’s time to consider whether you dropped the ball on this one. And consider what steps you can take to make things right.

On the flip side, there are people who spend the majority of their days being outraged. Today may just be their day to be outraged at you.

This post is an expansion on ideas I discussed in a podcast episode earlier this year. Thanks to Justin Jackson for encouraging me to take those ideas and put pen to paper.

The post How to Deal With Public Criticism first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

I co-host a podcast that focuses on bootstrapping software startups. Last week as my co-host and I dug into some struggles he’s running into getting his product to escape velocity, I started saying a phrase I hadn’t used before:

It sounds like you’re taking speed bumps and turning them into roadblocks.

As a founder you can choose to look at an obstacle as something that keeps you from moving forward (a roadblock), or as something that slows you down for a minute as you continue along your path (a speed bump).

As I look back at my experience building startups I can see how my own thinking has evolved over time. In the early days everything seemed like an insurmountable roadblock; a company-ending event.

These days I force myself to view things as speed bumps. As I’ve made this seemingly simple mental shift, the more effective and less stressed I’ve become.

Roadblocks
Problems are inevitable when you are building a company. When they arise, if you find yourself using phrases like the following, your founder lens is viewing them as roadblocks:

This is too big to fix.

If this doesn’t work, the business is finished.

I’m out of ideas. I can’t make this work.

Obviously there are situations where a problem is an actual roadblock. This is a business-ending situation where a platform is shutting down their API or you’re being sued out of existence. While these things happen, they are much, much less common than speed bumps.

Speed bumps
The tricky part about speed bumps is they masquerade as roadblocks. They do this by taking advantage of your founder brain. The level of stress and uncertainty that we experience as we’re building companies leaves us vulnerable to believing things that simply aren’t true.

Often, we do this because the level of stress we’re experiencing is high and our minds don’t quite know how to handle it. When we’re in this constant fight or flight mode, most things feel like an existential threat.

“Business-ending”
I recall working on landing a large customer for Drip, and my inner voice was saying:

If you don’t land this customer, the business is going to fail.

That statement is factually inaccurate. It would be a disappointment if we didn’t land the customer. But every month several large potential customers showed up in our inbox. We had options.

This was absolutely a speed bump, not a roadblock. But I let it become a roadblock in my mind, taking a toll on my happiness and productivity in the process.

In the early days of TinySeed I spoke with a founder who decided not to accept our investment terms. My inner monologue was telling me:

Our approach is too new and people aren’t ready. It’s not going to work.

Yet here we are 6 months later with a full batch of startups I couldn’t be more proud to work with. In retrospect I turned a minor rejection (a speed bump) into a mental roadblock that stuck with me for multiple days.

Unnecessary Stress
Roadblocks put stress on your mind. Stress on your body. Stress on your relationships. It’s no way to live, especially for folks who are building startups to improve our lives rather than re-arranging our lives around our companies.

We don’t have to grow at all costs or answer to a board. We do it with the handicap of not being able to raise buckets of funding. It’s hard-earned freedom, and it’s something you shouldn’t squander by letting your mind manufacture roadblocks where there are none.

At some point a couple years ago I realized that all the stress and all the worry over the 14 years of building companies was not a good thing. When people ask what my biggest regret has been as a founder, it’s typically that I stressed too much about things that were going to work out. I made roadblocks out of speed bumps.

Optionality
My process for solving problems has moved from stressing about everything that could go wrong, to mapping out 3 or 4 possible options if things do go wrong. Often these options are not optimal, but none of them would be business ending.

Typically they involve spending more money, investing more time, turning down a lucrative deal, navigating a sticky situation. These are all things I’d prefer not to do, but none would ruin the company.

Making the mental shift from “everything will end” to “we’ll switch to plan B, C or D” has been one of the biggest leaps in my own psychology. I’ve realized this over the past few years, but heard it in full force in the podcast episode I mentioned at the start of this essay.

I would not be overstating to say this has been a life-changing realization for me. My regret is that I wish I’d discovered this years ago.

The post Roadblocks vs. Speed bumps first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

The response was overwhelming.

Hundreds and hundreds of tweets, re-tweets, likes, Hacker News upvotes, email responses…it was immediately obvious that there is pent up demand for this kind of alternative early-stage startup funding.

Previously On..TinySeed

To catch you up, here’s a brief summary of TinySeed:

TinySeed is a remote accelerator designed for SaaS founders seeking mentorship from world-class experts, community with other talented founders, and enough funding to live for a year.

Our goal is to grow your company faster by helping you move from nights and weekends to full-time, and through guidance, advice, and mentorship.

And to do this without the headache of traditional fundraising, loss of control, or the pressure to build a unicorn ($1B valuation) or even raise another round of funding.

And apparently, the message resonated…

In less than 48 hours we received opt-ins from 3,800 founders, investors and onlookers.

And we received offers of support from successful founders who have raised funding, bootstrapped, and those who’ve done both:

+1 on that! Would love to chat and see how/if we can help

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) October 12, 2018

very interested to see how you approach this. In general I'm eager to see people explore new ways of supporting entrepreneurs.

— Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover) October 12, 2018

I'm also very happy to help / get involved in any useful way!

— Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) October 12, 2018

This was the moment we knew we were onto something.

During the ensuing two-and-a-half months we’ve spoken with more than 100 founders and investors, worked on terms, and settled on the structure of the program.

Here’s Where We Stand…

TinySeed is remote, runs for a full year, focuses on SaaS, and on “non-unicorns” (companies that don’t aspire to grow at all costs to reach a $1B valuation).

To us (and most bootstrappers) $5M, $10M or $20M in ARR is a solid win for everyone involved (and much more likely than becoming a unicorn).

With that said, here are a few additional details about how TinySeed works:

#1: We Fund Companies in Batches

From the beginning, we knew we wanted to fund in “batches.” That is, a group of 10-20 companies going through the program together.

Einar went through YC in 2009 so he’s witnessed the benefits first-hand.

I’ve been a vocal proponent of mastermind groups for close to a decade, where you share your journey with other founders who are also slogging it out in the trenches.

Add to that the friendly competition it can spark, the lifelong relationships, and we believe it’s a superior approach to funding companies asynchronously. The founders we’ve spoken with agree, and are excited about the possibility of being part of a group of 10 or so companies all working towards similar goals.

#2: We Focus on Early Stage SaaS

We’re a SaaS accelerator, and accelerators focus on early-stage companies.

We don’t have a maximum revenue cut-off, but if you’re generating seven figures a year then TinySeed is probably not a fit

#3: We Provide World-Class Mentorship

When growing a startup you don’t need mentorship every day, but when you need it, it’s game changing to have access to successful founders who have been down the road you’re traveling. There are no silver bullets in startupland, but sometimes a word of advice can keep you from making a bad hire, wasting time on a marketing approach, or save weeks of time exploring a dead end pricing change.

That’s why we’ve gathered some of the foremost founders and subject-matter experts who will provide guidance on topics ranging from copywriting to SEO, top of funnel marketing to CRO…and pretty much everything else you’ll face on the journey.

To date we have 25 TinySeed mentors on board, including: Hiten Shah, Joanna Wiebe, Jason Fried, DHH, Laura Roeder, Steli Efti, Patio11, and Rob Walling.

#4: We Succeed Only When You Do

Traditionally, venture capital has consisted of unicorn-hunting. VCs are looking to fund the next Facebook or Oculus Rift. If a traditional VC funds your business and it gets to $50m in revenue, generating $20m in profit year over year, it’s considered a miss.

On the surface that might seem ludicrous, but VCs are generally smart people and just like you, they have customers (their investors, also known as “LPs,” which are typically institutions like pension funds and university endowments).

Their customers demand a certain kind of return – one that can only be achieved by looking for businesses that have the potential to provide a 100x or 1000x return on their investment. On average, a unicorn is found less than 3% of the time.

You might think of TinySeed as an accelerator for the long tail of startups. These are startups (perhaps like yours) that will never become the next Facebook. And because of that, the traditional VC model will not work. We need a structure that allows our investors to get a fair return without the potential of finding a unicorn in the portfolio (otherwise investors will simply stop backing companies like yours).

To do this, we’ve arrived at a way for investors to share in the success of a company via profit sharing, but without sacrificing a company’s growth or its potential to raise future funding (should you decide to do that).

Essentially, we’ve found an approach that allows us to succeed when you do. And we’ll be announcing our terms when applications open.

Speaking of that…

Applications Open January 18th

I’m very pleased to announce that TinySeed applications open January 18th, and will run for about 6 weeks.

I’m excited to continue the conversations I’ve been having with talented startup founders interested in the TinySeed approach to startup funding.

Enter your email here to be notified when the doors open.

The post TinySeed Applications Open January 18th first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

This focus has made them successful in launching startups like DropBox, AirBnB, Stripe and Instacart.

But what about founders who want to build a profitable software company with annual revenue in the $1M, $10M or $20M range? Are those companies worth a similar level of support and guidance?

These bootstrapped (or mostly bootstrapped) startups are who I come into contact with while running MicroConf, hosting Startups for the Rest of Us, writing books, speaking at conferences, etc.

I first thought of a “YC for bootstrappers” in 2011, but realized the timing wasn’t right. In 2014, after hearing an interview Colin from Customer.io, I started publicly embracing the idea of bootstrappers raising a small funding round to get them to profitability without taking institutional money.

And as the focus of my angel investing changed from VC-eligible ideas to smaller, but higher probability “base hits,” I’ve realized there is a serious lack of startup capital and accelerator-type support in my corner of the startup ecosystem.

So I’m trying to fix it…

Partnering with Einar Vollset I’m starting a remote accelerator designed to take bootstrapped software companies in the $2k-$40k MRR range, and dramatically accelerate their growth through mentorship, guidance, and a small amount of funding.

We will focus on “real” software companies. These are ideas that won’t become unicorns, but could reach $1M-$30M in annual revenue.

If you’ve been to MicroConf, think of the founders and companies you’ve encountered.

If you listen to Startups for the Rest of Us, think about the ideas and startups we mention.

Companies with real business models. Charging real money. To real customers.

It’s still early, but here are some details…

Our accelerator, called TinySeed, will provide you with a year’s worth of runway so you can quit your day job and focus on your startup full-time (or if you’re already working on it full-time, invest the funds into growth).

No more trying to navigate the startup landscape alone.

No relocation required.

You’ll receive world-class guidance and support from successful founders who have been where you are, and built highly profitable software companies. Founders like Hiten Shah, Rand Fishkin, Joanna Wiebe, Patrick McKenzie, and myself (to name a few).

You’ll be part of a small class of founders challenging and encouraging one another on weekly mentor-led calls.

I’m taking everything I’ve learned over the past 13 years and going all-in to create startup funding for the other 99%.

Our name is TinySeed. If you’re intrigued, click here and sign up to get on the inside track as we move towards launch.

And a huge thanks to you if you tweet about it or spread the word on Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit, etc.

I’m terrified of what comes next. But I know it’s going to be a crazy ride. Wish me luck!

The post My Next Act: The First Startup Accelerator for Bootstrappers first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

Today I’m going to show you 3 emails that can change the trajectory of your SaaS business. The emails I’m highlighting here are easy to set up and pack a punch – ideal for early-stage products.

You’ll learn how to:

• increase your signup conversions by 15%
• improve your “trial-to-paid” conversions
• prevent payment-related churn

The best part? You can combine the three emails for a multiplicative benefit

In today’s article you’ll learn exactly how to leverage those emails.

Use the Signup Abandonment Email to increase your signup conversions by 15%

The concept of the Signup Abandonment Email is something I learned from Rob and the Drip team and implementing it had a dramatic impact on my signup conversion rate.

The idea here is very simple. Take any two step signup process like the one from Drip here:

Did you know that roughly 60% of signups will drop out on the 2nd step? Me neither.

Now the good thing is that you’ve already got their email address, so there is nothing stopping you from reminding them via email that they should sign up. So that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Look at Drip’s signup abandonment email:

If you want to learn more about this and even more advanced tactics I’ve written an extensive case study on signup abandonment emails.

Convert more trials into paying customers with trial extension emails

Another problem most SaaS products encounter is that roughly 50% of trial signups do not start using the app and do not convert into paying customers – and often it is even more.

While it’s depressing to realize, this is also a great opportunity as you can rather easily pump that conversion rate up with good onboarding and some email marketing.

One easy to implement, yet effective tool in your email marketing toolbox is the trial extension email. Imagine the following scenario:

Bob, the CTO of ConstConvSoft, signs up for your app, starts the 30 day trial, looks around a bit and gets distracted by the CEO/his wife/an alien invasion. Now, he totally wanted to use your app, but he got distracted and then forgot about it. Next time he remembers your app is when you inform him on day 31 that his account got cancelled, at which point he just thinks “meh”.

Ideally, you (/your app) realize on day 15 that Bob is failing in his trial, e.g. by comparing their usage of the app to successful customers. Then it’s just a matter of sending Bob an email on day 15 and offering him more time to check out your app – along with some help (videos or 1-on-1 call) – for a decent chance to convert Bob into a successful (and paying) customer.

