What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both of their companies and
in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal
here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to
build our own profitable internet businesses. Today, I'm talking to Jane Portman, the founder
of UsurList. Jane, welcome to the show.
Hi, Cortland. It's a great pleasure to be here on the show and to just be talking to
your amazing, widest audience here.
My pleasure to have you, Jane. You are the founder of a company called UsurList. Tell
us a little bit about what UsurList is and how it works.
UsurList is a tool for customer messaging, and you can use it to send a lifecycle email
to your SaaS customers. And unlike other email automation tools, we are focusing entirely
on SaaS companies, so we're a bit of a more focused, more streamlined version of intercom
slash customer.io. And we've been out for two years by now, publicly launched in August,
and have been growing much better ever since. And I do this together with my co-founder
Benedict and my co-founder Claire Solentrop. And I think she was on your show sometime.
Yeah, big fan of Claire's. You know, it strikes me when I hear you describe UsurList. I've
been following your story, and I know that if I had asked you a year ago what UsurList
does, you probably would have described it very differently. You've had quite a journey
with the evolution of exactly what it is that you're building, but also how you describe
it to people.
Exactly. And actually, what we're building has not changed as much as the way we try
to get the point across. What was really helpful this year, I think in the middle of the year,
we did the positioning exercise, and we started using the terms customer messaging ever since.
And that was super helpful, because not only it allows us to explain what we do well, but
also it allows us to build a much more focused roadmap in terms of what we're going to do
next.
Because before that, we went all over the place with some imaginary features. We can
take a deep dive, because we collect behavior data of SaaS customers, and then send communications
based on that. But behavior data, once you have it in place, it's a pretty powerful thing.
So you can go into conversion insights. You can go into analytics, all kinds of other
things, fancy dashboards, while calling ourselves a customer messaging tool allows us to focus
strictly on the communication aspect of that.
Makes sense. So walk me through maybe like a case study or an example. If I am a customer,
how would I use user list?
So you would use our API and start sending information about what users do inside your
web application. We record this display of users within our dashboard, so you can manage
and see who users are, what they do. And then you would head over into the automation section
of our app and then set up automation campaigns there. So let's say when the user joins, they're
sent this and that. When they convert to paid, they get sent this and that. When they achieve
their project number 300, they get sent this and that, and all kinds of lifecycle-based
campaigns in a very straightforward and beautiful manner.
Very cool. So it's like if I had this with ND hackers, I could say, hey, if Jane or any
user makes a product page on ND hackers and their product surpasses $1,000 a month in revenue
or $10,000 a month, send them this email congratulating them and asking them to come on the podcast.
Something like that.
Yes.
Very cool. So the idea that you cannot change what your product does and yet completely
change the way that you describe it and the terminology that you use to explain it to
potential customers and have it still be accurate is pretty mind-blowing. It's just kind of
illustrative of the fact that a product can be many things to many different people. What
motivates you to make a change like that?
I think it was not the motivation. It was very straightforward, like struggling to explain
what we do. And we've been out for about two years. And until just very recently, we've
been really struggling in conferences and in other situations when we have to do the
elevator pitch, it would not be effective. We would do behavior-based email automation
pitch. And that meant that people started comparing us to Drip, ConvertKit, Mailchimp,
other things. And while being powerful in the behavior-based component, we don't allow
for marketing email at all. So it put us in the wrong league. So it was clear that we
were doing something wrong, but it wasn't obvious until we did April Dunford's exercise
and the spreadsheet and all this stuff, like what we are doing wrong. And what we did was
actually listing all the features and all non-existing features like those that we would
never build, hopefully never, and then map those to the value they deliver and to the
people who can benefit from that. So that allowed us to select this messaging component
and focus on that.
So ultimately, you were finding that people didn't understand what you did, even when
you told them what you did. And so you went back to the drawing board to figure out a
better way to describe your product and your features. And now you've sort of unlocked
growth. You're at a point where you're making, I think, four figures a month in revenue.
But I want to go back in time and talk about the path that you took to get here because
I know Usualist isn't your first company. I know you've learned lots of other things
from your previous companies that have informed what you're doing now. Where did this whole
story start for you?
That's a long story. I've been serving SaaS companies as a consultant for ages, basically
since 2012, 2013, when UI Breakfast was created as my consulting brand. And I really enjoyed
being in the community of founders, really enjoyed product work. And I did my own products,
but they were never SaaS. So I did four books before venturing out to start my first SaaS
company.
And that was great training, but it was very, very not similar to running a SaaS. So not
many of those takeaways were helpful in the SaaS industry. I mean, it was really definitely
an amazing sandbox. But when I ventured out to create my first SaaS, which was called
Tiny Reminder in 2000, I think it was the fall of 2016, I was making all kinds of possible
mistakes. And I'm super grateful that I started with a very small SaaS product and that I
wrapped it up fast, understanding that it's not really going too far. And after that,
when I sold it, I ultimately reanalyzed all these mistakes that I did and settled out
to recruit co-founders, Benedict and Claire. And then we started Usulist in the fall of
2017.
We spoke a few weeks ago, and you said something to me that was really interesting, which is
that you wish more founders realized that starting a SaaS business is actually a pretty
slow process. And it's clearly not the best way to make money online. What is the best
way to make money online? It's someone who's done it in other ways.
There is a whole range of options. It depends on how much you want to get and how scalable
you want to keep this. Of course, the most straightforward way is to trade your time
for money, being a freelancer or a better consultant. So that's the most straightforward
way.
