This is Court 1 Allen from AndyHackers.com and today I'll be speaking with Laura Roter
who in 2013 created a social media tool called MeetEdgar.
In the three years since launching her business, Laura's gone into 7,000 customers and over
$4 million in annual recurring revenue.
So she's a very experienced founder and obviously a very successful one too.
In this interview, she gives you tips for building a social media presence from scratch
for how to use ads and write compelling marketing copy to land your first customers and even
how to hire employees and give them ownership and autonomy.
I think you guys are really going to get a lot out of this interview and so without further
ado I present to you Laura Roter.
Laura Roter, how's it going?
Excellent, how are you?
Doing great.
So don't get too mad at me but here's my first question.
I run AndyHackers as you know and it's a long form content site and I've got a Twitter account
where I share all of my content and yet until recently I hadn't heard of Edgar and I hadn't
used it.
So could you, I'm kind of putting you on the spot here, could you pitch me on Edgar and
why I should use it and why other people who have content websites should use Edgar?
Yes, well luckily you're like the best use case for Edgar ever so this would be really
easy for me.
So people like you who have created content and actually podcasts in particular.
What's interesting about podcasts is, podcasts, that's hard to say plural, is they're almost
always evergreen and actually most content that most small businesses are creating is
also evergreen.
So evergreen just means it's still valuable 3 months, 6 months, a year from now and most
small businesses are not doing this journalistic style.
Here's the breaking news that's no longer relevant in 10 minutes.
They're usually writing advice, philosophy, how to, that kind of stuff.
So what most people do, what maybe you've been doing until recently is they spend hours
and hours creating long form content, creating podcasts.
They send it out sometimes once.
This is what kills me when people send it out literally just once the day that it's
live which is very common like the one tweet or maybe they send it out a few times that
first week that it's live and then it goes to the content graveyard, it goes to the long
tail in your Google analytics and you never see it again.
Your audience never sees it again, but the whole idea of online marketing, like the reason
why we're doing all this stuff to try to get attention is to draw in new people every single
day, right?
Your business could not survive without new people every day.
So it's super important to put that entire library of content, that back catalog that
you've created in front of new people.
Also what a lot of people don't realize is only about 5% of your followers across networks
see any update that you send.
So when you send one tweet about your new blog post, 95% of the people who have already
chosen to follow you do not see that tweet.
So it's really, really, really smart and increases your traffic and your exposure a lot to send
out that tweet more than once.
So that's what Edgar does.
Edgar stores a library of your evergreen content and keeps cycling through it, keeps sending
it out.
So with other tools, you have to keep refilling your queue.
With Edgar, Edgar fills your queue for you with your evergreen content.
Oh man, that's so bad because my Twitter strategy right now is literally the thing
that you said not to do.
Which is just tweet things out when they're live and then they just go to the graveyard
forever.
Right, right.
It's kind of crazy that that's such a common thing because we work so hard to create this
content.
It's just really silly not to leverage it.
And why would you be on Twitter if you weren't hoping for new followers all the time, right?
But then why would those new followers only want to see what you happen to publish this
week?
Exactly.
So let's zoom out a little bit and talk about things maybe from the perspective of the listeners
because there's a lot of entrepreneurs who are listening in who haven't quite gotten
started.
Maybe they have an idea or maybe they don't even have an idea yet.
Why should they use social media?
Is it valuable for them at that stage?
I think it is.
I mean, I would just give the caveat.
There's so many different strategies for marketing and connecting and how to do anything.
But what's really amazing about social is that you can build this network and community
and in many cases thought leader presence for yourself in just a really easy way.
So if I were in the stages where I was kind of thinking about ideas, kind of kicking things
around, one, I would be connecting with the people I need to connect with.
So that might mean people in your local startup ecosystem.
That might mean potential co-founders.
That might mean potential customers and might mean learning about your industry.
You always need to connect with other humans to make anything successful.
That's how we get 100% of our opportunities is through other people.
So that networking part is really, really important.
And the internet and social media in particular is just a really easy way to keep up with
people and meet people and make that happen.
Can you give the audience some tips about how they make that happen?
Because I know, for example, I'm a developer and it's really easy as a developer to put
your head down and just start coding.
And it's completely neglect any sort of talking to other people and making things happen in
that way.