Here’s a great example of such an email:

This tactic is easy to implement. You don’t need a link that extends the trial, you can do that manually after Bob replies. All you need is an email template and a method to filter for failing trial users.

Prevent payment-related churn with great dunning emails

The last topic I want to touch on is payment-related churn. This is a fancy way of saying “a customer’s card didn’t go through and we have to cancel their account”, which happens way more often than you’d think.

Granted, this isn’t as much of a problem when you’re very early on, because people tend to give you up-to-date credit card info during signup. But after a year or so you’ll see more and more cards near their expiry date – and subsequently fail payments. Even before that you’ll see the occasional failed payment as the credit card balance may run low.

Payment-related churn can make up to 50% of your overall churn, so it is well worth addressing. After all cutting your churn rate in half will fast-track your growth like nothing else.

Getting dunning emails exactly right is an art, but you can get 80% there by heading a few simple rules:

1. Do not ask users to update their credit card details BEFORE payments start to fail
2. Do NOT immediately retry a credit card the next day after a failed payment
3. Make updating the credit card details as easy as possible

Most payment providers (like Stripe) will update expiration dates behind the scenes without any payment failures. So asking customers to update their expiration date creates unnecessary friction for them.

Additionally, you shouldn’t retry a credit card immediately on the next day, because the credit card may have reached its limit and the customer is waiting for a deposit on the credit card to go through. If your first charge fails on a Friday, you retry on Saturday, and again on Sunday, your customer won’t be able to balance their credit card before you cancel their subscription.

The folks at Churnbuster wrote a detailed article on how to get dunning emails right – check it out to learn more!

Learn even more email marketing tricks

If you apply just those three email tactics in your SaaS you’ll get more trial signups that will more likely become paying customers and churn at a lower rate once they are paying customers. How’s that for a nice triple whammy?

Of course there are even more email marketing tactics that you can use to accelerate the growth of your SaaS. If you want to learn more, I’m writing the SaaS Email Marketing Handbook where I share everything I’ve learned from years of running my own SaaS and consulting other SaaS businesses on email marketing.

Head on over to SaaSEmailMarketing.net to read get a special discount.

The post 3 Emails Every Early-Stage SaaS Should Be Sending first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

Had we not committed to a deadline, in public, 2-weeks prior to the ship date (when we published this post on Drip and emailed a bazillion people), I believe we’d still be adding finishing touches.

It’s scary to ship. And it’s in our nature to want everything to be perfect before doing so.

When working in tandem, these two forces can keep you from shipping for far too long.

Enter Deadlines
This is why I’ve gone back and forth over the years about deadlines. Deadlines, especially those you commit to in public, are great at forcing you to ship.

But they can also have a negative impact on your quality of work (if you don’t give yourself enough time to do things right), or your quality of life (if you don’t give yourself enough time to do things right).

So personally, I don’t use deadlines all that much. But every once in a while (and especially when you’re just starting out), the discipline of a deadline works better than perhaps any other motivational tactic to force your hand and make you ship.

And with our Workflows launch, the deadline worked.

It forced us to make some tough decisions and get things out on time. And the launch turned out to be our biggest growth accelerator of the past 18 months. Hooray for shipping.

But committing to a public deadline is pretty scary. Here’s why you should do it anyway…

What You’ll Learn
If you’re doing things right you should be shipping a lot more than feels comfortable.

Especially in the early days, you should ship something monthly. Weekly. Maybe even multiple times per week (think of starting a blog and posting 2 or 3 times per week).

If you’re not doing this early in your journey, you’re not going to build up your shipping muscle. This is the muscle that’s weak and frail in all of us when we begin. And you strengthen over time through shipping, and shipping alone.

Shipping is also the event that gives you the rush.

This is the endorphin infusion you experience when hitting “deploy” on a new feature. Hitting publish on a blog post. Or launching an ebook on which you’ve slaved away for months.

The rush is the thing that keeps you going, yearning for the next time you can experience it. And if you wait too long, you forget how good it feels.

Fear
Don’t get me wrong, shipping is scary. It gets easier over time, but the fear never goes away completely.

I believe that our desire to not ship is created by multiple fears working in tandem with one another:

• fearing people will criticize you
• wondering if what you’ve shipped is good enough
• wondering if anyone will notice
• …and secretly hoping no one does

These are the big ones you’ll feel every. single. time. you. ship.

The answer? Strengthen your muscle. Ship more often.

It makes the terror decrease (just a bit). And it fires those endorphins that make you remember why it is you decided to embark on this journey instead of keeping your day job like a sane person.

How to Keep Shipping
Back to deadlines. A great way to force yourself to ship is to make an ongoing public commitment. Start a weekly podcast, for example. It’ll put your feet to the fire.

I’m pretty sure this is why Andrew Warner has shipped 5 interviews a week for years.

John Lee Dumas has done 7 per week.

Even schlubs like Mike and I have pushed out an episode every week for 3 or 4 years now.

I can’t speak for Andrew and JLD, but Mike and I are not particularly well organized. We don’t have our act together much more than the next person.

But after pushing a few episodes you start to feel like you’ve made a commitment to keep doing what you’ve been doing. It starts with a few weeks, then it’s a few months, then a few years.

By the time you get there you don’t want to break the streak. You’re a little scared to see what would happen if you missed a week.

Shipping is not only addictive, but it builds momentum and makes it easier to ship next week. And the next. And the one after that.

Public Deadlines
Maybe you don’t want to make an ongoing commitment, and just need motivation to get a big feature (or product) out the door. Your other option is to go old school and set a deadline. Nothing new here; we’ve all had them before.

But when was the last time you set a deadline for yourself and didn’t move it when things got tough?

I’m not talking about a deadline set by your boss, spouse, or local tax authority. I mean sitting down, choosing a realistic date. And, come hell or high-water, shipping by that date.

Even if your kid gets sick. Even if the next episode of Game of Thrones comes out. Even if you realize you missed a major piece of functionality and are going to have to scramble to fit it in.

Doing this will be both stressful…and exhilarating.

If you set a deadline and tell everyone you know about it, with one small motion you’ll start a silent timer. A doomsday clock of sorts. The pressure will build, but in the end you will push something out the door.

With Workflows we found a few extra tidbits we wanted to add before launch. We also realized we had overlooked re-working our onboarding flow to match the new stuff we were launching…but we didn’t push the date.

Because we’d committed to it in public.

But Beware…
There’s a balance here. Most of us are building companies because we want to enjoy the journey. So if you’re working yourself to death because you’re constantly setting overly ambitious deadlines, you’re doing it wrong.

If you go on one too many death marches due to unrealistic deadlines you’ll reach deadline fatigue, where they don’t motivate you any longer. Don’t do this.

I think it’s good practice to put your feet to the fire and commit to a hard deadline a few times per year.

For me, the two weeks after we set our Workflows deadline were the most productive I’ve had in months. Something about setting that deadline (let’s be honest, it was the fear of missing it) pushed me to become the highly-focused, insanely productive Rob I catch a glimpse of now and then.

So if you find you’re in a rut, not making progress, trying figure out what to polish next, or you haven’t shipped anything in months…set a deadline. In public. And see how it makes you feel.

Hopefully it scares the hell out of you. That’s how you know it’s working.

The post How to Force Yourself to Ship (Even When It’s Hard) first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

In early 2011 I was looking for my next thing. Long ago I learned that when I’m not learning I’m not happy. And in early 2011, aside from hosting our first successful MicroConf, I wasn’t doing many things that scared me.

Which told me I needed a next thing.

My book was selling well. I had a portfolio of 8 or 9 small apps and websites. But nothing was pushing me to expand beyond my current mental limits, and I knew that within months I would start to feel a tinge of burnout and apathy that would eventually turn into genuine unhappiness.

I had spent the previous 10 months hanging out with our newborn, working 12-16 hours a week, and making an income comparable to what I had made working full-time.

Life was good, and I had to go screw it up.

The Acquisition
With patience as one of my least prominent traits I didn’t want to spend 6 months coding, and 12 months launching/learning/trying to find product/market fit.

So I took a page out of my playbook and went on a search for an acquisition larger than any I had previously attempted.

I’ve already detailed the acquisition in a 3-part blog series, so I won’t rehash it here. But suffice to say I spent almost every penny in my business account to buy a SaaS app that looked like this:

And was able to turn it into this:

And 10x the revenue in 15 months, via steps I outlined in a MicroConf talk a few years ago.

Things were good while I was growing HitTail. I was often frustrated with how long each step took, but I was learning huge lessons along the way.

Another Next Thing
And then things changed…and I had another “what’s next?” moment.

This was partially due to Google pulling Not Provided out of its hat in 2012/2013 (which we worked around pretty easily, but it did scare me for a couple months). And partly due to the massive amount of learning I had packed into the revamp and growth of HitTail.

It became apparent during one of my semi-annual retreats that I needed to find my next thing. Again.

The next thing turned out to be Drip. I won’t go into its origins here since I’ve detailed them elsewhere. But suffice to say, at a certain point Drip’s growth curve became such that it didn’t make sense for me to focus even a few hours a month on any other products.

So I began divesting myself of my portfolio of websites and web applications.

I shut a few of them down. I sold one for a few thousand dollars when someone made me an offer out of the blue. I gave my share of another app to a business partner.

And then there was HitTail. It was making too much money to shut down or give away. But luckily, but this time a secondary market for web applications had started to develop.

Finally, A Secondary Market for SaaS Apps
A few years ago, the options for selling a small web application were bleak. I didn’t know of any reputable brokers. Flippa is akin to selling at wholesale (and dealing with a lot of uneducated buyers in the process).

But over the past 4 years I’ve watched first-hand as a secondary market for small websites and web apps has developed through reputable brokers like FE International and Quiet Light.

Having developed a relationship with FE International over the past several years, I chose them to assist with the HitTail sale.

And a few months later (after what felt like hundreds of hours of due diligence work, but was more like 40-50), I found myself staring at a newly augmented bank balance and my list of applications that had once approached a dozen in number….now standing at 1.

It’s all about Drip, baby. And that focus feels great.

Here’s the official announcement about the HitTail sale

So What Did I Learn?
As soon as news of the sale hit the front page of Hacker News questions started coming in: Would you do it again? Was it a financial win? What did you learn?

Here are a few things:

#1: “Stair-Stepping” Is Very Much Alive
I’ve come up with a name for this approach of starting small and working you way up through larger and larger opportunities as you gain experience, skills, funds, and confidence. I call it Stair Stepping.

This move from HitTail to Drip marks my next stair-step, from step 3 (recurring revenue) into an as-yet-undefined step 4 (might be: more recurring revenue in a larger and more competitive market).

Had I tried to launch Drip in 2011 without the experience, skills, funds and confidence I gained from growing HitTail, I would have had my ass handed to me.

Launching and growing Drip has been hard. I honestly don’t think I could have pulled it off P.H. (pre-HitTail).

The more I learn, the more I see Stair Stepping as an optimal approach for maximizing results while minimizing your chance of failure. It’s not the fastest path, but a predictable one.

#2: Money Makes Things Easier
I was doing fine before HitTail. As I said, I was working 12-16 hour weeks, hanging out with my kids in my non-work hours. And making a full-time income (akin to what I made as a contract developer in California).

But one night in the middle of a conversation about earnings, money, and other financial stuff I asked my wife: “What would having more money allow us to do?”

She rattled off a number of things, but the ones that really hit me were:

• Be more generous
• Travel
• Save for the kids’ college
• Have more control of our schedules
• Feel more security about the financial present/future

Notice none of the things she mentioned involved buying stuff. Aside from nerdy t-shirts and good whiskey, I don’t care much for stuff.

So I hadn’t given much thought to making more money once I’d hit that “good enough” mark back in 2008/2009. But this conversation changed the game for me.

Within a year, HitTail had changed our standard of living and accomplished most of the things she mentioned during that conversation, including allowing us to help friends and acquaintances out of a few financial situations, bringing the kids with us for a month in Europe/Thailand each year for the past 3 years, and generally feeling more definite about our financial future.

I’m not in a place where it would be possible for me to never work again. But HitTail was a noticeable step towards that possibility. It gave me a glimpse of what that might feel like.

Let me be clear: I don’t think you need buckets of money to be happy. And, in my experience, “more stuff” is a ridiculous reason to seek more money.

But you can do some crazy generous and interesting things when you have a bit more breathing room.

#3: Buying is Probably Better Than Building
I’ve been singing this tune for a long time. But acquiring an application that already has product/market fit puts you 12-18 months ahead of starting from scratch.

Like most founders, I’m impatient. And leaping ahead is so much easier than building something from nothing.

By my estimation, I think acquiring HitTail condensed my career timetable by 18 months. And removed a lot of anxiety and stress of the pre-p/m fit thrashing.

#4: A Team of One Can Accomplish Crazy Things in the 2010s
The amount of leverage one can achieve given marketplaces like Upwork, metered hosting like Amazon’s AWS, inexpensive payment gateways like Stripe, and the myriad of other tools that are multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than they were a decade ago, is mind-blowing.

My journey with HitTail would have been impossible 10 years ago.