And I think I didn't invent this kind of a letter-step approach. Emmy Hoi, Rob Walling,
Patrick McKenzie, they all talk about the same stuff. So first, it's trading time for
money, then it's productizing your services, meaning that finding a reliable, repeatable
format for that, then you can experiment with info products. And info products money is
much easier to make than SaaS money, because books and courses are pretty much impulsive.
And you really don't care that much what they're going to do with it. With SaaS, you really
have to be useful 100% so that people keep paying a recurring fee for what you do.
So it's a different kind of value-slash-money exchange. And I've been through this initial
phase of a startup twice by now. And there is still so much ahead in terms of growing
it. But as for the early stage, I think I can absolutely testify that it's a slow one.
And even if you do things seemingly right, it is still slow. My illusion was that if
I fix all these product mistakes that I did with my first SaaS, I'm not going to do this
silly stuff again, then things will go much faster.
Our ambitious goal when starting useless was to get to $5,000 MRR in the first six months.
And then that would be a great validation whether we should incorporate and keep doing
this. What happened? Oh, my God. We barely got a working beta in about a year after getting
started. And it took us so long to set things up properly to incorporate, to build all this
infrastructure that surrounds the software as a service business. But nobody talks much
about it. It's like getting your terms of service in place, getting your knowledge base
up and everything like that. Of course, there can be a different way. There might be a way
to do this overnight, like Josh Pickford with Bear Metrics. He built it in a few weeks.
I'm sure he didn't have a knowledge base running immediately. But right now, these days, with
the quality bar being so high, we just couldn't go live without having proper knowledge base,
proper company being fully legal and things like that. All of that took so long. And then
when we had this in place, we thought, now we can rocket ship grow. And then, no, not
yet. And we were just in closed beta and courting more and more early customers and so on and
so forth.
It was absolutely exciting, absolutely positive. We didn't fall in the trough sorrow or anything.
But it was nowhere close to where we thought we could get provided that knowledge and that
quality of the product that we have. So it is definitely, definitely a learning experience.
So let's talk about some of these things that make a business slow to grow versus other
kinds of businesses. Because as you mentioned, there are people who've started SaaS businesses
that are like up and running in a week. And there are SaaS businesses that need a certain
level of polish and incorporation and paperwork and documentation and need to build a certain
level of trust that just can't get up and running that fast.
And then you also released, I think you said four different books. And so you've done quote
unquote, info products, where you can just sell those instantaneously and people are
buying from day one. What are some of the differences you've learned and seen between
these things? And what are some of the factors that control whether a business can get up
and running and start making money quickly versus whether it's going to take a long time?
For books and courses, you still have to have an audience in place. And for info products,
it's more important to have an audience than it is for SaaS. Because the ultimate goal
for SaaS is to discover new people in a reliable, repeatable manner. While with books and courses,
you can have your little pool of loyal fans, whatever that means, is it 5,000, 10,000 people
or even 1,000 is pretty much enough. And you can keep launching new things to them, keep
producing new content. And the loyal part of those users who trust you and trust your
expertise, they will happily repeatedly buy your stuff. And that's a wonderful way to
make money online without going into any of the technical complications, especially with
the platforms like Gumroad and many others in place, you don't even have to worry about
payment processing that much. It's basically about shipping a PDF in a sales page. That's
and having a mailing list to launch it to. That's very much an MVP for an info product
business.
How much of the audience building plays into this? Because a lot of times people want to
launch an info product, but they don't have anybody to buy. They don't have a Twitter
audience. They don't have an email list. Does that take years to build? Or is that something
you can build as you're building your info product?
I don't know. I did a very slow way. So I also was growing my mailing list over years.
And it was only of those four books that I did, only the last two were really financially
successful. And the first one was purely like a learning experience. The second one I did
for Envision. And they paid me a small sum of money, but they also provided a connection
to their amazing audience. So some of those people joined my list and it grew in a way
that it could have never grown on its own. And the book was called Fundamental UI Design.
And in addition to just bringing the audience, it's also a cool thing to be on offer of.
To say that I wrote this type of a book.
Yeah, you're an expert.
And the last couple, one was called the UI Audit. And I think we have an article here
on IndieHackers about that.
An interview on IndieHackers from I think 2017.
That was sort of my signature UI UX book, which represents my philosophy on building
products. And then the last one in 2017, I believe, or 18, something like that was called
Your Productized Consulting Guide. And this book appeared because I could just not keep
the knowledge to myself on the topic. Over the years, I've accumulated some of the ideas
and concepts how to run a productized consulting service. And I did a talk at a Brandon Dunn's
conference. And I just had so many questions that I was absolutely excited to just sit
down and type all of that into some sort of guide. And that's what it became. So it's
not directly related to my UI UX profile, but I'm sure it also has attracted some eyeballs
to what I do.
I think being an expert is one of the coolest things you can be online where people see
that you've written a book. In your case, not just one book, but four books. You know
exactly what you're talking about and you've built an audience around that. How do you
leverage being an expert and having an audience and take that into building a SaaS product?
You know what comes to mind? That video with six red lines and I'm an expert when you're
saying that. I think you don't have to be an expert to teach people stuff. You can share
your knowledge and your discoveries even as you learn yourself. And that will help both,
will help you to learn and help other people to learn. So that's totally not a requirement
to be 100% expert or anything like that.
Very true.
So what was your question?
I actually think what you said is a great point, which is that you don't have to be
a world class top tier expert to teach people things. There's so many people who can make
a living online by teaching others, by helping others learn things, who disqualify themselves
because they think I'm not the best in the world. So how can I teach this? Somebody knows
more than I do. But your goal as a teacher is not to be the most knowledgeable person
on earth. It's to be helpful to the people who are trying to learn from you. And usually
that means teaching people who are just one level below you. So even if you're a beginner,
you could document what you're going through and help other people become beginners. And
if you're intermediate, you can help beginners become intermediate. And in fact, you're probably
a better teacher for beginners if you're not an expert than the experts are because they
forgotten what beginners need to know.