There's kind of like a high bar to jump over to be comfortable doing that and then to figure
out how do you go about doing it the best way without annoying people or without seeming
like you don't have anything to give when you have yet to create something.
So what tips would you give to somebody who's maybe hesitant to get started and doesn't
know how to grow their followers on Twitter?
So Twitter in particular, even though I think some people think like, uh, Twitter, it had
its day, you know, it's on the way out and it may be on the way out, but it's certainly
not out yet.
And what's amazing about Twitter in particular is you can send anyone a message, you know,
as Anna mentioned an at reply and they will actually see it, which is, you know, not the
case on a lot of social networks or is not the case with emailing people.
What's cool about Twitter is that unless you literally have 80 million followers, most
people read all of their mentions.
So if you say someone's name, they are going to see that message.
And it's this really easy, low stress way to connect with people because they don't
have to reply.
So we've been doing it to promote our content.
We'll tweet it out to influencers or people who, uh, curate newsletters or blog roundups
or whatever, sending them a tweet to the link is so much easier for them than sending it
in an email where they feel like they have to do something with the email.
They have to respond and figure out how to be nice to us and reject us or tell us they
like it or whatever.
They just don't have to reply.
So I've met a lot of people through Twitter in particular because it's just, it's so low
commitment and low stress.
So if you're trying to connect with people through Twitter, the first thing I would do
is just follow all these community groups.
So like I'm here in Austin and Austin, there are tons of Twitter accounts that are like
everyone loves Ruby on rails, women who code women of color, who code people who don't
like to code people who live in Austin, like there's everything.
And you can follow those Twitter accounts.
You can connect with the people that run them.
You can find out about events that are going on.
And when I say connect to the people that run them, I mean, literally just respond to
the tweets you see, which can be like, you can write the word cool.
You can write the word.
Thanks.
You can write like, thanks for sharing that.
I'm going to check that out.
Interesting.
It's just making small talk on the internet.
You don't have to do anything that profound.
But after you start talking to people a while, they recognize your name, they remember who
you are, and then you can move it to that next level of maybe meeting in person, like
I said, at an event or maybe when you email them and you're like, Hey, let's get on Skype.
Let's spend half an hour chatting.
They feel like they already know who you are because they've seen your profile and they've
talked to you on Twitter.
You're not a complete stranger.
Yeah.
It reminds me of Ryan Hoover from Product Taunt, who I think in the early days spent
a whole bunch of time just individually tweeting anybody who signed up for his newsletter or
his website and just thanking them and saying, Hey, thanks for joining and just having so
many conversations just by adding random people on Twitter.
Yeah, there actually is data.
We all have to find the blog post that we published.
We referenced this.
There is data that just thanking people on Twitter is incredibly effective for having
them share your stuff more.
So if you're trying to get people to retweet more of your tweets, simply writing thank
you after they tweet your stuff, it does work.
So what's your story and how did you get into all of this social media stuff?
Yeah.
So my story is I started out as a freelance designer and web developer in 2006 that evolved
into social media consulting because I was making websites for people and social media
started to become a thing that they would ask me about and not involved into doing social
media training for small businesses.
And then I launched Edgar in 2014, which is my first software business, also of course
in the social media space.
And how did you come up with the idea for Edgar?
So Edgar actually came directly from training.
I was teaching people how to do it manually what Edgar does for you.
So I had come up with a system because I had discovered this problem in social, like I
was referencing, like why are we creating five original pieces of content to put on
Twitter a day when people don't see them?
Why would we not recycle the same stuff?
So I had kind of figured that out.
So I had this whole system of make a spreadsheet, put all the different updates in different
categories, cycle through those categories, but you had to copy and paste it all and do
it all manually, and I was teaching other businesses to do this.
So Edgar is, at the time, there was no tool that did it.
So Edgar is just the tool that executes the system that I was teaching.
Yeah, that's something that I've seen a lot, which is that people getting into entrepreneurship
can start by learning something that's maybe hard that other people don't know and is useful
to them and just teaching it to them and building an audience.
And then very often some sort of useful product will grow out of that, or they'll have some
other insight and they'll start another product based on their teaching.
How did you initially build the audience to teach them what you knew about social media
marketing?
Well, so, you know, I've been building the audience for a long time.