I believe today is the best time in history to be a founder. And it’s especially easier for a single founder given the power of outsourcing and today’s global labor pool.

Epilogue
The day the HitTail sale closed I received a few congratulatory texts from close friends.

At this point, after weeks of due diligence, I was emotionally exhausted. Selling something of this scale is hard. You don’t think it’s going to be that hard, but it is.

There’s an emotional component as you constantly wonder if the sale is going to fall through. You don’t sleep well. And you have a hard time letting go of something into which you’ve invested so much time, effort and emotion.

But sometimes it’s the right thing to do.

The post What I Learned Buying, Growing, and Selling My Startup first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

After a while, I started to notice a pattern emerging among the pool of bootstrappers who were able to successfully replace their income, buy back their time, and quit their jobs.

I first captured this pattern in my notebook in early 2009, but I didn’t have enough data to be confident in the theory. I started embracing it as a framework on my podcast around 2010, and in 2013 I gave it a name.

I call it The Stair Step Approach. After fully fleshing it out in my talks at DCBKK and MicroConf Europe last fall, I’ve been struck repeatedly by how many successful bootstrappers have followed, or are currently following, this trajectory.

The interesting part is that my own path moving from consulting to products followed the same steps, as you can see in my product revenue chart from the past decade:

Each revenue jump is when I made the move to the next step of the Stair Step Approach.

I decided it was time to put pen to paper and lay out what I see as a repeatable path with a higher-than-normal success rate, to bootstrapping yourself to the point of quitting your job.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Your First Product
Everyone knows how difficult it can be to launch your first product, and frankly, a lot of the startup advice out there just makes it harder. From validating an idea, to testing message-to-market match, coming up with a marketing plan, and actually building the product, it’s a miracle anything gets launched at all.

With that in mind, how do you give yourself the best chance of avoiding failure?

In my experience, the biggest pitfall that trips up first-time product people is trying to create something too complex.

The strategy that seems to give people the best chance of success is creating a simple product, with a simple marketing plan – one that only requires a single traffic channel.

Specifically, I’m suggesting that you don’t get started by building a stand-alone subscription software (SaaS) product. Recurring revenue is the holy grail for bootstrappers, as we’ll discuss later in this essay, but it also makes your business more complex if you try to launch a stand-alone product that you have to not only build, but market on your own.

It’s much easier to sell an add-on to an existing ecosystem like a WordPress plugin, a Shopify app, a Heroku add-on – they’re usually small things to build, relatively inexpensive for customers to purchase, and you have built in discovery through the plugin repository or app store.

Other examples include Magento or Drupal add-ons, a Photoshop plugin, a WordPress theme, or an ebook or course. There’s an extensive list of these app store/marketplaces over on the Rocket Gems blog.

These smaller projects might not be as “sexy” as trying to disrupt marketing automation, and they probably won’t land you on TechCrunch, but they will help you become profitable much, much earlier.

A project like my last SaaS app, Drip, is a serious undertaking. I’m confident I would not have been able to make it work 13 years ago when I first started building products.

As for a single traffic source, focus on figuring out one way of generating customers, instead of trying to master all the different traffic channels at once.

Getting those initial early sales is a big win.

In my case, that meant getting good at SEO with my first project, instead of trying to learn SEO, Adwords, Facebook ads, etc. all at once. I’ve seen many other people focus specifically on generating free downloads from WordPress.org and then up-selling premium plugins or ranking for appropriate keywords in the Shopify or Heroku app stores.

This focus will help you start generating revenue without worrying about becoming a master marketer, and let you develop new skills one-by-one as you need them.

Step 2: Own Your Time
Step 2 is doubling-down on the model that worked in Step 1 and repeating it until you own your time. You may be able to grow a single product to achieve step 2, or you may need to cobble a few together.

In essence, once you’ve launched your first successful product and it’s making a bit of money, try to understand if you can grow it to that “full time income” level, or whether you need to repeat the process and launch a second or third product in order to buy out your time.

One of the biggest mistakes I see founders make is abandoning what already works and trying to take on a bigger challenge before they’re making enough money to own all of their time in a given week.

Obviously most WordPress plugins won’t pay you enough to quit your job, but three might – that’s exactly what worked for Dave Rodenbaugh. Once he figured out how to successfully sell premium add-ons to users of his free plugin, he developed two more plugins with premium options, instead of jumping to SaaS or trying to figure out how to promote his plugins with Facebook.

And now Dave has moved on to his next product, a very successful “step 3” SaaS application called Recapture.

Phil Derksen is another example with 2 WordPress plugins: Pinterest Pin it Pro and Stripe Checkout Pro for WP. He quit his job a few years ago by stacking their combined revenue into a full-time income.

Richard Chen of PHP Grid recently made the jump from one-time sales to leaving his job, and is working on climbing to the next step.

David from FatCatApps is doing great with his easy pricing tables and easy opt-in plugins.

And Fri Davies from the Dynamite Circle has done this with his Magento add-ons.

When I first started moving out of consulting in 2005, I acquired a product called DotNetInvoice, a straightforward piece of invoicing software that I promoted almost exclusively through SEO.

The revenue from that product grew incrementally until 2008 when I started acquiring and building more products instead of trying to optimize what I was already working on.

Those were still simple projects, like a job board for electrical linemen, an e-commerce store for beach towels, and a couple of ebooks – all one-time sales promoted that relied on SEO traffic or AdWords to make sales.

So why did that grow my business faster than testing and tweaking each of these products individually?

Lifetime value. The lifetime value (LTV) of nearly all of these products was not enough to warrant anything except “free” traffic from an organic source like Google or the WordPress plugin repository.

But I didn’t know that at that time, which lead to me wasting more than a year trying to scale my beach towel store. But when you’re selling something that has an LTV of $10-15 dollars, you just can’t make paid advertising work. Or content marketing. Or any of the other approaches I would use to grow an app with a higher LTV ($150+).

So in Steps 1 and 2 I see people succeeding by sticking to free traffic channels (typically organic or viral), sticking to the first one that works for you, growing it until it plateaus, and focusing on replacing your income with the first product, or by repeating it with multiple products.

None of my early projects were particularly glamorous, but when I stacked them together I built enough product income to buy out 100% of my time and quit consulting.

That let me move on to step 3, where I was able to start focusing on bigger projects, with higher LTVs that gave me room to experiment.

Step 3: Recurring Revenue
Now that you’re generating enough income to justify going out on your own, and you have the experience and the mindset of someone with a few successes under their belt, it’s time to level up and take a bigger risk by going after a stand-alone product with recurring revenue.

Recurring sales are the holy grail for bootstrappers for a reason – instead of repeating the painstaking process of selling new product month after month, every customer increases revenue for this month, next month, and beyond.

While some percentage of your customers will churn, this model gives you incredible leverage to grow your business – if you’re providing a good product, you will retain the vast majority of your sales month over month.

That’s a big part of the reason why SaaS is so popular with bootstrappers.

But the other side of the SaaS coin is that there’s along ramp to any kind of substantial revenue, which is why I recommend you complete steps 1 and 2 before moving to this step.

Aside from the fact that recurring revenue tends to yield much higher lifetime values – think about how much you’ve paid Basecamp or your hosting company over time – the high dollar value that a new customer is worth to your company opens up a world of new marketing approaches you can attempt, such as: PPC, display ads, content marketing, integration marketing, etc.

When I bought HitTail and optimized its sales funnel, it more than doubled my annual revenue, even though the average purchase per customer was barely into the double digits.

But because it’s relatively inexpensive on a monthly basis, customers stay with us long enough to create a nice LTV which gave me the flexibility in ad spending to figure out a profitable Facebook ad campaign that brought more than a thousand new customers over the course of about 6 months.

That kind of growth is the promise that drives a lot of new founders to dive headfirst into SaaS projects. But frankly, I hope this post has made your reconsider that it’s probably the wrong place to start due to the technical and marketing complexities (not to mention the competition) that go along with SaaS.

I don’t think HitTail or Drip would have taken off if they were my first projects – I don’t know that I would have had the time, money, skills, or confidence to give them what they needed to succeed.

Moonshots
The tech media likes to focus on moonshots because they’re exciting, but their focus on the 1-in-10,000 that work means they ignore the hoards of people who have tried and failed because they try to play in the NFL before they’ve learned basic blocking and tackling.

There is no guarantee that The Stair Step Approach will help you launch a successful product right out of the gate, but based on patterns I’m seeing in the bootstrapper community it’s a nice, low-risk path to a successful software company.

If this idea tracks with your experience, or if you have more examples of someone who has climbed the stairs, ping me on Twitter at @robwalling.

The post The Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

When I was writing the copy for the home page of Drip, I ran into a bit of a challenge: the idea of marketing automation is still new to a lot of people, so not everyone is aware of how email marketing (much less marketing automation) can help them.

One of the easiest ways I’ve found to explain the value of Drip has been making screencasts, walking people through the product and pointing our very specifically how Drip can help in their particular use case.

But making a personalized screencasts for every trial customer isn’t realistic, so I put my mind to finding a way to make this a little more scalable. After discussing with Derrick we came up with the idea of creating a few explainer videos to walk visitors through how I would tag, segment, and structure a Drip account for a few different business types. 

Normally, I prefer to use contractors (typically those who offer productized services) for basic marketing elements so I can focus on higher-level tasks, but in this situation there was a catch…

We have four distinct customer types that find Drip valuable, but they’re attracted to the product for very different reasons. And at roughly $2,000 apiece, hiring out production of 4 videos was going to get expensive in a hurry.

So I came up with a process to create multiple explainer videos quickly, with the help of a couple inexpensive services. In the end, my total out of pocket cost was $11.

But here’s the catch: in addition to the $11 dollars, this process took about 8 hours of my time. If you’re a funded startup or a top-dollar consultant (or you only need 1 video), you should probably just hire it out and save yourself the time.

But if you’re a bootstrapper or need multiple videos like I did, it makes a lot more sense to spend a day putting these videos together than shelling out $8000 dollars to have someone else handle it. 

So without further ado, here’s the process I used to create 4 explainer videos in about 8 hours, for $11).

If you want to watch them before reading the creation process, visit Drip’s home page and scroll about halfway down.

Step 1. Write the script (Estimated time: 45 minutes)
To kick things off, I wrote a script for the first video. It wound up taking a form quite similar to a sales letter, starting with a narrow focus to grab the visitor’s attention, then expanding on the details of what Drip can do.

Sometimes writing a clear, persuasive script can take hours, but this first one took me about 45 minutes – partly because I’d had so much experience explaining the product in screencasts, sales calls, and on the long-form homepage, but also because explainer videos need to be super short (so there wasn’t much copy to write).

Your video should not be any longer than 90 seconds, and to be honest, the shorter the better. If you can make the case for your product in 45 seconds, that’d be great, but for most people, the video will end up being at least a minute long. 

Try not to worry about duration while you’re writing, but keep in mind that you need to be clear, precise, and straightforward.

Here’s how it turned out:

Meet Frank.

Frank is interested in your ebook, software or other digital product, but he’s not quite ready to buy.

Instead of leaving your website and never coming back, Frank notices you’re offering a free demo version or sample download from every page of your website. Made possible using one line of JavaScript from Drip.

So Frank gives you his email address and downloads your sample.

Over the next few weeks Drip sends Frank amazing educational content, convincing him you’re an expert in your space. And when he’s ready to make his buying decision, it’s a no-brainer for Frank to buy from you.

If you use one of these payment providers, in addition to several others, your Drip account knows Frank became a customer without you having to write a line of code. And if not, it’s as simple as adding a single line of JavaScript to your website.

In Drip, you’ve setup an automation rule for purchases, so Frank is automatically moved from your lead nurturing email campaign into your customer campaign that follows up, provides more educational content, and ultimately leads to Frank buying more of your products.

You also tag him as a Customer so you can easily send one-off promotional emails when you’re having a sale, release a new version, or just need a quick influx of cash.

Drip is unlike any email marketing platform you’ve ever used, and it can handle every phase of your customer’s lifecycle, from website visitor to sample downloader to paying customer.

All this and so much more is possible with just a few clicks, with Drip.

Step 2: Walk Away for a Day, Then Edit (Estimated time: 30 minutes)
In order to give the copy a solid revision I put it in a drawer for a day. Coming back for a  “cold” read highlighted a number of flaws right away.

After the first round of revision I started reading the script out loud, which brought out a few more flaws right away.

With those fixed I edited for length – I think I was around 1m55s, so I cut a paragraph or two to reduce the length to under my self-imposed 90-second limit.

Step 3: Record the Audio (Estimated time: 15 minutes)
This is one of the easier parts – I used a free piece of software called Audacity to record and edit the audio (you could use Garage Band or any other recording software), as well as a high-quality mic. I used the same headset I use to record my podcast since I know it’s up to par, but it’s important that the mic connects through the USB port and not the little headphone jack; the audio quality is much better on USB mics.

Don’t put yourself under any pressure to nail your first take here…just hit record and read through the script. Any time you mess up, start the sentence over and cut the bad sentences out during editing.

Editing is what takes most of the time here, but since you’re just cutting out sections of one audio track, it’s still relatively fast.