Absolutely. And I'm standing on the shoulders of giant sort of speaking, because I learned
about that from Nathan Berry in 2013. And he talks so much about how you can be teaching
just what you're saying exactly. But he also had this great book called Authority that
walked the reader through step by step instructions, how to get started with your first book.
And I was like, well, yeah, that's a great way to kickstart my consulting career. And
that's what I did with the first book. And I can't be more grateful for that instruction
and that learning that he provided. However, there was one important point missing in his
book. It was about making this book useful as a product, serving it to serve, creating
it to serve somebody's pain. In that regard, I wish I had known Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman
and stacking the bricks and all that kind of philosophy earlier, because with that in
mind, I might have been more successful with the first one. However, it did help down the
road. So can't complain. So not only you need to step the follow the technical steps of
creating a proper book and marketing it, but you also need to do it from the product standpoint,
so that it's useful and it's really closing some burning pain in the lives of your readers,
potential readers.
What are some of these lessons that you wish you would learn from Amy Hoy and her philosophy
and how to sell a product that you're missing when you're selling your books?
I think the Sales Safari approach is a really awesome technique, which allows you to, without
actively interviewing anyone, go online in forums and other public places and just explore
the audience that you want to serve and find out what pains can be solved. And if you find
repeating patterns, that's a great sign that the product can exist here, be it software
or books. And also she has plenty of great material and writing sales pages, which is
also helpful, that pain dream fix scenario and everything like that. All these sales
page classics. It's also great. I did learn most of that gradually. And I think there
are so many resources these days where you can get this type of knowledge in a condensed
way by paying like $100 for some type of course. There are so many courses teaching people
to make courses and they're not necessarily bad. I mean, that's how the knowledge spreads.
So yeah, that was a learning curve.
So at this point, whether or not you see yourself as an expert, there are certainly many tens
of thousands of people who see you as an expert because you've written these books, you've
worked as a professional, you're doing consulting, and you decided that you're actually going
to take a shot at building your first SaaS business. And this is Tiny Reminders?
Yeah, that was called Tiny Reminder. In plain English, it was a form builder with built-in
reminder emails. So whether you need to collect some information from people, maybe you're
a publisher who needs to collect articles from multiple authors. So you just put together
a form and the system would send them reminders until they submit the form. So I imagine this
was such an amazing productivity tool that everybody would be fascinated. Like they would
just instantly sign up and see how useful that would be in my life. Well, no, that didn't
really happen. And I didn't have a clear audience that I wanted to market to. That was one mistake.
Another mistake was I was trying to create a product category that didn't particularly
exist. So it wasn't a form builder. It was not necessarily a project management tool,
something in between. And it would take ages or a few sentences to explain what it does
to mere mortals. While if we were in an existing product category, that would be much, much
easier. However, it's still not a recipe for 100% success, really, because with user lists,
I thought we were playing in the existing category. Guess what? It took two years to
figure out how to call ourselves. So seriously. Yeah, there's no magic bullet. But I think
for a lot of first-time founders, they think the fact that there is nothing that they can
compare themselves to, that they are completely unique, is a huge advantage. They say, oh
my god, I've invented this. It's a totally new thing no one's ever done before. And that's
exactly what you need to do when you're starting a company. Because as a company based on having
a new invention, and I think a lot of people find out the hard way that just as you did
that, if you have to take ages to explain what you do to people, if they're not already
searching for what you're building, because it doesn't exist as a category in their mind,
that makes the entire process of growing your company way harder to do. How did you handle
that at Tiny Reminder? How did you even figure out that that was what was happening?
I didn't handle it well. Somewhere after launching it to no success, I interviewed Alex Yumashov
of JITbit. And what he said would be, if I were starting from scratch, I would just build
another help desk. And he runs a help desk business. Because you don't need to explain
a help desk at all. It's a very established category. And it's clearly necessary product
that people clearly need. So at that point, ultimately, that resonated with me, not before.
So with Tiny Reminder, what made me stop trying is that an acquisition offer came along. And
you know, when you're flipping a coin, what matters is what you feel when it lands, not
what it actually says. And with that acquisition offer, I was so relieved that I can take this
off my plate and get into somebody else's loving hands to market it well. So that was
basically it. I didn't even wait for the sale to go through. That ideas for a new proper
SaaS were percolating already in my head. And I talked to Benedict, and then it started
with the user list.
So what's the story of how you and Benedict started working together? Because he was helping
you build Tiny Reminder.
That's correct. We met many years ago in the same founder community online. So we were
sort of friends before we started working together. So when I was looking for a developer
to build Tiny Reminder for me, we got on a call. And I was just looking for some technical
advice on how to recruit a co-founder. And he was not a co-founder, a developer. And
he asked me what my budget was. And then he agreed to build the MVP for me for that type
of budget, which was, to be honest, smaller than his typical rate. So we did an MVP with
him very fast. And then I kept hiring him a little bit more for some feature development
during the year. And that's when we figured out that we make sort of good cadence working
together.
So when the topic of another SaaS came along, it was obvious that I could not afford this
kind of grand plan without having a great developer on board. And I'm super grateful
that he said yes.
Did he feel the same way that you felt about the acquisition offer for Tiny Reminder? Like,
yes, can't wait to be done with this. Let's move on to something else.