I started out doing training in 2009, and initially I did, you know, it honestly is
Content Marketing 101, and I did a lot of the social media stuff that I'm talking about
today and still do, like, connecting with people on Twitter, meeting people, hosting
webinars.
Especially in the beginning, I was really big on guest blogging and pitching myself
for opportunities.
This is something that I think I've been good at that a lot of people just miss entirely.
So in 2009, it was the first year of my training business, and at the time, South by Southwest
was a huge deal in the startup world.
I mean, it still is a huge deal, it's just, it used to be cooler than it is now.
And in 2009, so all my friends would go to South By, all my friends from San Francisco,
and in 2009 I had my own panel.
I hosted my own panel at South by Southwest, and so many of my friends were like, you just
started this business, how did you get your own panel?
That's so cool.
And I would ask them, did you submit a panel?
You know, did you submit an idea for a talk or a panel to South By?
And they're like, no.
I'm like, well, that's how I got a panel.
I submitted an idea.
You can't get a panel unless you do.
And whenever I want to go to a conference, I pitch myself as a speaker, because if I'm
going to go there, I want to talk.
So a lot of the conferences that I've spoken at, I have approached them.
I spoke at Business of Software last year.
That one has always been on my hit list as a conference I admire.
So I emailed a friend who had spoken there, and I asked him to introduce me and recommend
me as a speaker.
And that's how I got there.
And I think a lot of people have this fantasy that you have to wait for someone to pick
you, or one day, your inbox is just going to get flooded with all these requests.
And that can happen over time, but it'll happen a lot faster if you choose yourself and if
you pitch yourself for opportunities.
Yeah, that's huge.
And Business of Software is one of my favorite conferences, at least two or three of my favorite
talks of all time were given at Business of Software.
I think a lot of people, well, I can only speak for myself, but I remember reading Nathan
Berry's early emails that he sent out and just thinking, wow, that just looks exhausting
to be constantly producing so much content and putting yourself out there in front of
people.
Do you have any tips for staying motivated and forgetting maybe over that initial hump
where it's intimidating to put yourself out there, but once you get going, maybe it's
a little bit easier?
Yeah, it's intimidating.
And it's just painful in the beginning because you are starting with a really small audience.
So when we launched Edgar in 2014, I really experienced this firsthand because we created
a blog, we created all of our social accounts from scratch.
So we had a Twitter account that had zero followers and then five and then 10 and then
100 and then 1000.
And I really got to experience that pain firsthand that my customers were experiencing that I
hadn't in a few years, which is when you are tweeting and you have 12 people following
your account or when you're publishing your podcast and you have 50 subscribers, it sucks.
You feel dumb.
You feel like, why am I talking and no one is listening?
And I think the best advice I have is that consistency wins and consistency is shockingly
hard to do.
I've been in this space for about 10 years now and I've seen just so many people just
give up, just not be able to be consistent over the years and publishing or blogging
or whatever they're doing.
And I think just committing to, I'm going to blog once a week, but I'm going to do it
all year or even I'm going to blog once a month, but I'm going to do it all year.
I think it's less about the frequency and more about just showing up, just showing up
over and over again and trying your best.
It sounds so silly, but we all hear it.
We know intellectually, it's not easy.
You have to try.
You have to try really hard.
You have to try to create really good content.
You have to really try to push it out there.
And we read these things and we know these things, but I think often when we look at
our own behavior, have we really done that?
Have we published and shared in all the places that we even know that we should, not to mention
all the places that we don't know?
Look at your own behavior.
Have you really tried your best to get it out there?
Yeah, I think consistency is one of those challenges that's just going to be daunting.
And I know at Indie Hackers, since the type of content that I put out is streamlined,
it's kind of a consistency hack where I know I'm going to get interviews.
I know I can ask pretty much the same questions and that I'll probably never run out of people
to interview.
So I'll always have content at least three or four times a week to put out.
Or Peter Levels from Nomadlist, for example, is constantly hacking on his website and adding
new features.
And so his hack for consistency is, every day I'll just take a screenshot of the feature
that I'm working on and post that to Twitter and start a conversation.
Do you have any sort of consistency hacks for yourself that you might recommend for
people getting started?
Yeah.
So I think you're mentioning basically batching and having frameworks.
And I think both of those things are so important.
I mean, batching is really the whole idea behind Edgar that you think of your social
content in categories.