Render the file as an MP3 and you’re all set.

Step 4: Turn the Audio into Visuals (Estimated time: 1-4 hours)
Turning ideas from my recording into physical images was the longest part of the process by far. I knew I wanted to find drawings that I could move around to “animate” the video, but it’s hard to find high-quality drawings to license, and even harder to decide how to visually represent technical terms.

For instance, when I mentioned “Frank” visiting your website and being tagged, it took me a while to track down an image of a guy with a laptop and a question mark next to his head, and to come up with the idea of using a luggage tag. 

This is the creative part of the video, though, so it’s worth the time investment and in retrospect I’m glad I took the time to search as long as I did to find decent images. 

Stock image sites tend to have a large collection of clip-art style drawings, and 123RF in particular has a lot of drawings that you can search before signing up. 

I was surprised at how long this section took (for me, it was close to 4 hours). That included finding them, downloading, resizing, printing them out, and cutting them out.

Step 5: Filming (Estimated time: 1 hour)

Once I had all the drawings printed out, I grabbed some butcher paper from my kids’ art closet to use as the backdrop.

If you have access to high-end video equipment that’s great, but it’s not necessary – I just propped up a consumer-grade HD camcorder. I didn’t even have a tripod for the first videos (which was ridiculous, in retrospect…I bought one the next day before I recorded the remaining 3 videos).

It probably took me 10 takes to get the first video right. Timing is definitely the hard part, because I was listening to the audio recording while trying to move the pieces around in time with the words. It took some practice and coordination to get to a point where it didn’t look ridiculous, but the final product turned out great.

Step 6: Editing & Rendering (30 minutes)
I edited my videos in iMovie – it isn’t the world’s best video editor, but it works (and if you’re on a Mac, it’s free)

Then I rendered and exported it as an MP4 and voila!

Here’s the finished product:

Step 7: Repeat
I made sure to focus on getting one video right before I worked on the others. Once I was really happy with the first version, then, and only then, I went back and did the next three.

This was to ensure that if I made a mistake in one of the later steps, it only screwed up one video, not all four of them.

By practicing that way and ironing out a process, I made all my mistakes on the first video.

Once I had the process and coordination down, I cranked out the other three.

I wrote the scripts for the next three videos, used basically the same clipart, and recorded all three in under two hours.

What’s next?
This process may not be the best fit for everyone, but it’s an inexpensive way to build yourself a decent explainer video.

My videos have worked out really well for Drip. I’ve used them in countless email exchanges to quickly explain Drip in terms that are very specific to their niche. And around 25% of home page visitors watch one of them.

Would I have gotten prettier videos if i dropped $8,000 bucks on them? 

Probably.

But my videos work for now, so it makes more sense to put that budget towards other marketing approaches (or building new features).

And of course, I’d love to see your videos if you follow this process. Just ping me on twitter: @robwalling.

The post How I Created 4 Startup Explainer Videos for $11 first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

Through the mad illustration skills of one Maggie Appleton, here are SketchNotes summarizing my entire talk in a single image (click the image for a hi-res version).

The post SketchNotes of My Talk: “How to Make More Money from Your Business” first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

I’m in the midst of the biggest gamble of my career. The thing is, every chance you take feels like your biggest gamble while you’re taking it.

When I left salaried employment for consulting in 2006 it felt like a big gamble.

When I left consulting for product in 2008 with a wife, kid and a mortgage, it felt like a huge gamble.

When I spent most of the money I had in the bank on a broken-down SaaS app few people had heard of, called HitTail, I was downright scared. It’s hard to put years of work and savings on the line, based on nothing more than confidence that you will execute.

Upside
But every one of the above gambles worked out, and I wound up far better off than if I’d never taken them.

And here’s the thing…

The more gambles you take, the better you become at reading the tea leaves and figuring out if your next gamble is going to work.

You also gain confidence in your ability to execute when your back is to the wall. This means you don’t crumble under the stress of the decision.

Instead, you start to become addicted to drawing yourself out of your comfort zone. This is a good thing.

You start to embrace the immense amounts of learning that happen when you’re doing something that terrifies you.

Pushing on Drip
When we launched Drip last November the first month was solid – over $7k in recurring revenue. I was pleased with that result and was looking forward to growth in the months that followed.

Except growth didn’t come. Second month revenue (granted, it was December) was $7k.

Third month revenue was the same. And worse yet, I started to see a trend…

Many of the new subscribers I was adding through my tried-and-true marketing efforts were churning out after a few months of use. It’s an expression I used to call “leaking out of the bottom of the funnel.”

Now we just call it churn.

A high churn rate means you haven’t found a market that really needs your product, or, worse yet, that you’ve built something no market wants (yet).

And if you’re paying attention this is the learning phase that happens between building and scaling (I talked about it in my 2013 MicroConf talk). The learning phase is, in my opinion, the most painful part.

So while the percentage of new users who completed onboarding was high for an app of this complexity (close to 60%), they were not sticking around like I would hope, which meant we hadn’t hit the nail on the head and solved the problem I came to solve.

Namely: fixing email marketing for startups.

Obvious
So it was back to work.

We had more than a dozen requests for “marketing automation” features – basically, features that allow you to send subscribers personalized emails based on their behavior.

So if they read a lot of SEO articles on your website, you can tag them with “SEO” and move them into your SEO crash course.

And that’s the tip of the iceberg; you can tag people based on links they click, URLs they visit, or things they buy.

Tracking customers from website visitor to marketing subscriber to trial user to customer, and being able to tailor communications the entire time is insanely powerful. In fact, it’s the future of email marketing. But I didn’t want to build a behavioral email/marketing automation platform.

It would be a ton of work to build, and the space has been crowded for years. It’s not a typical bootstrapper play, it’s the kind for which you raise funding.

But the more founders I spoke with, the more I realized this was the real problem they were facing. Most founders have either outgrown their first email marketing app (think of a static email newsletter service like MailChimp or AWeber), or they’ve tried a beefy tool like Infusionsoft and it hasn’t worked out due to high price and low usability.

Contrary to my plans, founders didn’t need a little help with email marketing, they were telling me they needed a massive step up from the tools on the market.

Perhaps fixing email marketing for startups was a much bigger problem than I had originally thought. And perhaps this new approach was the one that I came here to solve.

Best Laid Plans
We planned for 1 month of development to build email marketing automation focused on the Saas, WP plugin and info product use cases. It took almost 5.

We rolled it out in batches – a new feature every few weeks. And the strangest thing happened as we did…

Revenue started moving up. First a few hundred. Then a thousand.

Churn plummeted. By more than 50%. Revenue rose almost 50% in a couple months.

All during a time when I was heads down, not doing a lick of marketing.

I had a feeling we were on to something.

The Gamble
I’ve invested a year’s worth of company profits into Drip. Funds that could buy a house in most cities in the world. And I’ve invested the bulk of my waking hours for a year.

We’re entering a competitive market with massive upside and players who have raised millions of dollars.

And here I sit, on the eve of unleashing Drip 2.0 realizing that this is, once again, the biggest gamble of my career.

The thing is, every chance you take feels like your biggest gamble while you’re taking it. And most of the time choosing the gamble is the right choice.

Wish me luck.

The post The Biggest Gamble of Your Career first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

This is a guest post by Thomas Smale from FE International, a website brokerage with an emphasis on SaaS apps.

At FE International we speak to website owners on a daily basis who are looking to sell their businesses. Unfortunately, many of these businesses are not sellable for a number of very avoidable reasons. Planning your exit in advance (even if you have no intention of selling now) is always the sensible thing to do and will put you in good stead, saving you headaches when you do decide it’s time to move on.

SaaS products have always proven to be very popular with buyers over the years. Last year we sold 78 web-based businesses, so reflecting on these we’ve pooled together our collective experience to show you what really improves the saleability and the value of a SaaS business in the eyes of a new potential buyer. A combination of these factors could be the difference between selling for 1x EBITDA (if done badly) and 3x (if you follow these rules).

Choose your payment processor carefully
This is one of the most common issues we come across and can affect value significantly. With SaaS businesses the majority of revenue will be through monthly, quarterly or annual billing recurring payment plans. There are often hundreds if not thousands of subscribers paying through the year, usually processed by one payment platform.

A common problem sellers run in to is that when it comes to sell, the monthly subscribers cannot be transferred to a new owner – which is where the majority of business value lies and is an essential element of the sale. For instance, subscriptions in a Paypal account cannot be transferred and this requires a buyer either taking over the seller’s account (always a last resort and can be complex if the sale is international).

This can lead to complex transfer arrangements between buyer and seller which can be a deterrent for investors from the outset and is also an ongoing headache for both parties post sale as it will often involve contingency based financing agreements. To avoid this, opt for a transfer-friendly payment processor which will make the business universally appealing to buyers and save considerable effort post-transaction. Check with your merchant account or payment processor before signing up as they all have different policies depending on your location or history with them.

Future-proofing your software
Many SaaS business owners have developed their product themselves, usually to solve a problem they encountered personally or profit from a gap in the market they spotted. As the architect their technical knowledge of the source code is unrivalled, but it can present a problem when it comes to selling. How can a new owner upgrade or expand the software offering without the seller? This is a common issue and the best mitigation strategy is to source an affordable, reliable, independent third party to work on the product for 3-6 months before the sale.

Ensure they document everything they do in detail. This will assure the new owner that product developments can be carried out without the seller’s technical knowledge. It also opens up the potential buyer universe to non-software specialists, which is a considerable pool of demand for a business seller to tap in to.

Build and utilise the mailing list
Focus on building your email subscriber list and make the most of it (ideally through a scalable auto-responder sequence). Buyers are increasingly focused on email membership for SaaS businesses which they see as a first-step marketing strategy after a change of ownership.

For example, investors without much experience in the niche will likely initially focus on marketing to existing customers (always easier to sell to an existing client), so a responsive subscriber base is a strong business sale point. On the practical side, make sure you use a good provider (Mailchimp, Aweber etc.) and not a more complicated self-hosted solution that could put off buyers.

Depersonalise the service (mitigate key man risk)
This is a general point for many online businesses (particularly owner-run models) but is very relevant for SaaS sites. Make sure any personal branding you use for marketing or for the product itself is phased out prior to sale. Whilst a personal touch can help with humanising the marketing approach and selling services, it makes the transfer of ownership and ongoing operation more of a risk to new buyers who can’t continue the same approach and will likely affect sales price or mean you have to stay on for longer post-sale.

Guarantees to the new owner that they can market with your name aren’t worth near as much as a neutral product offering to begin with. Another solution would be to use a pseudonym to brand the product around and that way, the “owner” and his/her reputation would be far easier to transfer to a new owner.

Get on top of your data
Again this is a general point but in our years of brokerage experience, there is a direct correlation between the quality/quantity of information a seller has and the execution of a sale. In short, buyers like information and transparency. In SaaS, this is particularly acute given the number of subscribers involved and ongoing obligations to be transferred.

For example, in SaaS businesses, there are a number of key metrics that buyers expect to see, such as life-time value, churn, product breakdown split (assuming you have packages), conversion data and much more. There is no such thing as too much data when it comes to selling, and a good broker will help present these in a relevant manner.

Cultivate a quality affiliate network
Building out a solid affiliate network is commonly a sustainable way to build the profile of the product but more importantly it diversifies the marketing effort and revenue profile of the service. For investors, this is a big positive as it reduces the perceived overnight ‘acquired’ responsibility for direct sales and creates a ‘passive’ income stream for the service.

As a general rule of thumb, any passive income stream in an online business will attractive a premium valuation. However, do, of course ensure you partner with quality affiliates that will only enhance your profile and reputation of the service and try not to be reliant on any one affiliate. A general rule of thumb to achieve a top valuation would be to not have any one traffic source (or affiliate) driving more than 25% of sales.

Don’t discount without reason
A common strategy for sellers trying to maximise value before a sale is to bump revenue by pushing heavy discounts (or annual packages) in the months prior to listing. The unfortunate truth is that business valuations are almost always calculated off of normalised business performance so any last minute spikes in revenue will be significantly discounted by past performance and could even look dishonest.

Discounting the product in the run up to a sale may in fact have the adverse effect of weakening its value proposition in the market and thus perceived value to buyers.

Do a few things and do them well
Once the platform has been established, it’s usually the case that a SaaS business only has a finite amount of high ROI additions. Pursuing all of these opportunities exhaustively in the aim of an extra dollar is not always the best strategy. Focus on a few expansion strategies and do them well.

Trying to do everything might not improve profits (and thus the sale price) and more importantly might limit a new owner in terms of what they can ‘launch’ when taking over. A buyer likes to know that they can grow something, so leaving some future growth potential will benefit the sale price now.

The post Building a SaaS Business You Can Sell first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

This article is a guest post from Bronson Taylor. Bronson is a co-founder and host of Growth Hacker TV, the only educational platform focused exclusively on helping startups grow by acquiring, retaining, and monetizing users. They have over 60 episodes, with guests from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, DropBox, and many more. Image above from Toban Black.