I don't think it was putting a big toll on his time or productivity, because it was more
about the moral mental pressure of the thing being out there and not growing. It was a
freedom also. The new signups kept coming, but they never really converted, which is
not a great sign. But he was very supportive. We did chat a bit back and forth. He definitely
was more than just someone for hire. He was also pretty supportive about this situation.
I think a lot of founders find themselves in this position where they're super optimistic
about something. They think it's the bee's knees, and it's definitely going to work.
And they build it, and they're proud of it, and it looks great. And then exactly what
happened to you happens, where people might sign up for it, and they might be excited,
but they don't stick around. They don't keep using it. It's missing some crucial utility
factor that just prevents people from being retained. And it just doesn't grow as a result
of that, because it's very hard to grow something if people aren't sticking around. How did
you feel in that situation? Because I've been there myself, and it doesn't feel good.
I didn't have that long to feel miserable. And I did have some marketing ideas in mind
that I would have probably pursued with time. So I had a plan to explore certain niches
and go after a specific niche. But the massive takeaways of building a product in a no market
category. It's also a productivity tool. So it's a vitamin type of product, not a painkiller
type. So you can easily sign up for it, but you can easily let it go. And with all these
factors in mind, I was just confident that this is no way to make good money anymore.
Basically, that was the feeling. So it was quite a no brainer to just stop trying and
start something else with all these considerations in mind.
Start something that's not a vitamin, but that's a painkiller. And start something that's
not in a new product category, but that's an existing product category. What are some
of the other lessons you took into starting Usualist? Some of the constraints of the items
on your checklist that you had to check off for Usualist?
Probably that being an essential business tool is really important. And by being an
essential business tool, we of course put more strain on the product. It's got to be
super well built. It's got to be reliable, so it adds more pressure on the founder's
shoulders. But it also means that people who get on board and who are satisfied, they're
way more likely to stay and keep it going.
Maybe sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes, I know, we all feel like locked in in some
platforms that we don't like. I really hate to say that, and I hope that never happens
with Usualist. But that, of course, means that the retention is going to be much better
than with any possible productivity tool.
I think there's a certain trait that I see in a lot of founders where you don't really
want to give up, where you're pretty confident that you can build something that works, that
you can succeed. And so if you try one product, you try one app, and it doesn't work out,
you're not like, oh, man, building a business is hard. I guess I'm done. You think, oh,
wow, I'm not going to make those mistakes again. But on turn number two, I'm definitely
going to avoid those mistakes and do it better. And there's never really a question in your
mind that there's going to be a try number two. What do you think that optimism comes
from with you?
Maybe I don't know. It's really hard. It's really hard to say. I think all these experiences
from previous products combined, it shows that no single product is really a deal breaker.
And if things are not working out, sometimes it is worth to just keep moving on and see
what you did wrong. I had conversations with friends at the time when I was traveling with
Tyner Winder and they said like, well, you know, sometimes the businesses fail because
the founders, they fail to persist for the necessary amount of time. They just give up
prematurely. And I was like, yeah, yeah, but not. And what we did this time with Yuzo
was exactly that we persisted, but combined, like all my experience combined, all Benedict's
experience combined and Clears as well, because Benedict was also a second time founder. And
he also, his first product, Stage CMS, and I'm sure he's more qualified to talk about
it, but it served the audience of musicians. And I bet he learned that serving an audience
of musicians is not a great thing to do if you, you know, hang out in the audience of
SaaS founders. It's definitely much harder to find customers for that kind of business.
So I'm sure he took his lessons to our venture and I brought in my lessons and we had a feeling
that we were doing things right. We were quite surprised with the pace at which we were doing
that. But on the other hand, this time we were more dedicated to just doing the grind
and grinding through to the ultimate growth inflection point, which I'm hoping we're
not. But let's see what time brings. I'm not qualified to speak off of the future.
What about sort of financial and lifestyle considerations of running a business as an
early stage founder? Because it's pretty expensive to, you know, have to pay your bills and your
rent and all that kind of stuff while running a business that's not yet making money because
it's in the early stages. How are you able to sustain the fact that you're starting company
after company?
I've been always consulting on the side, not on the side, but probably like my time split
and half, half time consulting and half time doing my own things. And also with client
work, you sometimes get like breaks from projects. And if a regular freelancer slash consultant
would just be sitting there desperate for work, I would be happily doing my own stuff.
And I didn't have too many of these breaks though. With user list, both myself and Benedict
we've been doing consulting throughout these two years and Claire as well. And that has
helped us to grow at the organic pace as opposed to being desperate for money because that
does not lead to any wise decisions. And generally speaking in life when you're desperate for
something that's not a great point to be. Be consulting negotiations, be product sales,
being desperate does not create good vibes at all for marketing and for your customers.
So let's talk about the earliest days of Usualist. I mean, before we even got started working
on Usualist, when you were just trying to come up with the idea, what did that process
look like? And were there other ideas that you considered working on?
We were pretty sad on what we were going to do. So I was quite fascinated that Usualist.io
was available as a domain name because it was Usualist. That's very much what I want.
It's such an easy thing to pronounce, like how can it be available? So we got the domain
name and the idea was let's do something for SaaS founders. We collect behavior based data.
We do automated messages. And I was basically very inspired by Intercom at this stage because
Intercom was, I mean, I love them as a product. This trainer is an amazing person, everything.