So in Edgar, all of your updates are in a category like links to my blog, links to
other people's blogs, inspirational quotes.
So inspirational quotes are one of those things that a lot of people like to share on social.
If you're trying to find a new one every day, it's incredibly time consuming.
But if you sit down and put a hundred of them in a library, you can knock that out in an
hour or two because you just go to an inspirational quotes library and you find the ones you like
and you copy and paste.
So whenever you can batch work.
So yeah, when you have topics and you're like, so I batch recording these interviews.
So I have this is something I like to do to promote my business.
So I have a podcast week once a month and we schedule as many as possible during that
week.
And so it just makes the scheduling easier, right?
If you can't do it this month, you push it off to the next month or the month after or
whatever.
And we aim to do four a day, five days a week during that week.
So we don't always get that many, but I'm on a lot of podcasts by the end of the year.
It adds up to a lot.
And doing that many would just be outrageously time consuming.
If we didn't have processes in place for pitching them, for scheduling them, for having parameters
of the type of podcasts that I'm on and the ones that I'm not on.
And another thing we've done like that is just our newsletter.
So through, through my various businesses, I have sent a newsletter every Wednesday since
January 1st, 2009.
Like I've literally not missed a single Wednesday.
And what that newsletter is more or less, it's evolved over the years, but it's links
to the blog.
It's links to the blog content and having that kind of system in place, I think it sounds
so simple that a lot of people think it's not going to make that much difference.
But actually to this day, to our meet Edgar blog, we still get most of our traffic from
the clicks from the email newsletter, which is so fascinating to me because I think a
lot of people have this misconception.
You know what?
If they're on my email list, they already know about me.
They already read my blog, but obviously that's not true.
Obviously we would miss out on, you know, literally thousands of visitors if we weren't
sending out this email every week, just being like, Hey, we published something on our blog.
Maybe you want to click on it.
Wow.
Like you pack so much information in your answers and I'm like trying to take notes
so I can apply it to Andy hackers at the same time that I'm trying to think of the next
question to ask you.
But batching sounds really smart and it makes a whole lot of sense.
And I'd love to talk more about your newsletter because I think it's a channel that a lot
of people underestimate.
Maybe based on their own usage of email, they're like, I don't like subscribing to newsletters
and therefore I don't want to send out a newsletter when I found it to be an extremely easy way
to reach out to people who are interested in whatever you're putting out and get them
to come back to my site.
So can you talk a little bit about how you started your newsletter?
How many subscribers you have and how do you get people to subscribe?
Yeah, I agree.
Email is so underrated.
I think a lot of people maybe they feel like it's passé or yeah, they feel like, Oh, well,
I have so many subscriptions and I'm just going to be bombarding people.
Your inbox is still no matter how crowded and how busy our inboxes are, it's still something
you check, you know, like I'm going to say at least once a day, which is ridiculous because
no human on this earth actually checks their email only once a day.
I mean, it's very common to literally be checking it every few minutes or sort of infinity times
the day it's always open, right?
Like people are still very, very engaged with email despite all the noise.
So it's very important to show up in people's inboxes because it's just still the channel
where you can get the most visibility, right?
If someone wants to stay in touch with your business, they can follow you on social.
Like I said, they're only going to see 5% of your updates.
It's just the nature of the networks nature of the algorithms.
Even emails that we don't open, we often at least see them, right?
Like we see that name in our inbox, even if they get archived, never opened, whatever.
Sometimes of course we do, especially if you have like a tab open, right?
You do like all the promotions, just going to archive them all, whatever.
But if you're emailing regularly, people are going to see at least a few and we're really
big on email marketing as like both an awareness strategy and a sales strategy.
So the way we view it is that that's where our sales happen, are from our email list.
So if you go to meetedgar.com, we collect email as the main function on our homepage,
which is really unusual for a SaaS company.
And people will be like, it's a barrier.
It's friction.
You know, what if people are interested, but they don't want to give you their email.
But like we're selling B2B software, like who could be that interested, but not want
to get like, they're not that interested, you know, like who's going to buy B2B software,
but not be willing to receive emails from you.
Like it just, it just doesn't really make any sense.
So the way I view it is like, I want to collect the email address of anyone who's mildly interested.