Founders sometimes assume that they need an influx of cash to truly grow a product. Luckily, this isn’t true. The confusion arises because we fail to make a distinction between the growth strategies that are relevant to venture backed startups as opposed to the strategies that are relevant to bootstrapped startups. These strategies overlap, but the differences are immense.

You can grow without money, but only if you stop imitating the startups that have closed a round of financing. As the host of Growth Hacker TV I have become keenly aware of these two parallel worlds, and this article is my attempt to outline the primary ways to think about growth when you are building a product without investment capital. There are plenty of blog posts for the funded so let’s even the score a bit.

Think Product. Not Distribution.

Alongside growth hacking there is another buzz phrase titled distribution hacking. Growth hackers generally tend to focus on product centric growth mechanisms, while distribution hackers focus on distributing a product using paid channels (i.e. pay-per-click, retargeting, etc.). Distribution hacking takes money to test, money to execute, and money to optimize. Paid channels can lead to incredible growth, but let’s be honest, they require at least some capital to do well.

Growth Hacking, however, focuses on the product itself, and is therefore extremely cost effective. Here’s the bottom line: if money is tight then stop worrying about paid channels even though they’re working for other startups that have 18 months of runway and 10 employees. Here are some the product features you should focus on:

• Funnel – Since you’re not purchasing traffic, you must ensure that you’re optimizing the traffic you do receive. You need to define your funnel, track the conversion rates for each step of your funnel, and then adjust and optimize the funnel accordingly until you’ve reached acceptable conversion ratios.

• Emails – Email has been, and will be, one of the most powerful tools in a growth hacker’s arsenal. There should be three primary aspects to your email strategy. First, you need to collect email addresses from visitors. Incentivize people to give you their email through giveaways, early access, discounts, free ebooks, or anything else you can think of. Second, set up a drip campaign that automatically emails people at predefined intervals (Day 1, Day 7, Day 15…) with relevant information about your product. Third, send out event-based emails that correspond to certain actions that users take (or don’t take) from within your product. If they haven’t logged in within a month, ping them. If they just reached the top ten in a leaderboard, ping them. If you master collecting emails, sending drip emails, and sending event-based emails, while maintaining a sold funnel, you’ll make the most of the traffic you have.

• Referrals – This is where you try to spread your product via the networks of your existing users. Some of the people that use your product would gladly tell their friends about it if you give them a reason and make it easy. What could you unlock in your app in exchange for a Facebook post. What would make someone want to share a friends email address with you? Can you ask for the referral at a certain moment in their usage that has a higher success rate? Can you auto populate a tweet for your users and allow them to post it with a single click? Simply having social icons on your site is not really utilizing referrals because there is no reason to share your product and it’s not easy enough to do so.

Think Inbound. Not Interruption.

There are two ways to attract attention. You can either interrupt people that are consuming interesting content, or you can be the interesting content. Inbound marketing is all about providing value to people instead of annoying them while someone else provides value to them. Inbound marketing costs time, while interrupting people costs money. If you’re bootstrapping it’s an obvious choice. Here are some ways to generate attention through inbound marketing:

• Guest Blogging – Of course, you could just start your own blog, but then you also start without any readers. Why not leverage someone else’s hard won audience by providing massive value to them through a guest blog post. Meta warning: this is what I’m doing right now. I know that by spending an entire day writing this post for Rob that I’ll get some people to visit Growth Hacker TV as a fair exchange of value. Don’t be afraid to ask someone if you can guest blog for them, but please remember: it is not a pitch for your product, it’s about providing value for their audience. Period.

• Podcast Tour – The audio version of guest blogging is a podcast tour. Get booked on podcasts that are relevant to your product. This is beneficial because it creates a unique bond between yourself and others. If they hear your voice (or see your face) it’s different than just reading your words. If you can effectively guest blog and go on a podcast tour you can create deep connections with people.

• Guides and Ebooks – Writing a complete guide on a topic may seem like a lot of work. Well, that’s because it is, but who said that growth hacking was easy? If traffic matters enough to you then why wouldn’t you spend a week (or more) spilling your insights and crafting something meaningful. And why wouldn’t you give it away for the sake of inbound traffic, instead of trying to make a few miniscule dollars on the front end?

Think Partnerships. Not Competition.

When you’re bootstrapping a startup, try to align yourself with other relevant companies through partnerships. Avoid seeing everyone as a competitor because when companies cooperate amazing things can happen. All partnerships are different, but here are some questions to ask yourself as you develop bonds with other companies:

• What other companies serve a similar audience to your own?

• What value could you provide another company’s users without being seen as a threat?

• How many resources would the proposed partnership require (money, time, energy, etc.)?

• Is the value you’re providing another company equal to the value you are receiving?

Here are some ideas for possible partnerships:

• Could you find another company to do a simple cross promotion with? You could trade tweets, blog posts, or ad space.

• Could you integrate products with another company through an API to deepen each other’s feature set?

• Could you exchange introductions with another company to open doors for each other?

• Could you offer your product at a discount to the users of another product for strategic reasons?

• Could you swap internal data with another company in order to learn from each other’s analytics?

Think Cash Flow. Not LTV/CAC.

It has become very popular to talk about the LTV>CAC equation. It basically states that you want the LTV (lifetime value of the customer) to be greater than the CAC (customer acquisition cost). While this is a helpful way to think about your numbers, there is a hidden variable that is sometimes overlooked, which is “time”. Even if LTV is greater than CAC you may still have negative cash flow for a few months. It takes time to recoup the cost of acquiring a customer before you actually make a net profit. Remember, it’s the “lifetime” value of a customer, not the “instant” value of the customer.

If you have venture capital in the bank then you can afford to go upside down on CAC for a few months, but if you’re bootstrapping your startup then this is probably not an option. Therefore, despite how helpful this equation is, you must be very realistic about how the CAC affects your cash flow and how much “time” you’re willing to let lapse before you are in the black.

Think Creatively. Not Dogmatically.

The tried and true startup advice that is passed around amongst founders is sometimes not applicable to startups without venture capital. You must keep this in mind when reading blogs, or taking courses, or attending conferences. Good advice applied to the wrong context can destroy a startup. You must think creatively about how you are going to acquire, retain, and monetize users, because there simply isn’t as much wisdom available to guide you when you’re bootstrapping. Don’t be afraid to develop new strategies, try new tactics, and chart your own path to growth. It might be your only option.

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Since you made it to the bottom of the article, here is your reward. Use the promocode “rob” to get a free month of Growth Hacker TV.

The post Growth Hacking Without Venture Capital first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

This article is a guest post from Eric Tarn. Eric is a co-founder of Onepager, a simple website builder which helps individuals and small businesses get beautiful sites up quickly and easily.

When you’re part of a startup, you’re usually working with a smaller team and budget to reach big goals. While it’s tempting to try to do it all by yourself (after all, isn’t that the go-getter startup way?) there may come a time when it’s most beneficial to work with another company to reach your goals.

It’s very likely that another company has developed a product or solution that you don’t have time to, and vice versa. Like the symbiosis between egrets and hippos, partnerships allow two parties to mutually benefit from each other’s work.

At Onepager, we’ve formed two very different partnerships. In our first, we incorporated fellow startup Gumroad’s e-commerce platform into our own; in the second, domain registrar Namecheap.com offered our services to their huge user base. In both cases, the other companies approached us with an initial proposal.

While luck is always part of business, I also think that by communicating our values honestly, both internally and externally, we attracted like-minded companies who were natural partnership fits. And throughout both negotiations, we made sure we were crystal clear on how the partnership would benefit each side.

Here’s how I’ve found working with both a small and large company beneficial to my own, and the reasons why any startup should be open to the idea.

Partnering with a fellow startup

Onepager’s main objective is to help small businesses build great-looking websites quickly and easily. However, since businesses tend to sell things (who would’ve thought?), many of our customers expressed the need for e-commerce functionality. Since we couldn’t address this immediately, we put e-commerce on our roadmap, and had customers link to their PayPal accounts as a provisional solution.

Then enters Gumroad, proposing a partnership in which Onepager would use Gumroad as its e-commerce tool, giving us the functionality we needed, and providing Gumroad with wider distribution. By integrating with Gumroad we were able to address the needs of our customers with a market-tested, user-friendly tool. Here’s how this partnership directly benefited Onepager, and how a similar partnership would benefit you.

1. We pushed out a sophisticated feature quickly

To build the e-commerce functionality ourselves would have taken two of our team members at least 40 hours each. Using Gumroad’s Platform API, it only took 20 hours of work over the course of a couple weeks to integrate everything and offer our customers beautiful e-commerce functionality. Not only had we reached a goal on our roadmap, but we were able to keep focus on other initiatives. And by giving our customers a product they had asked for with such quick turnaround, we demonstrated that we had prioritized their concerns.

2. We saved thousands of dollars

Using Gumroad saved us thousands of dollars in development hours, since a product we needed had already been built. If we had chosen to assign this project to existing team members, it would have taken two people at least 40 hours—a total of 80 hours, which, depending on who you ask, could have cost us $60,000.

Additionally, delaying e-commerce could have cost us thousands of dollars of potential revenue from prospective users for whom e-commerce was a make-or-break necessity. By partnering, we got a useful and elegant product for free, and delivered it to our customers quickly.

3. We worked with people like us

Other startups just get it. When you partner with a fellow startup, you both understand what it’s like to be a small business amongst many hoping to succeed in a highly competitive market. Chances are you entered the field because you’re super passionate about what you do, and working with like-minded people makes the whole process easier.

It’s also very rewarding to see both your company and their company grow. Being invested in each other’s success boosts morale all around, and this sense of kinship only happens when you self-identify with your partner. It makes the whole process that much more exciting because when one side wins, so does the other. Everyone’s in it together.

Partnering with the big guys

When Namecheap first contacted us, we couldn’t believe that such a large company was approaching us (the little guys!). Once we recovered from the initial disbelief, we felt validated to know that such an established company wanted to work with us. It reaffirmed the idea that being honest and forthcoming about our company’s mission attracted companies we were excited about. But besides merely boosting our ego, working with Namecheap has given our company huge advantages that would have been harder to gain on our own.

1. We have the seal of approval

When you’re working at a startup, you know you’re great, but it’s powerful to have a well-known company backing that up. No matter how revolutionary or useful your product is, having a trusted source vouch for you gives people confidence in your purpose. That’s what Namecheap does for us; they let people know we’re valuable. So valuable that they use us for their own customers. This type of reassurance makes people more confident in you, and thus more likely to use your product.

2. We got press you can’t buy

Being linked to a larger company gives you high-visibility press that’s much harder to come by on your own. When we partnered with Namecheap, we wrote a press release, which was either reposted or covered by various news sources. Now visitors on those sites, who we previously had no way of reaching, now know who we are. The partnership also means that anyone who registers a domain with Namecheap is offered Onepager as their site builder, putting us in front of potentially millions of their customers.

3. We gained wider distribution

It can be a struggle to balance lofty goals with a thrifty budget. While you probably didn’t found or join your startup purely for the sake of making money, the reality is that you need it to build your company. So if you can get sales in exchange for offering a product you’ve already developed, it becomes an almost effortless, and hopefully free, way to generate revenue. (Of course you have to get past the negotiation process first, which unfortunately can be lengthy.)

To give you an idea, Namecheap, who boasts a list of over one million users and three million domains, started offering us on their site December 14th, 2012. Since then, our revenue has increased by 50%. That’s high volume sales without much work. Any customer registering a domain is extremely likely to be looking for a website builder, and with the click of a button, they’ll get exactly what they need. That’s like having selling machine that presents our product to an ideal audience 24/7. Compare that to cold-calling, and you can see how desirable this model is.

Conclusion

Partnering with these two companies has allowed our company to grow in amazing ways that otherwise would have taken longer to achieve, or might not happened at all. As I mentioned before, being honest and in-touch with your team and other companies about your mission will help you develop partnerships that reach your goals with smart, like-minded people. If both companies are benefitting in clearly defined ways that directly contribute to their missions, you can rest assured you’re entering a very desirable partnership.

Down the line you might be able to enter partnerships that aren’t so clear cut (like co-branding ones), but in the beginning stages of growing your company, you need be laser-focused and protective of your resources. Partnerships like the ones we’ve formed with Gumroad and Namecheap are the kinds that directly benefit startups, allowing you to continue down your roadmap with more resources and support than you had before.

The post How I Grew My Startup’s Revenue 50% And Saved $60k Through Partnerships first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

In this 3 part series I’m running through 13 pre-launch traffic strategies (actually it’s turned into 14) I am using for getting attention and building an audience and a list for my reporting app Informly.

In part 1, I went into detail about my onsite content strategy which forms the backbone for my traffic generation efforts.

In part 2, I went through 6 more strategies including forums, guest blogging, email newsletters, CSS galleries, partners and app comparison sites.

In this final installment I am going through my final 7 strategies.

8. App listing sites

There are a lot of sites that just list and / or review apps. When I launched my beta a few months ago I created a spreadsheet with a bunch of these sites, some general app sites and some mobile app sites and submitted to all of them. Because of the mobile explosion a lot are mobile only so it helps if you have a mobile version if your app (which I do).