But at that stage, it was super expensive for me as an early stage founder. And it was
even prior before their redesign. So not only did not do fantastic job, it was not even
pretty for the company of their size. They did redesign and they did add amazing feature
and they did get it funded with less like some billions of dollars, of course. And they're
not our direct competitor. However, there was a product up in front of our eyes that
was great, but it was definitely an overkill in terms of the features. So we basically
deconstructed the essentials of that platform and we set out to do something which has a
Usualist behavior based data, some messages outgoing, be it email or in-app messages. And
then we figured that we can sort of iterate from there because nobody really knows what
future will bring in terms of customer development. And we initially we wanted to do both in-app
messaging and email as channels for delivering messages. And we quickly focused on just being
email. And only now we're bringing back the idea of in-app messages. And we hope to launch
that soon, probably in early 2020. So we're going a little bit back in terms of the features.
So when you decide you're going to build a product that's entering an existing category
where there's other apps that are kind of doing similar things to what you're doing,
you usually have some idea for how you're going to be different. And in your case, it
seemed like, well, you're going to be more affordable than Entercom and you're going
to have a much better UI because the issue at the time was pretty rough. How else were
you planning to differentiate and what was kind of your overall strategy for what would
set Usualist apart?
You don't say things like we are affordable out loud. Competing just on price, it's not
a fantastic strategy. However, yes, we were intended to be affordable as in our peers
can afford this. They cannot afford Intercom for a few hundred dollars, but they can afford
Usualist. And we started as low as, I don't know, $29 a month. We quickly figured out
we're not going to go anywhere with that price. So right now our baseline price is $49 a month
for the first thousand users. So, yeah, the price slash value delivered ratio, it was
supposed to be good because not everyone needs all these complex enterprise features, as
you can see in advanced automation like customer.io provides or Intercom provides. Well, actually,
Intercom is a different story because their behavior based email, it's not super advanced.
Their strategy is more like trying to do everything in under the same roof, which is a viable
strategy and we can see how they're making money. So we were going to do it in the opposite
way to make a focused set of features make really clean and much simpler to use. And
I hope we have succeeded, but there's still so much to go in that direction.
What do you think were the biggest challenges in the early days that you didn't really anticipate
when you were coming up with the idea and that ended up biting you in the end?
It's very hard for us to get people on board because it does not only depend on us, but
it depends on their team effort. And it depends on the stage of their business like they might
be launching, they might think they're launching in a week, while in fact, they'll be launching
in four months and we all know how it works. So they will sign up for a trial now, then
they will figure it out. Oh, we don't need it just yet. And they will go and then they
will come back in six months and we will happily welcome them. But that doesn't provide good
metrics when you look at them. So things like that being dependent on the customer's business,
we thought it's going to be smoother to sell it. And it just depends on so many external
factors that, of course, we try our best to provide education, handholding materials templates,
still not enough to just get everyone like jump on board like that. So there are a lot
of stages to adoption in our case.
Yeah, it seems like for what you're building, you're helping businesses talk to their customers
basically and react to their customers' behavior. And so generally speaking, these brand new
businesses who are just first launching might be some of your best customers, but there's
a lot of uncertainty there, like you're mentioning, where they're not even sure when they're going
to launch and they might get the launch day wrong. And so you have this very small window
of time where you can sort of be their customer messaging tool of choice, but that window
of time shifts and it's hard to predict.
Yeah, we're still not 100% positive what type of founder is our idea of founder. We're positive,
it's not an enterprise scale size, but whether that is like day zero kind of founder or is
it a team of a few people who are a little bit farther in the journey? We're still not
sure because the second group is definitely more grateful. They are more experienced.
They've seen some bad tools, so they will come in here and appreciate a new tool. However,
the mission that we started this product is to provide both types of people with quality,
affordable tool for running their SaaS because there are so many problems running your SaaS
that you don't need another one in the form of complex things. So it's sort of intended
like a homepage that you can go to, you can see your user list, you can segment them,
you can send them onboarding emails. So it's like a little hub for your software company.
I think one of the feelings you have when you first start your company is wild optimism.
Every single time I've started anything, everyone I talk to is 100% going to work, it couldn't
possibly not work. I've sort of shifted over the course of being a founder to be a little
bit, I don't want to say pessimistic, but a little bit more realistic. I'm always looking
for reasons why things might kill my business, reasons why I might be overlooking certain
things.
I think one of the things that's easy to overlook as a founder is just these customer conversations.
Talking to people and actually getting out of your own head and your own predictions
of how things are going to go and actually talking to your customers and figuring out
the reality on the ground. And you at user lists, all three of you have been really good
at that. I've read a lot of your blog posts around the customer conversations you've had
and the fact that you've done so many customer interviews. And you're just like, good at
talking to customers in a way that I'm jealous of. I wish I could talk to customers as much
as you did.
Describe to me some of the insights you've learned through talking to your customers
over time and some of the methods that you've used for learning who your customers are and
what they want.
Thanks so much. This means a lot coming from you. But indeed, essentially, customer interviews
are the primary source of truth, at least in our world when it comes to product development.
Before even getting started, Claire did a huge round of potential customer interviews,
most jobs to be done style kind of research of whether the problem is worth pursuing at
all. So that led to some optimistic results. We did collect pre-orders, which helped. And
speaking of validation, however, pre-orders are also not a recipe for 100% success. It's
a little bit of sidetrack of this conversation, but a lot of people who would buy your pre-orders
they won't use the app, as far as like, I don't know, 50% not using the app, 70%. Because
it's an impulse purchase to pre-order something from the founders you like. It's a different
story to be actually using it.
But going from there, we started doing demo calls first with those early pre-order customers
then with more and more. And it was super intimidating first to get on the phone to
discuss, it was Zoom, or Skype, Zoom, to get on the call live to discuss the product, especially
in the early stage when your thing to demo is really embarrassing. It barely does what
it should do. And everybody asking questions and you would be like, oh, no, not yet, not
yet, not yet. So it takes some guts, but it's also a muscle that you can train. And you
should definitely start early and often.