And then once we have their email, we can use that channel to educate them about the
product, educate them about social media marketing, increase that no like and trust factor, all
that stuff.
So we email a newsletter every Wednesday in addition to, you know, if you sign up for
an invitation on your homepage, obviously you get a sequence, receiving the invitation
and educating you about Edgar.
And we have, I think at this point, about 115,000 on our email list.
Whoa, that's tremendous.
So has this email list followed you between businesses or did you start a completely new
one for Edgar?
Mostly new.
So with my last business, we were up to about 75,000 on the email list.
But most of that is new for Edgar because we had people, basically we just advertised
Edgar to the old list.
So obviously that gave us a huge boost as opposed to starting from scratch, but we didn't
just move people over to the Edgar list.
What would be your, if you had to give one tip to somebody who's just getting started
and maybe wants to start an email newsletter, what would that tip be?
Consistency, like sorry to be boring, but that's the truth.
And also just to start it.
So a lot of people have the excuse, like people want this great opt-in, right?
They're like, well, I need to write a free ebook to download, or I have to have some
compelling reason to opt-in.
Actually I saw Noah Kagan yesterday and he was showing me something he just put on his
okay dork blog that he was experimenting with.
And the opt-in was literally, it just said, put in your email to continue reading.
To continue reading the blog, that's all, that's all it promised.
And I think even if you have something on your blog that just says something super boring,
like get my email newsletter or get emails from me, hear from me via email.
All these things are a really great place to start.
And a lot of people just never get started because they're waiting to develop this amazing
piece of content for people to opt-in for, or they don't know what to say or whatever.
Just put something, like literally just copy and paste whatever, like the MailChimp default
language is.
Like it can literally say like, put your email, MailChimp email newsletter title here and
you can put that on your sidebar and you would collect some email addresses, which would
be better off than you were before.
So just doing it is so important.
And then just deciding, like I said, sending out links to your stuff is a really great
format for an email newsletter.
It really is just reminding people what you've published.
So just commit to be like, I'm going to collect email on my site and then I'm going to send
something out.
Take a day of the week.
We choose Wednesday.
You can copy us.
It really doesn't matter which day it is.
Take a day of the week and send something out.
And like we were talking about, batching and frameworks are going to make this really easy.
So if you're not stressing about what to say on Wednesday, if you just say, I'm just going
to start my newsletter by putting the headline from my blog post and the first few sentences
and I'm just going to send that in an email.
So whatever my last post was, I'm going to load that up Wednesday morning.
If I don't have a new post, I'm just going to use the one I sent last week.
And stuff like this is so important because we're way too close to our businesses and
we read everything that we write, right?
You've heard all of your interviews because you've conducted them.
You've read everything on your blog and we tend to forget how many times we have to get
in front of people before they consume what we do.
So if all you did was send out an email every Wednesday and it had like the same link for
four weeks in a row and that's all it had, you would be shocked by how many people still
opened and still clicked that email on the fourth week because a lot of people don't
open and a lot of people don't click.
You always still have people to reach.
Yeah.
I like the strategies that you have to kind of make things easier, right?
Like you lower the burden of work on yourself because I know when I first started sending
newsletters, I send mine on Thursday morning and every like Wednesday nights, a Thursday
morning I was stressed.
I was like, okay, what am I going to put in my email?
I need to tell a unique and interesting story about what I'm doing that I didn't tell last
week or I haven't ever told before and I don't know.
And now I just send out links to Andy Hacker's interviews with like a small paragraph at
the beginning and the end that takes me almost no time to think about and the newsletter is
doing just as well.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
We kept cutting stuff out of ours and it did just as well.
The other funny thing that we found with ours, so like I said, we put links to our blog and
the biggest thing that impacts our traffic to any given blog post is if we put the link
first or second in our newsletter because people click the first link dramatically more
than they click the second link and it just shows you how simple you can keep it and sort
of how simple people are when they're reading your newsletter, AKA how little time they
have is like first link click.
No, I'm done with this.
Exactly.
I've never seen the exact same thing because I'll send out four interviews and it's just
every single time like Domino's.
The first one gets the bulk of the clicks, the second one gets slightly fewer clicks.
So I want to talk about the launch of Edgar because that was a chance for you to put a
lot of the things that you talk about into practice.
How did you launch Edgar and what kind of strategies did you use to get it out to people?