The submission acceptance rates are generally pretty low and most will try to get some money out of you to guarantee inclusion. If budget permits you may decide to pay for some of them if they are particularly suitable (I didn’t). But you can get good long term traffic from these sites and you’ll often get picked up on other sites because they’ll see your listing on app sites.

My app was recently added to Cloudli.st (14 visits converts at 7%) without my doing and it was reviewed on Appvita (41 visits converts at 4.88%). These are just a few examples, I’ve also had it added to other sites as a result of my submissions and the overall conversions are surprisingly excellent (61 visits at 6.5%).

I have a spreadsheet of 100 or so mobile app sites, if you are interested feel free to email me if you want it.

9. Startup sites

Similar to app sites there are also loads of sites just dedicated to listing startups. Again if you build a list of these and add yourself to them you’ll also find that others often pick you up naturally. The one I got the most traction from when I initially added my site was KillerStartups.com (over 200 visitors – back before I was measuring conversions).

I also heard recently on Rob’s podcast a mention for http://betali.st/ which looks great and I will be submitting there also.

Often the experience with these sites is that you will get a fair bit of traffic when it first goes up but it will drop off dramatically once it leaves the homepage. This obviously depends on the site, on larger sites your submission won’t stay on the homepage long.

When you launch you’ll also want to look at getting some press from sites like these and other startup related news outlets so you can consider these sites in your “reach out” activities as well (see later on in this post).

10. Twitter / Tweet Adder

This strategy has been my biggest surprise in generating traffic to my pre-launch site. The process is basically:

• Follow a bunch of people on Twitter (you could start by following people who follow your competitors, or people who follow other services you integrate with for example).
• When someone follows you, send them a message thanking them for following you and letting them know about your app.

I used Tweet Adder to automate this process which requires more or less a one off setup and it runs 24 / 7 on my second computer. This is a potentially risky strategy as Twitter doesn’t love this kind of automation, I also use my second Twitter account so I don’t end up following loads of people on my main Twitter account (which kind of kills the Twitter experience).

Over the last 3 months this strategy has sent me 33 conversions out of 364 visitors (9%) putting it into my top 5 referrers by volume and right up there with the highest converting traffic sources. For my time spent (around 20 minutes setup) it is by far the best in terms of return on my time.

11. Podcasting

A few months ago I started a podcast called Web Domination. There have been 18 episodes so far so all up probably around 80-90 hours work across a few months. It’s been a real eye opener to see how much you can get out of exploring a totally different medium. Here are some of the specific things I’ve gotten out of doing the podcast.

• Over 3,000 visits to my podcast posts in around 3 months
• 20,000 episode downloads in about 3 months with episodes ranging from 1,000 downloads per episode up to 5,000 downloads.
• Around 250 podcast subscribers in iTunes and 11 5 star reviews.
• Personal relationships started with some very influential people including Neil Patel, Tim Reid, Tim Conley, Dan Andrews, James Schramko, Alan Branch, Ana Hoffman and more often than not Retweets or shares from my guests.
• Interviews on 2 other podcasts (more on the way).
• Backlinks from well regarded sites in the industry including Internetbusinessmastery.com, lifestylebusinesspodcast.com, tropicalmba.com, Foolishadventure.com, superfastbusiness.com and more.
• I’ve also been asked to present at 3 different conferences (I haven’t accepted but it’s interesting to note that 2 of the requests came from previous podcast guests – podcasting is a great authority builder).

One thing I didn’t do when I started out was really have any kind of strategy for the podcast. As a result I didn’t mention the app in the show all the time and didn’t have any way to benefiting from them visiting my podcast site. I’ve recently changed this by moving the podcast site over to the main webcontrolroom.com domain, adding a message at the start of the show and to all previous shows that mentions the app and I’ll also offer a specific deal to podcast listeners when I get closer to launch.

I was recently in an event in Bangkok where Dan Andrews presented to the whole room a sales pitch for Rob’s product HitTail. Dan’s point was that because he listens to Rob’s podcast each week, he knows everything about his product. While it’s sometimes difficult to measure the impact, podcasting can be extremely powerful.

There’s no telling how powerful the podcast will be long term in terms of my app but it could well be the most powerful strategy of all. Particularly if I get some assistance with the launch from some of these big players.

12. Weekly videos

I didn’t address video in my section on onsite content in part 1 because I was only just starting out with the idea of doing a weekly video at the time. So I’m adding video as a bonus strategy.

Since the first post went up I decided to take a different approach with the videos and they are starting to have a decent impact.

I started out doing a video series called 5 Minute Friday which was supposed to be a 5 minute video with some insights about marketing on the web. In episode 6 however I decided to do something a bit different and use a bit of humour. The episode was called ‘Overnight success – how to go viral’.

This video was very well received – the chart below shows the impact of my 5 most recent posts and as you can see the How to go viral post is well ahead of the others (the Siri video is only a day old I suspect it will overtake the other blog posts shortly).

As a result I decided to do videos in this style from that point forward. Because it’s so early I can’t really offer too much in terms of results or advice but I have had a few things happen that are notable:

1. My viral video was shared on Facebook by 2 people I look up to with large audiences. It was also played in front of 60 people at a conference I attended.
2. I’ve had some great comments via email and on the site. If you look at the screenshot above you can see there are 15 comments on the viral video (The D logo is the commenting system I use Disqus). This is significantly more than I would generally get on a podcast episode or blog post so the engagement is very high.
3. I know there are people who have seen the videos who wouldn’t have seen any of my other content (I had a comment from Youtube guru Gideon Shalwick for example).
4. They’ve also enabled me to show a different side of myself and I really think they have the potential to spread my brand to a totally new audience. So far I have had over 1,300 watches on youtube. Early days but I think this is a good start.
5. In addition to youtube I’m extracting the audio (which takes a few seconds) and they audio version is syndicated to iTunes. I’m getting 500-600 audio file downloads per episode as well.

One thing I will be doing is installing Lead Player so I can convert better from the videos. At the moment the actual pages where I post the videos are very low in terms of conversions.

13. Social Media

I’m no social media guru and without paying for ads it’s not easy to build a following on social media. One thing that helps enormously is putting out a lot of your own original content. Again particularly with the podcast and the videos, these have resulted in a lot of new followers on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

My main strategy with social media at the moment for me is to use it to build relationships and also to share my content. I’ll discuss the relationship side in the next point on ‘Reaching out’. In terms of content I get a lot of traffic through social media and while it converts poorly (under 2%) I think it is probably one of my best sources of new audience members. This is a bit hard to measure but social media is one of the main ways that my content gets discussed by other people and in that sense it’s the main way for me to get in front of new people. Twitter and Facebook are both in my top 10 traffic sources.

Social media is as multiplier for your great content. If you are writing long, detailed useful articles or doing podcasts, or videos etc but have no presence on social media, they will be unlikely to get any attention. So if you are running with a heavy content strategy then social media is a must.

There are many more sophisticated things you can do with social media depending on your budget and available time and expertise. For me, the bare minimum is being active on Facebook (page, group and personal account), Twitter (personal and app account) and Google+, sharing my posts on each network and other useful posts and actively engaging with others, encouraging discussion, thanking for re-tweets etc.

I also use the post impact chart shown above to get a feel for what content is having the most impact on social media which points me in a direction for future content.

14. Reach out

My reach out strategy is a long and at times laborious set of tasks. When I launch in a few weeks time I want to get some attention and I want important people to know what I’m doing. If I do nothing now and just send a bunch of cold emails on launch then I’m not going to get noticed. So I’m taking a structured approach to it spending a bit of time each week on reaching out.

The specific steps are:

• Building a Google doc of influential people in my space (these include some international and local press contacts, influential people in the startup / web app world and bloggers and sites relating to my main target audiences (bloggers, small business owners, internet marketers etc).
• Spending a bit of time each week working through the list, finding their sites, their Twitter handle’s, their blogs, any communities they are part of etc.
• Engaging with them in some way such as retweeting their posts, commenting on their blog, engaging with them in the communities they are part of (if they have their own this is by far the best way). I’ll write down everything I did in the spreadsheet and if I got anything back from the person (if you have a decent memory you probably don’t have to do this).
• Help them out if at all possible, little things like pointing out broken links on their sites, leave them an iTunes review or if they ask for help with something – jump on it. A few months ago when I first started, Jason Calacanis put out a tweet asking for tips on free app review sites. I sent him my list and had a quick email exchange about my app. A few months later when I noticed he was looking for guests for an upcoming Ask Jason episode I volunteered and reminded him about the exchange last year. This lead me to being on episode 297 and getting me and my app in front of 100,000 people. Hopefully I’ll have more stories like this closer to launch.
• After 4-5 weeks of doing this, I’ll choose whichever journalist seems to be the most relevant and offer them an exclusive for a story on the launch. Again it’s early days so time will tell but hopefully when it comes time to launch this strategy will allow me to get some press.

In addition to journalists I am building a list of bloggers who talk about similar topics that my audience is interested in and I will reach out to them the week before launch with a bit of information on the app. I am hoping this will result in me getting some mentions on blogs when I launch.

What is your number 1 traffic strategy?

One of the main points to take out of this is I’ve arrived at this list of 14 things by testing many many more and working out what works for me. It’s an ongoing process as I get more and more feedback from people and continue to monitor the data on what is working.

With the right setup you can learn a lot from doing different tests and then over time refining your approach to focus on the ones that work best for you. With that in mind I’d love to hear from you. Let us know in the comments below what your number 1 traffic strategy is.

I’d also be happy to answer any questions relating to this article below.

Dan Norris is the founder of Informly a free tool that gives web entrepreneurs a simple report on the performance of their business. The app talks to popular services like Analytics, PayPal, Xero, Mail Chimp etc and simplifies the information into a 1 page live report available via the web or mobile.

The post Case Study: 13 Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups (Part 3 of 3) first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

In this 3 part series (part 1 here) I’m running through 13 pre-launch traffic strategies I am using for getting attention and building an audience and a list for my web app Informly. In part 1, I went into detail about my onsite content strategy which forms the backbone for my traffic generation efforts. In this part 2 I’m going through 6 more strategies.

2. Forums

I’ve always been fairly active in forums frequented by my target audience (generally tech savvy small business owners). Rather than going into a lot of forums and posting an intro thread, I tend to build up a decent presence in only a few forums.

Once you’ve built your chops, you’ll get support from other members, leniency from the forum moderators and additional benefits (like links in your signature).

I have a weekly task to spend an hour going through and either answering people’s questions or posting original content to forums I participate in. The latter seems to work better for me because a lot of people hang out in forums to answer people’s questions, not a lot take the time to produce well thought out original content for a forum. I also make sure I’ve got a compelling call to action in my signature and it links to my site via a trackable link.

Here’s an example of a thread where I’ve posted some original content. You can see from the replies that people appreciated it, thanked me, some even signed up to test the app.

You can also see that I wasn’t afraid to mention my app in the thread which is something I encourage for onsite content, forums and guest posts. With forums this can get a bit murky and it’s worthwhile checking the forum rules first before deciding to break them ;). If you build up your presence on the forum often you can make your own judgement on what is valuable to the audience and that will be respected by the moderators. If it’s not then generally the worst case is the post will be edited or removed.

The content for posts like this come very easily once you are in the habit of creating epic content for your own site because you can just post simplified versions of the content in the forums that are more relevant to the audience.

In addition to free forums I also participate in paid forums which I find an excellent (probably the best) place for building deeper relationships with people and advocates for my app. Since this post is about free methods though I won’t go into that more here.

3. Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a big part of my traffic strategy but there are a few tricks here. Check out these results from 2 guest posts I did on Problogger. Both had very similar traction on the site (40-50 comments / 270-300 tweets).

10 vital stats for blog health Visits: 45, conversions: 0 (this was for beta user signups)

Are you wasting your time guest posting Visits: 156, conversions: 35 (for email signups)

The main difference between the posts is the first one is a generic list post and doesn’t reveal specific information about my business. The second one does which means it mentions my app and educates the reader on what it is. So at least at the end of the post the readers know what my app does and they have some interest in heading to my site for a look. I also find posts where I’m talking about conversions or aspects of what I’m doing on the site will send me more traffic because people will be curious to see the site – some of these people will inevitably opt in.

The other strategies I recommend in guest posting are covered in the pro blogger post so I won’t repeat them here but despite a shaky start, guest posting is turning into a great strategy for me. Our of all of my strategies it is my number 1 source of conversions (in the last month).

4. Email newsletters

Most people will tell you that your email list will convert better than anything else. The truth is it depends on the list. I have 2 email lists (other than the list of beta testers):

• One that I have built up from my blogging efforts and writing ebooks and resources for small business owners over the past few years (using a free ebook as opt in bait).
• Another one that I am building as a pre-launch list for the Informly app (no opt in bait).

The people who signed up for my first list were interested in my content. Whereas the people who signed up for the second one are interested in the app. In terms of conversions I haven’t sent an offer to the launch list yet (I will do when I launch) but I suspect that will convert very well. My other list however converts very poorly. I send out useful information to this group but the information doesn’t drive people to sign up for the app.