We've written, indeed, a little bit about that. And in our books, a demo is not about
the product. It's most times about the customer's business, about their struggles, about their
needs, what they want to accomplish with the product. And we've heard lately Steli Efti
talking about how demos should not be longer than like half an hour ever. But then, indeed,
the part when you're showing around your product, it should be small. But the part where you
are talking about your customer's business, that can be endless. And you can't learn enough
while you're doing that. It's always very helpful. And founders, of course, they're
super, super glad to share. And if there's a pain point, you're going to learn about
that. So talking about their business, not about our product was probably number one
secret if we were to share anything from those calls.
What are some things you came away from those calls knowing about your customers that informed
what you did with your own business?
It's interesting that I can't really say that anything in particular strikes. We didn't
discover anything revolutionary, but it helped us to understand their world better at scale.
And when we were doing those first, I don't know, not the initial validation interviews,
but actual product demos. And we did a bunch of them. And meanwhile, we were also building
the product. And when we started saying that the feature requests, they repeat each other,
that people are showing the same trends, that was in our books, a great sign that we are
actually moving in the right direction. And then we understand what we're doing, not necessarily
like 100% product market fit. But when you start seeing the same repeatable trends, then
it's definitely great.
And we came on most of these calls together, at least two out of three. And typically it
was me and Benedict. And in addition to being super full of custom insights, we also shared
these insights together in real time. So it's a great team building opportunity. And it's
a great way to have all these insights right there in real time from the source. And that
was really awesome for us understanding the product and understanding the customer.
So how did you go from understanding the customer so well and having all of these conversations
to the point where you realized that the way you're describing your product and what you'd
built wasn't really resonating?
I think the difference there is the setup, the environment in which this understanding
happens. Like when you have a whole hour of the conversation, then of course you have
all this time to ask proper questions, to explain away. But when you're at a conference
and you're doing your 30 second elevator pitch, or on your landing page when somebody out
of the blue just lands on your homepage and they have 1.3 seconds to grasp what you do
from your headline H1, that's a different setup.
So finding those striking words, it's much more difficult. And as when it comes to H1,
I'm pretty sure we can still do better than that. So these are different things to do.
But as a software, as a SaaS business, your major properties, your marketing website,
so you got to be able to do both. And that H1 art of H1 is also necessary.
So at the same time, you're basically trying to figure out how to describe your product.
You're trying to sell your product to people. You're trying to build your product and design
it. You're working a consulting gig. I can only imagine that you're also trying to learn.
You're reading books. You're trying to figure out how to be a better founder. How do you
juggle all of this time and what does your life look like as an early stage founder trying
to...
I also had my third child last year.
Wow. Okay.
Along all of that.
Okay. So you just have like 36 hours a day, apparently, that I don't have.
How did you juggle all these things and actually be a productive human being?
I don't think I'm a super productive human being, really. I'm also super... My productivity
is definitely not linear. Sometimes it will be a huge spike. We'd do something great
while launching a website or refactor all email communications or something like that
or prepare for the launch. On the other days, I would be missing from work a lot or getting
my child for school, going shopping or something like that.
So it's really the keys to delegate as much as you can when it comes to household activities.
It's just mostly a matter of managing these people and making enough money in that regard.
Just realizing that you cannot be perfect 24-7 and doing your best in all kinds.
When you have that many friends in your activities, when you have children, when you have a consultant,
we have a SaaS, then there is no unhealthy obsession with just one of them.
You suddenly understand that you have limited resources and these limited resources cannot
go into just one place. They should probably be wisely distributed and that there is that
necessary amount of resources that's going to make it all right.
A good example would be when you have one child, you can get really obsessed with them
and that might lead to unhealthy parenting decisions like a lot of first-time parents
like really, really over caring or something. When you have three, you just realize that
by no means, Mother Nature intended us to overprotect just one because your attention
is suddenly all over their place.
So with the businesses, it's a little bit like that. You're not super eager for results
on the SaaS front, for example. So you're not desperate. You just try to show up whenever
planned and do your best. I guess something along those lines and I still... I don't have
a recipe.
Do you think having kids and a rich family life and having a consulting gig on the side
forces you to be more productive with the limited hours that you do have to work on
your business?
Definitely so because, for example, as someone who goes to an office, sometimes you would
just come there because you have to and sit and stare at your screen and eat chocolate
and browse social media. Well, in my universe, there is not much time for that even though
I do that browsing from time to time. But still, you come to your computer and there
is always something that you can do to move your business forward.
With consultant work, it has really helped me to avoid stressful deadlines. Like when
you're 16 and you have your first client, you would think that if you don't ship it
by tomorrow, the world's going to end. And you would stay up until 5 a.m. and I'm one
of these people and ship that work. But most likely, the world is not going to implode
if you don't. And it's much better to be healthier and more sustainable in everyday
life.
What do you think it is about user lists that has kept you motivated? Because it seems like
there are a lot of the same troubles you had with tiny reminder. You ended up having with
user lists but in a very different way. And yet, you're super excited to work on user
lists. And I can tell you very optimistic about the future and you have lots of plans
where a tiny reminder, you're kind of just waiting to get rid of it or to sell or move
on to something different.
One major difference is that I didn't have an audience in mind firsthand. But right now,
I do very, very much. We do have a very clear audience in mind. And that is the audience
of fellow founders. And we understand that audience very well in their pains and their
struggles. So we are very inspired to build a quality tool for them. And both myself and
Benedict, we love product work, but we also like it as a meaning in life. So it's also
pretty rewarding to be working just in that direction together. And we are also, we make
a very nice team in daily communications and in sort of our approach to life and to products.