Yeah.
So, and we haven't actually shared numbers yet.
So for context, we launched in July 2014, we're recording this into March 2017 and right
now we're at about 4 million ARR, about 7,000 customers to give people a sense of numbers.
One thing that we did at launch, which I think not enough companies do is we focused heavily
on paid ads right from the beginning.
I should also say we're bootstrapped, but self-funded is a little more accurate because
we basically took profits from the training business and use them to launch the software
business.
So we are bootstrapped, but we had like, I would say about like 200,000 that we started
with from the business like over the first year to fund Edgar until it was totally supporting
itself.
So just numbers context there.
So yeah, when we launched, because I'm a huge fan of, as I've said, content marketing, organic
marketing, social marketing, all this stuff.
But the problem with this stuff is it takes time, especially SEO, right?
You're not going to show up for all your keywords from day one.
It takes time to get links.
It takes time to create that library of content.
So what you can do right from day one is pay Google and pay Facebook and they will put
you in front of who you want to be in front of.
You don't have to do anything clever.
It doesn't take any time.
You give Facebook a dollar and they follow your instructions for the most part.
So that's something we did right from launch.
We were actually spending 40,000 a month on Facebook ads and you have a unique advantage
in software and a lot of industries at launch because just the news of a new tool is very
compelling to people in most industries.
It depends on what your tool is, but what you can do for, I would say most software
products is just run ads to people that are using or watching your competitors.
So we just ran ads to people that like the pages of our main competitors and the ads
were literally just like, there's a new social media tool out there.
Maybe you want to check it out because that's really interesting.
Like if you're a person that uses social media tools, you're actually super interested in
the new ones and how they might be different than the one you're already using.
So that was pretty effective for us in the beginning, just getting the word out and getting
our name out there and it's just a really easy strategy that I think people are scared
of spending the money, but I would rather spend more on ads in the beginning because
later I can have the bulk of my customers coming from search and coming from organic
than spend ads later, you know, because later you can actually have the search traffic,
which to me is the best kind of traffic.
Right.
So there's a lot there and I think two things that I see a lot of early founders struggling
with the people who perhaps want to get into this and haven't started yet is number one
for people who haven't started yet.
They have a lot of trouble coming up with an idea because they worry that they're not
original enough and they worry that they don't have, you know, a problem of their own that
they can solve.
Whereas listening to you talk about the launch of Edgar, you already had a lot of competitors
and clearly there are other social media tools that didn't discourage you.
So I'd love to talk about that.
And another thing, just so I won't forget, is marketing copy.
So I talked to a lot of people who've launched a website or, you know, they got their landing
page up or maybe they even started running ads on Google or Facebook, but they're not
sure how to actually write the copy to be compelling to people.
Right.
How do they how do you know that when you say there's a new social media tool out there
that people are going to like that?
And I would love to talk about how you come up with marketing copy and how you think about
writing things that appeal to your audience and get them to sign up.
Yeah.
So so to start with a competitor thing, I mean, I think this is one of the biggest fallacies
in entrepreneurship is that you have to have something super different.
Honestly, you don't have to have something different at all.
Like if anyone listening looks around their surroundings right now.
So I'm looking around.
I see a mouse.
I see my sunglasses.
I see my water bottle.
I see my notebook.
Just these are products that have literally thousands of competitors, often competitors
that are pretty much identical and yet people make notebooks and people make sunglasses
and people make water bottles every day and people buy all those things too.
You know, in other industries, we don't have this idea like you have to be the only water
bottle, you know, like we don't have this idea like why can't someone's already invented
the water bottle?
You know, there can't be another one.
But in software, we very often have this idea of well, there's already a social media software.
You know, there's already a blogging platform, whatever it is.
And it's great to have a unique advantage and I would definitely recommend it.
But if you think about it, even if you made software that was just like basically the
same as something that's out there already, even if it was identical, which like that
would be kind of shitty, something that was literally identical and maybe you'd get in
some trouble for it, but you would get customers.
You would get customers just because like not everyone chooses the same thing.
More likely, of course, there's going to be something a little bit different, even if
it's just in how your interface looks.
Maybe your pricing is a little different.
Probably your marketing is a little bit different positioning or just your site literally looks
different from the competitor.
You're going to get customers just because people make different choices and people choose
different things.