I chatted to a few people about list building including Neil Patel and James Schramko and came up with my own strategy for my app (particularly focused on the launch stage).

Tip 1 – Build a list of people interested in the app

If you are just writing useful content and you are asking people to sign up for more content then you are building a list of people interested in your content. This is fine once you have launched but before you launch you want to get people who are interested in your app to increase signups on launch and help with the momentum.

So for my 4-5 weeks leading up to launch my site is very simple with no clutter and a clear opt in. This opt in is getting people excited about the app and asking them to opt in to be notified first when it launches. This goes into the footer of every blog post and every page on the site. Note I’m also experimenting with an opt in for my content in the sidebar on blog pages. What I will probably do when I launch is show the content opt in to current users (who are logged in) and show the app registration to all others:

Tip 2 – Make sure your content is about your app

I mentioned this above in the onsite content section and it’s also important here. If your articles talk about your app, use screenshots etc and generally build interest throughout the post then readers will be much more likely to opt in after reading it. I’d suggest either a locked opt in that moves down the page as the user does or a second post footer opt in box (I’m using WP Post Signature and doing the latter).

I’m not saying make every post about your latest feature – that’s a terrible idea. Follow the epic content notes in part 1 of this series and create awesome, meaningful content for your audience and use your app / site as the test case or where it’s relevant in the article. For an example check out my recent post on Actionable Analytics.

Tip 3 – Inform and educate the list

I’m keeping my list in the loop before I launch. I let them know about major new features (not all features) and I’ll be sending them some information on the importance of tracking metrics and some examples of people getting good results from the app. This will warm them up prior to launch.

After launch, my strategy will be a little different but prior to launch my goal is to get 1,000 people signed up to my launch list (I have around 450 so far). I want these people to be very keen to try the app when it launches and tell their friends to help with the momentum of launch.

If you have already launched I would encourage you to check out what KissMetrics are doing, particularly their emails. They do an exceptional job at educating you, building on your problems and positioning their app as the solution.

5. CSS Galleries

Most web startups will be pretty heavily into design so once you get your landing page up, submit it to a bunch of free CSS directories. You can either go through a list of popular directories yourself and submit manually or pay a small fee to be added to them. At CSS Gallery List you can get links to all of the sites or pay them $20 to do it for you (have a week off coffee and it’s still free).

I did this when I first put my site up and got quite a bit of traffic from the sites that included it. I’l be doing it again once the full re-branded site is launched soon. If you have a really exceptional design you can potentially get a lot of traffic from this.

CSS galleries are one of my top traffic sources however conversions are typically quite low. For a  site with a nice design though it’s a very quick, cheap way to get some attention (and particularly good if your app is useful to web designers).

6. Partners

Partnerships with other apps is a potential goldmine if you can get the mix right.

My app integrates with a number of other apps (Xero, PayPal, MailChimp, Aweber, Analytics etc). Some of these apps provide resources for integration partners and I’ve found the traffic I get from these partners is phenomenal – in some cases up to 5 times the site average!

Not only that, these directories are actually a big referrer of traffic volume. Xero.com is one of my biggest individual site referrers of traffic.

So every time I integrate with a new app, I’ll see if they have a partner directory and if so I will:

• Add myself to it
• If time permits, create a specific landing page for the app – here is my Xero landing page
• Look to see if they do anything else for integration partners. Xero have a community that I participate in, they have a specific API team Twitter account (which I’ve engaged with and had stuff re-tweeted which has in turn been re-tweeted by the main Xero account), they also have specific events for add-on partners that I’m looking into as well. They have also offered to do a blog post about my launch and they have given me a quote to include in my press release!

Other companies are keen to get their brands out there too and if they have your audience already they are potential gold mine if you play your cards right.

Even if your partners don’t have an integrations directory make sure you reach out to them and say something nice – Twitter is the best place to do this and sometimes you’ll be retweeted to their audience. I do this when I start working with a new partner and once we launch the integration.

7. App comparison sites

There are sites out there that will compare apps to each other. One is Alternativeto.net but there are quite a few of them. You can either add yourself to these or you might find you just get added naturally as you get more exposure.

My app has a free version and most of the incumbents are paid only. So being on these comparison sites as a free alternative to a paid app, sends some great traffic my way. Here is a competitor’s listing on Alternativeto.net which shows me as the only free alternative (thanks in advance for the like).

These sites not only send a lot of traffic but they also convert very well. Incredibly, my conversion rate from Alternativeto.net is over 10%, way above my site average and they are in my top 5 top referrers by volume. I wouldn’t have expected that to be the case.

Build yourself a spreadsheet of sites like this and submit your site to them either before you launch or after (I’ve submitted to a few already and will be doing some more after).

What do you think?

Feel free to let me know below what you think of these 6 traffic strategies. In part 3 I’ll be wrapping up with my final 6.

Dan Norris is the founder of Informly a free tool that gives web entrepreneurs a simple report on the performance of their business. The app talks to popular services like Analytics, PayPal, Xero, Mail Chimp etc and simplifies the information into a 1 page live report available via the web or mobile.

The post Case Study: 13 Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups (Part 2 of 3) first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

Part 1 (of 3) – Introduction and Onsite Content
Experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that no traffic is free. Even if you aren’t paying money for something you are paying in time (which is worth something) and once you try to scale it, you will have to part with cash.

But sometimes they forget what it’s like when you get started. The reality for most bootstrapped web startups is that you have time – but you don’t have money. And even if you did, it’s often very hard to make paid traffic like Google AdWords work.

To get the momentum going we have to rely more often than not on a bunch of free strategies.

My web app, Informly is a simple live dashboard that reports on your business performance showing charts from a number of services (MailChimp, Analytics etc). I’ll be launching it in a few weeks and over the last few months I’ve been working on a bunch of traffic strategies designed to build interest, develop an audience and launch with a decent pre-launch mailing list.

Over the course of 3 articles I’ll present 13 free traffic strategies that I am using to drive traffic to my site pre-launch. I’ll also include specific information on visits, opt ins, conversion rates etc where possible and what worked and what didn’t.

In this part (part 1) I’ll be addressing onsite content which is by far the most important part of my traffic strategy.

Start with Google Analytics Custom Segments
One note before I get into the details: If you are going to follow a structured approach like this then it’s imperative that you use Google Analytics to track progress so you can learn over time which techniques are working.

Because a lot of these strategies don’t lend themselves to use trackable URLs you will need to set up custom segments to get usable high level data on the traffic and the conversions for each of these strategies.

If you aren’t familiar with custom Segments in Google check out my post Google Analytics Advanced Segments. Here are 2 charts from Informly which show my last 30 days worth of traffic from my top 10 traffic strategies.

Traffic strategy 1. Onsite content

I live and breath onsite content and I believe it’s a huge opportunity for startups because it’s often ignored or at least misunderstood. Too often startups will focus 100% on the product and won’t be engaging with their potential audience enough prior to launch. Content is the easiest way to engage with new people online and it’s the backbone of my traffic strategy.

The main thing here is to work out who your audience is and create some useful content for them.

In my case the people who use my app are web savvy small business people and online marketers. These people use other SAAS platforms heavily and are eager to save time by having all of their stats in the one place. But importantly they are also looking for simpler ways of understanding complex data (particularly the small business crowd) and generally any information that will help them succeed online.

My onsite content strategy involves having an interview podcast (which I’ll address separately) a blog, a weekly 5 minute video and a weekly email.

Here are 6 tips that I can share on what to think about when formulating your own onsite content strategy.

1. Don’t just write about your niche
I’ve got news for you. What you are doing is probably boring. I know what I do is – Analytics and data is boring. If I was to constantly put content out about data I wouldn’t even want to read it myself!

When I spoke with Neil Patel from Kiss Metrics on my podcast he told me you don’t have to create content purely about your app’s particular use, just create content that is useful to the types of people using your app. If you check out the Kiss Metrics blog for example it’s not all content about metrics, it’s all sorts of useful content for tech savvy website owners.

Caption: For inspiration on how to create epic onsite content, check out the KissMetrics blog they are the best of the best.

This makes it a lot more fun and allows you to indulge a bit in your broader interests. So I write articles on cloud computing, small business, web marketing, content marketing, SEO as well as business intelligence, analytics etc.

2. Create a lot of content
Even if you know nothing about SEO, the act of creating content alone can easily be enough to make Google your biggest referrer of traffic.

My site doesn’t rank for any big keywords, I’ve only been actively creating content on it for a few months after all. But traffic from Google (even when I exclude anyone searching for my brand keywords) is by far my biggest referrer (recall the charts above). I’ve created around 40 posts on my site in the last few months and I’m already getting traffic from around 130 keywords a month. In my last business I created over 200 posts over a few years and in a typical month I would get traffic for 700-800 keywords.

This is mostly a result of creating content and mentioning a lot of words. It’s long tail traffic and it’s free, long term traffic that comes when you create a large amount of text content. The downside is while it’s at the top of my list of traffic it’s towards the bottom when looking at the conversion rates. So I wouldn’t rely on this alone.

3. Create epic content
As I mentioned above, the long tail traffic is a big source of traffic but it converts poorly. In addition it doesn’t really assist with any of your other strategies. When you create epic content it will do a lot more including:

• help build your social media following because people will be drawn to follow your advice.
• help with your “reaching out” efforts (more on this in parts 2 and 3) by building a body of work respected by influential peers.
• help build your authority over time to a point where people send you traffic via word of mouth, social media, forum mentions etc.

The content that works for me is longer, detailed posts about a specific topic. My post The simple guide to content driven SEO is an example which includes a lot of the things I like to do with my content such as:

1. It’s long and detailed (2,000 words)
2. It’s very specific. It addresses a specific topic and includes step by step instructions on how to undertake the necessary SEO tasks.
3. It includes lots of images. I love specific step by step instructional stuff because it lends itself well to screenshots which can be created easily and for free. Another option is original illustrations or pictures which you might be able to leverage somewhere else like Pinterest.
4. It attempts to simplify a complex problem. If you can take a complex topic that already has a lot of content written about it and simplify it for the audience, this is something that people love. I don’t try to become an expert in one particular area (Analytics, SEO etc) I try to distill the complex stuff that is out there into a specific, simple, actionable post and aim to become an expert in simplifying complex problems. My audience appreciates this and there is a good chance your audience will too.
5. It uses my business / app as an example. This is critical and is something I’ll talk about in the guest posting section as well. You want to make sure the reader knows who you are and they have some desire to opt in to your content or your app / business when they finish the post. Remember a lot of traffic will come direct from Google and may be seeing your stuff for the first time. The easiest way to gain their interest while still writing a post with 100% value for the reader is to make the post about your business / website etc.

I’ve also started doing a weekly video which is being very well received. The more mediums you can employ the better. I am using text and images for blog posts, audio for podcasts (supported by transcriptions) and video (converted to audio as well).

4. Utilise a range of mediums
So far on my site I’ve done:

• text articles
• info graphics
• weekly 5 minute videos, and
• an audio podcast.

I find some people love the podcast, others respond well the blog posts and I’m getting a whole new audience through the videos. I’m such a huge fan of podcasts that I’ll address this separately in part 2.

A lot of people assume that creating great content is about writing blog posts. In reality a lot of people don’t want to read blog posts. I watch more videos and listen to more podcasts than I read articles. And mediums like audio and video lend themselves very well to building trust and authority – much more so than writing blog posts.

5. Build your social presence
Onsite content and social media go hand in hand. Social channels like Twitter / Facebook, forums etc will be the main channel for promoting your posts to a new audience so if you don’t plan on investing time on them then you won’t get much return for your content efforts.

I go into this in a bit more detail in the social media and forum sections individually in parts 2 and 3 of this series.

6. Ignore most SEO advice
Here is my growth in backlinks over the last few months:

How have I achieved this growth? By doing zero back linking and ignoring pretty much every piece of SEO advice I come across. And the most recent Google Algo change – zero impact on my site.

SEO can be extremely complicated, particularly in the last few years. My last business relied on ranking for high authority keywords to bring me the vast majority of my new business. This is quite a risky situation to be in and it also requires that you know a hell of a lot about SEO (and I’m not talking about optimising H1 tags here).

I believe that long term a far better approach is to not worry about the specifics of SEO at all. Spend your time in more productive ways and focus on creating epic content and getting the word out about it.

*Note if you are a legit SEO guru then obviously ignore my advice here – this is written for the typical technical / product focused web startup founder. If you feel you can build an advantage through SEO then by all means go for it. But I’ve found a lot of people think they are SEO gurus but few really are.

Ignoring SEO advice means:

• No longer spending time learning about the latest Google changes. One thing will never change with Google and that is if you put out exceptional content and do a good job sharing it, you will be rewarded.
• Avoid elaborate on-page optimisation. Just do the basics and focus your attention elsewhere. Forget about keyword density, excessive internal linking, obsessing over optimised images etc. This stuff only has marginal benefit and the psychological overhead of having to be an expert in it is not worth it.
• Don’t do any off-page SEO (link building). This stuff is now trickier and riskier than ever. Forget about it, I have.

Here is what I think is a much better long term strategy for the typical web startup.