So it's also enjoyable in the process, not just in the results. And besides journeys
about the process anyways, you're probably never going to be satisfied with the results
and like sit back and do nothing.
Yeah, I have a little sticky note I put on my monitor sometimes. It's the most cliche
thing everybody says. It's about the journey, not the destination.
It's so true.
Yeah, whatever you're doing right now in your job, that's the whole point of your job. It's
the actual act of doing it.
Yeah, and human happiness, you don't just have to be happy at this moment, but it's
that perspective, that exciting vision of the future had that makes you half happy,
makes for like 50% of your happiness.
Let's fast forward to the point where you say you've had enough. You're going to read
April Dunford's book and you're going to figure out once and for all how you can better position
usualist in a way where customers can understand what you're doing and hopefully you can start
growing. What did that process look like? We talked about it briefly at the beginning
of this conversation, but what are the actual details of what you ended up changing about
how you describe usualist?
I don't think it's worth describing in full here because it's going to take like 20 minutes
and we have a nice blog post written about all of the steps. Coincidentally, it was one
of the most successful blog posts I've ever written by complete accident, to be honest.
What we did, we did this exercise. We listed our features and we mapped them together,
listed out benefits. We mapped them with a value and the audience. We did these value
clusters and based on those value clusters, we figured out what is going to be the...
What is it that we're going to do? How it can be called and who our competitor is.
What we took away from that is that customer messaging phrase that we've been using. That
took place in April of 2019. I think that we have already arrived at improving that,
so I don't think it works perfectly. We have added the word life cycle since then because
we think that from our observation, people use that word a lot when describing what we
do, so we added that. Right now, it's a life cycle customer messaging, not just customer
messaging per se. We still struggle with identifying ourselves as a competitor to Intercom because
we are a competitor to Intercom, but Intercom is helpdesk in the minds of many people and
we're anywhere close to helpdesk, so there is still sort of ambiguity there. We're not
sure whether we should be calling out Intercom by name or not. At that point in May, it seemed
like calling out Intercom by name was a great step. We still have it on the website. There's
still learning in progress, but I should say that this October, myself and Benedict went
together to microconf Europe and it was for the first time when we were in our circle
of peers, then we didn't have to pitch what user list is and what it does. To be honest,
it was not because we hit the right phrasing with the positioning, but it was mostly that
the product itself has gained some popularity in the community. We have appeared in some
podcasts. We have been publishing stuff and it's actually the reputation as a whole, not
just that H1 positioning statement that made us not having to explain what we do. To be
honest, that felt magical to be finally acknowledged for what we created. We were kind of very
close to being on top of the world this time.
I think it's a really good point that because you've been working on it since I think October
of 2017 and you've also been very public about it. You're going to microconf, you're talking
to people, you're all on Twitter, you're tweeting about it, you're writing blog posts
about how you change your positioning. You're not doing all of this in secret saying, once
everything's perfect, we'll start talking about it. You're sort of revealing all of
your struggles and your successes and your challenges to the world.
It's very easy for people like me to follow along with your story and see what you're
up to and then I kind of do understand what it is that you do. I do understand why I would
use it, who would use it, et cetera. I think that's kind of a cool roundabout way to educate
your customers, especially if they're kind of in the same social circles that you are
when you're tweeting online.
Absolutely. And as Bootstrap founders, you don't have too many resources to spend on
marketing and writing those updates about what you're doing right now, trying to explain
your reasoning, not building out in beta. Of course, it requires certain persistence
and stamina to keep showing up and doing that, but that's super easy compared to advertising
or other ways when you struggle to get traffic on top of your funnel and all that traditional
marketing route. So that's a very easy, very organic way to build real friends. And even
if they don't really convert, they can still have you in their mind and maybe recommend
you to other people.
Yeah, that's such a great point. You don't have to be this Don Draper copywriting expert
constantly thinking of new creative things you're going to write about. You just write
about what you did today and what you did last week and what you're working on and you
don't have to be super creative to figure out how to market what you're doing.
Yeah, the hardest thing is showing up. And a lot of founders, they're super overwhelmed
with daily activities. And I totally understand that they don't have time or energy to show
up. In our case, we were lucky to be a team of several people. So we could distribute
those duties. So I was the one writing the updates. Benedict was building the product.
If it was just one person, I can imagine how part of that could have been easily overlooked
or put as a secondary activity somewhere else.
So you guys have had some pretty cool successes in the process of building this. One of them
is that you were the number one product of the day on Product Hunt, which is exactly.
It's not an easy feat to accomplish. You get, I'm sure, hundreds and maybe thousands of
people visiting your website and signing up. How did you become the number one product
of the day on Product Hunt and what were the results of that for you?
Okay, there are two answers. One is we were super wise and we orchestrated this launch
very well. Number two answer is that, thankfully, nobody like Intercom or somebody else launched
their thing on the same day. Because if they did, our efforts wouldn't really matter because
we would be outnumbered. But from the resources that we had on hand, based on our experience,
we tried to organize the most appropriate launch. And we have a blog post about that
too. That we had this, just a sequence of things that we were going to do on the launch
day and how we were going to approach our own mailing list with things they could do
to help us in how I would write to my own UI breakfast mailing list so that they can
also go out and support us. So things like that. And it just comes down to producing
certain assets and then getting in touch with your audience in the most delicate and proper
way so that they don't feel abused but rather feel supportive. And it's our motto throughout
our marketing. We never want our friends or our audience to feel abused because what we
want is just from once in a blue moon just to get their support in not very hard activities
like tweeting out or upvoting us. So that's basically the gist of it.
How do you get your audience to help support you and tweet you and upvote you without making
them feel abused or sold to?
I guess every person has their own sense of balance and boundaries. And there are many
popular influencers out there who are on the hard selling side. We are not on the hard
selling side, but on the same side, we are not in the shy cohort. So we know that every
email should have a call to action. So people cannot just guess that they need to help you.
You need to think of the ways and write down the ways people can help you. You can include
the links to tweet. You can include a proper call to action to visit product hunt, et cetera,
et cetera, all these basic conversion sort of classic instruments. We do use that to
provide a way for people to support us.
I gave a talk a couple of years ago at ConvertKit's conference and I think it was called How to
Get Lucky or something like that. But a huge part of the premise was that a part of luck
is people helping you and people don't necessarily know how to help you unless you help them
help you by doing exactly what you're saying, by telling them, hey, this is how you can
help us. Could you tweet this, et cetera, have a call to action? And it's so obvious
when it's said, but I spent many years of my life never telling people what I was working
on or telling them how they could help me. And when I changed that, just like you did,
I saw a huge increase, a huge result in sort of people basically being on my team and helping
me do the things that I was doing.
Absolutely. One more mental model that helps is that people who are on your audience, you
are not the center of their world. They most likely know close to nothing about what you
do most likely. So whatever you do, you've got to provide context and maximum clarity
for what is this passage about. Like if it's a launch email, give them links where they
can read on about your product, give them some more context. If it's a tweet, don't
think that everyone knows what you're talking about. Give them an idea of what's going
on, et cetera, et cetera. So at each point of the communication, make sure that it's
super clear who you are, where you are at, what stage you're at, and what do you want
them to do. And to do that, you've got to use the classic methods, good copywriting,
nice clear design, anything else you can do in your arsenal.
So what's at the top of your mind nowadays? You're continuing to work on your positioning
and improving it, but what does the near-term future look like for Usulist?
Oh, it looks brilliant, of course. The big step that we have decided to take is both
myself and Benedict, we are going full-time on Usulist starting January, so we have a
really rapid network. Oh, wow. Congratulations.
Yeah, thank you. We're absolutely thrilled. And we took this decision when we were at
Microconf together, having a dinner on the top of the mountain in Croatia, and was literally
and not literally on the top of the world, just feeling great about what we've done and
that we can finally be positive that it's worth our full-time investment. So that's
big news.
What goes into making a decision like that? Because so many people are struggling to figure
out, financially, is it smart for me to go full-time on my product? Does it have the
kind of growth that it needs to be able to support me in a reasonable timeframe before
I run out of money and things get uncomfortable? How did you know that it was time to go full-time?
There were clearly signs that we're doing the right thing. However, the metrics were,
as we discussed, growing not even close to what we wanted to do. And it became apparent
that we're moving in the right direction, but Benedict desperately needed more development
time to build a few more features that we think could be deal-breaking for some of our
potential customers, for example, that vary in app messaging and so on. And on the other
hand, I could definitely use more time to just start pulling marketing levers forward
and start filling out the top of the funnel, because over the last year in particular,
we have really fine-tuned the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. We have
proper assets in place, proper onboarding for the email list, proper onboarding for
the users. So it took us so long to build those assets. And now it was just a matter
of real labor to start hustling and filling out the top of that funnel. And that, combined
with the confidence that we got from the community, the support from the community, the fact
that we didn't have to explain what we do anymore, but all played together into a decision
that we've built something worthwhile together and that we need to double down on growing
it.
So we build it and then we need to grow. I think that phase from building an MVP to growing
your actual product, it's where it makes sense to go full-time.
Listen, Jay, and I'm excited that you're both going full-time on this. And I think it'd
be really cool to have you on later next year to check in and see what the results of that
are. Before I let you get out of here, I really would love to get your advice as somebody
who's been building startups for years, who's working on your second business. What would
you say to somebody who's just considering getting excited with their very first business?
What do you think they should take away from your story and your lessons that you've learned?
Start with something smaller. It's great if you have info product experience, because
it helps you practice all these launches and everything. But even if you go straight SaaS,
build something smaller so that your stakes are not building something for five years
and then killing it. Because the chances of success are not very high for any SaaS. If
you're doing it for the first time, they're even lower. So pick an existing market category,
build a simple product, and do the drill and then see where it takes you. It might be that
you succeed, but it might be that you don't, and then you'll be very well familiar with
the process. So you can start over and build something else, correct your mistakes and
everything like that. Jane Portman, thank you so much for coming
on the show. It was my pleasure to have you. Can you let listeners know or they can go
to learn more about what you're up to at Usulist? Absolutely. It's been a pleasure to have this
meaningful conversation with you, Kordland. Thank you. Usulist is at usulist.com. By the
way, we bought the.com domain and we're thrilled about it. So it's at usulist.com. And we have
also put together a deal for the listeners. In case you'd like to have a special discount,
head over to usulist.com slash indiehackers, and you're going to have 30% off for your
first three months at Usulist. Hope that's helpful if you're just starting off the ground
with your SaaS. Very cool. Thanks so much, Jane.
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you reached out to Jane and
let her know. She is on Twitter at uibreakfast. Also, if you're interested in hearing my thoughts
on this episode and other episodes of the Indie Hackers podcast, I send a newsletter
with each new episode where I just share my thoughts and reflections and takeaways. So
you can find that at indiehackers.com slash podcast. Thanks so much for listening and
I will see you next time.