• Focus on what you are good at (in my case that is creating content on my topic of choice,  and building a great product).
• Create exceptional content that is good enough for people to naturally link to. If this isn’t something you are good at then get others to create the content like Kiss Metrics often does.
• Think long term. What will your site look like 2 years from now. Will it be ranking for 1 keyword with thousands of dodgy back links to your homepage waiting to be slapped by Google’s next algo change? Or will it be a well known resource in your field, filled with epic content that can effortlessly outrank your competitors for every new blog post you write (Make Grange, as James Schramko would say).
• Follow basic on page SEO for your site as a whole. In WordPress this is normally as simple as making sure your theme is using the right tags in the right places, is coded with clean HTML / CSS, using a sensible permalink structure (just postname is fine) and you have something like YOAST SEO installed to help with the rest – If you don’t know what I’m talking about here then you do need to read up on basic SEO with WordPress, if you do then you know enough.
• Make sure each post targets a specific keyword by searching for terms that you know you have a chance at ranking for. Forget about the big ticket keywords that you have no chance of ranking for in the short term. For me, I look for searches getting around 100 exact monthly searches and I don’t worry about looking at competition or how the front page of Google looks. Make sure your article name includes the exact keyword (which means your URL and title will to). You can tell YOAST what specific keyword you are targeting all via the post page in WordPress, aim to get the green light from YOAST and that’s enough.
• Monitor where you are ranking for each new post you put out. My app Informly enables you to do this for free or you can use a dedicated rank tracking tool like SERP Fox. The main reason to do this is not to obsess over where you are ranking but to learn over time which keywords work well for you and which ones don’t so you can make more educated choices about what to target going forward.

All of the above is very easy to do, if you get in the habit of doing it for each post you write, it’s only going to add a few minutes to your process of creating content. You don’t need to really know anything about SEO to do it, you just need to learn over time what’s working and what’s not.

Some posts will hit and some will miss from an SEO point of view. But if they are all great posts, they will all help towards building the authority of your site over time and building back links and social media signals which will increase the rankings for all of your keywords long term.

7. Simplify your blog and optimise for conversions
Finally, I would try to avoid the temptation to fill your site with every latest and greatest widget. All I have on my blog is the opt in on the right (modelled loosely off the Kiss Metrics blog), my social networks and social sharing icons on the left. You want your readers to opt in, either to get more content or sign up for your app – most other widgets are distractions.

Parts 2 and 3

In parts 2 and 3 I will be going into more detail on 12 other traffic strategies such as podcasting, social media, forums and more.

Share your success with onsite content

With that in mind I’d love to hear from you. Let us know in the comments below whether you are using onsite content as a traffic strategy and how it’s working for you. I’ll see you in part 2.

Dan Norris is the founder of Informly a free tool that gives web entrepreneurs a simple report on the performance of their business. The app talks to popular services like Analytics, PayPal, Xero, Mail Chimp etc and simplifies the information into a 1 page live report available via the web or mobile.

The post Case Study: 13 Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups (Part 1 of 3) first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

This artice is a guest post from Joel Gascoigne. Joel is is the founder of Buffer, a smarter way to share great articles with friends and followers. He Tweets at @joelgascoigne and writes regularly on his blog about startups, life, learning and happiness.

I was speaking at an event last week about the lessons I’ve learned along my startup journey, mostly focused on my recent experience of founding and growing Buffer. The first lesson I talked about was how being open with your ideas, and vocal about sharing progress can put you in a much greater position over time because you gradually grow a following and audience to use as a launchpad for future ideas.

After I finished my talk, someone in the audience asked a fantastic question, a concern they had which I think many aspiring startup founders have too: when being open and vocal about your idea in the early stages, isn’t there a danger someone will take the idea and run with it, and kill your startup in the process?

I want to share my personal experience of competition and talk about three specific reasons I now believe keeping your idea quiet could actually be hindering progress to success in a large way.

My “genius” idea turned out to be unoriginal

Before Buffer, I had a previous startup which I worked on for one and a half years. It wasn’t as successful as I would have liked, but it is where I learned a massive amount which enabled me to get traction for Buffer much more quickly.

The idea of my previous startup was that it would be your business card in the cloud. The benefits are that you would never run out of business cards (because you’d give them out digitally) and that your contact information would always be accurate and up to date (you can change your phone number after you’ve already given someone your card). My co-founder at the time, Oo Nwoye, and I thought this was a pretty damn good idea. We were hesitant to talk too much about it before we could launch the first version.

Once we had the idea, we needed a name. After countless discussions and lots of bad names, we decided on the name “OnePage”, which we were very happy with: it captured the concept (one page for all your contact information and social networks) and it was short and “speakable over the phone”.

After we decided on the name OnePage, we snapped up 1page.me as the domain name for the startup. After we grabbed 1page.me, we figured that some would try to access us through onepage.me, and we realised someone had taken that domain. We reached out to the person and tried to buy the domain, but they told us they had plans for it.

So we continued on with our idea, deciding we didn’t need onepage.me, and choosing to use myonepage.com as the domain instead of the more obscure “.me” domain. We started to prepare to launch a couple of months later, and we still hadn’t told many about our idea. Then, we found a Twitter profile with the username “onepageme”. We checked it out, and we were very shocked. The tag-line was “All of you, at OnePage.me” and the idea was almost exactly the same as ours. The guy we’d reached out to was behind the account, and he was based in Australia.

What had happened was that someone on the other side of the world to us had the exact same idea as us, without ever knowing we were working on the idea. Not only that, but he’d thought of the exact same name.

This really affected us, we thought it was a massive problem, but it was completely misguided: in the end, onepage.me never even launched. The landing page is still live, and you can see their last Tweet was almost two years ago.

This experience taught me one of the most important lessons of my startup journey: that ideas are cheap, and that execution is all that matters. Most of the time, someone else has the same idea as you and is working on it right now. If no one has the same idea as you, then you’ll want to think hard about why that is.

Startups: unknown solutions to unknown problems

Startups can usually be differentiated from other businesses because by the fact they have little validation. Whereas a more traditional service business might create websites for someone, a startup wants to innovate and hit upon something which solves a problem for people and can scale incredibly fast. With this element of innovation, it means that startup ideas are usually full of assumptions. The problem being solved is not validated, and the solution is not validated either. You’re not building websites for people like countless other small businesses now.

Therefore, as a startup, you need to be laser focused on validating these assumptions as soon as possible. You need to reach out to people and figure out if the problem you believe exists is a problem people actually have. Then you need to figure out if the solution solves that problem for people.

If you keep your idea secret, you’re delaying this validation, and as time goes on without the idea being out there, there’s an increasing danger you are spending time on a problem which doesn’t really exist or a solution which doesn’t solve a problem.

The idea thief has no passion

The best startups come from a personal need, and are driven by passion. Dennis Crowley founded a startup called Dodgeball before Foursquare which was also a location based social network. He has clearly been very interested about the location space for a long time, and has thought a lot about the problems in the space. He’s passionate.

Even if you don’t spend as long as Dennis Crowley thinking about a problem and space, I’ve seen a general trend that really successful startup founders are super passionate about the space they’re in. It goes beyond wanting to make money. Therefore, if someone was to simply steal an idea, they would lack this passion, and I believe they would make little progress before they give up.

Educating users about your new idea

A component of many startups is that they are new ideas and require some kind of change of habit, or push an idea beyond its current form or scope. People were used to posting on social networks, but not limited to 140 characters and with higher frequency, sharing more openly than they would before. This required a change of habit. In a similar way, Dropbox is something where generally users don’t realise they need the product until they try it. Word of mouth is vital for Dropbox.

With these kinds of startup ideas, if we keep them secret, we’re delaying educating our users about this habit change. The most interesting thing here is that any new competition out there is probably more beneficial to us than if it didn’t exist, because they can help to educate users and make them aware of this new way to do something. Apple’s Reading List is great for Instapaper and Pocket because it educates the masses about the problem, and these startups can simply build a great solution to the problem.

Have you ever felt uncomfortable about sharing your startup idea? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Photo credit: Kent Yoshimura

The post Tell Everyone Your Startup Idea first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.

About 8 months ago I acquired a small startup called HitTail. You can read more about the acquisition here.

When the deal closed, the app was in bad shape. Within 3 weeks I had to move the entire operation, including a large database, to new servers. This required my first all-nighter in a while. Here is an excerpt of an email I sent to a friend the morning of September 16, 2011 at 6:47 am:

Subject: My First All Nighter in Years

Wow, am I tired. Worst part is my kids are going to be up in the next half hour. This is going to hurt

But HitTail is on a new server and it seems to be running really well. Feels great to have it within my control. There are still a couple pieces left on the old server, but they are less important and I’ll have them moved within a week.

I’ll write again in a few hours with the whole story. It’s insane how many things went wrong.

What follows is the tale of that long night…

The Setup
I acquired HitTail in late August and it was in bad shape. I had 3 priorities that I wanted to hit hard and fast, in the following order:

1. Stability – Before I acquired it the site went down every few months, sometimes for several days on end. To stabilize it I needed to move it to new servers, fix a few major bugs, and move 250GB of data (1.2 billion rows).
2. Plug the Funnel – Conversion rates were terrible; I needed to look at each step of the process and figure out how to improve the percentage of people making it to the next step.
3. Spread the Word – Market it.

The first order of business was to move to new servers, which involved overnighting 250GB of data on a USB drive to the new hosting facility, restoring from backup, setting up database replication until the databases were in synch, taking everything offline for 2-3 hours to merge two servers into one, test everything, and flip the switch.

If only it were that simple.

Thursday Morning, 10am: An Untimely Crash
We had planned to take the old servers offline at 10pm pacific on Thursday, but around 10am one of them went down. The server itself was working, but the hard drive was failing and it wouldn’t server web requests.

I received a few emails from customers asking why the server was down and I was able to explain that this should be the last downtime for many months. Everyone was appreciative and supportive. But I spent most of the day trying to get the server stay alive for 12 more hours, with no luck. Half of the users had no access to it for the final 12 hours on the old servers.

Thursday Afternoon, 2pm: Where’s the Data?
We had meticulously planned to have all the data replicated between the old and new database to ensure they would be in synch when we went to perform the migration. But there was one problem…

Replication had silently failed about 48 hours beforehand, and neither myself or my DBA noticed. So at 2pm we realized we were literally gigs behind with the synchronization. With only 8 hours until the migration window began, we zipped up these gigs and started copying them from server to server. The dialog said it would take 5.5 hours – no problem! We had 2.5 hours of leeway.

Thursday Night, 8pm: Copy and Paste
My DBA checked on the copying a few times in the middle of his night (he’s in the UK), and it eventually failed with 10% remaining. At that point we knew that even if we got everything done according to plan we wouldn’t have data for the most recent 48 hours. Grrr.

In a last ditch effort to get the data across the wire we selected the info from a single table that changes the most and copied it to the new server, which took only around 5 minutes. The problem was that this data should have been processed by our fancy keyword suggestion algorithm and it hadn’t been.

Friday Morning, 1am: Panic Sets In
It was about this time I began to panic. Trying to process the data using existing code was not going to happen – the algorithm is written in a mix of JavaScript and Classic ASP, which couldn’t be executed in the same fashion that it is when the app runs under normal conditions. And it wouldn’t run fast enough to process the millions of rows that needed it in any realistic amount of time.

So I did one of the craziest things I’ve done in a while. I spent 4 hours, from approximately 11pm until 3am, writing a Windows Forms app that combined the JavaScript and Classic ASP into a single assembly – with the JavaScript being compiled directly into a .NET DLL that I referenced from C# code. Then I translated the Classic ASP (VBScript) into C# and prayed it would work.

And after 2 hours of coding and 2 hours of execution, it worked.

Friday Morning, 3am: It Gets Worse…
During this time the DBA was trying to merge two databases – copying 75 million rows of data from one DB to another. This was supposed to take 3-5 hour based on tests the DBA had run.

But it was taking 20x longer. The disks were insanely slow because we were running during their backup window and some of the data was on a shared SAN. By 3am, when we should have been wrapping up the entire process, we were 10% done with the 75 million rows.

By 6am we had to make a call. It was already 9am on the East Coast and customers would surely be logging in soon if they hadn’t already. I was exhausted and at my wits end with the number of unexpected failures, and I asked my DBA what our options were.

After some discussion we decided to re-enable the application so users could access it, but continue copying the 75 million rows, but with a forced sleep so the app could run with surprisingly little performance impact. It took 4 days for all of the data to copy, but we didn’t receive a single complaint in the meantime.

Lucky for us, no one noticed. And the app running on the new hardware was 2-3x times more responsive than on the old setup.

Friday Morning, 6:45am: Victory
After some final testing I logged off at 6:45am Friday morning with a huge sigh of relief. I dashed off the email you read in the intro, then headed to bed to be awoken by my kids an hour later. Needless to say had a big glass of wine the following night.

Building a startup isn’t all the fun you read about on Hacker News and TechCrunch…sometimes it’s even better.

The post How a Seemingly Well-Planned Server Move Crashed, Burned, and Rose from the Ashes first appeared on Rob Walling - Serial Entrepreneur.