Right.
And this is something really cool about the internet is it's act.
We're not competing for shelf space, right?
We have this incredible advantage, especially when you pay Facebook or you pay Google.
You can get in front of your audience.
I don't have to court target for a year and then pay them for a fee for my water bottle
to be among the other water bottles, right?
When I'm selling software, I can just publish it on the internet and link to it or pay for
ads and people will find my software that are typing it in and looking for it like that
is this amazing power that we have.
And it's because we have that power, it's actually kind of insane to me that people
are so scared of entering these industries where there's already just like one other
player.
Like there's still so much software that there's not major competitors.
So there's just like one that's pretty good and maybe another one that's not very good.
And that's kind of it.
Why do you think why do you think that is people and tech businesses and software are
uniquely afraid of being number two and think that everything has to be winner take all?
I think there's a few things.
I think one, so we're bootstrapped and the VC world of startups, a lot of it can be a
winner take all model because that's kind of the business model.
Because the idea is that there is not the exit that investors are looking for unless
it is not one of many companies but the company.
You look at Uber and Lyft, Uber is not happy being like, yeah, we'll have 50% or even like
80% of market share.
Uber literally wants 100% of market share.
And they've built their business in such a way and had financial models where that's
kind of like the outcome that everyone needs that's invested in Uber.
And I mean, this is something I love about bootstrapped companies.
So my company has no investors.
I own 100% of the company.
So if we have 10% of market share, or if we are like a five or $10 million business, that's
a great outcome for me.
I'm the only person that I need to please because I'm the only investor.
So I think it's something that gets a little lost in the way businesses have traditionally
been funded.
And also like software is still relatively new in the grand scheme of things.
And SaaS is very new.
And we just haven't had time to figure out these, I don't know, for all these things
to shake out of what our industry looks like and how it works.
The reason I'm interested in this is just because I think if we understand why people
think a certain way, and then maybe we explain it, it'll something will click in people's
heads and they'll understand how to think about this a little bit more effectively.
And I talked to Bryce, a partner at this VC firm called nd.vc.
And compared to other VCs, they're very focused on making money.
And his name of our episode in the podcast was how the VC narrative co-ops the entrepreneurs
vision.
And it was all about how in Silicon Valley, at least, you keep getting broadcast these
stories of winner take all markets.
And like you said, like Lyft and Uber, who's going to be the winner and who everyone else
loses and Facebook, you know, there can only be one social network because of network effects.
And I always tell people you have to be very careful who you take advice from, because
you go online and you just see like this generic startup advice.
But if that advice is coming from VCs, if it's coming from people whose whose goal is
that you know, you need to become a billion dollar company and everything else is not
worth it, when really, you're just trying to bootstrap a company and build something
that can, you know, provide a steady income for you and your employees and your family,
and you're going to get a lot of bad advice.
So it's really important to be able to filter out what advice you're reading and understand
like the differences between the goals because they're very, very different.
Well, yeah, and it's so weird when you start to realize how much of our advice is modeled
after Amazon and Uber and Facebook, which are these incredibly unusual companies.
I mean, one having a company that is losing millions of dollars a month doesn't have
a clear path to profitability, like that's not something that has existed before the
past, I don't know, 10 or 20 years, like it's a new thing.
No one knows if it's going to work out.
I'm going to say probably not like what do I know?
And so we're modeling our small companies that have really like very little to do with
these huge, unusual, very experimental and very new models yet we're trying to like take
advice from Amazon on what I should do for my 30 person company that's trying to make
money every month.
Like it just it doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, it's totally absurd.
And it's it's it's just funny because it's hard to catch yourself doing it because I've
been there too.
You know, I've been like, okay, here's what Facebook did to get users and here's how I
should do and it's like, no, it's totally different.
And if you don't understand how you're going to make bad decisions.
On that note, you mentioned, you know, we're modeling our small companies off of these giant
behemoths who have a totally different goal.
But even with any hackers, I've talked to a lot of bootstrap companies that might be,
you know, in your position where they're a few years and they're doing super well.
And people will look at what you're doing and copy all of your strategies and not realize
that maybe things were different in the very beginning of Edgar than they were at the end.
So if things changed and how you've grown your company and acquired users and run things
or they've been pretty consistent the entire time?
Yes, and no, it's a hard question because it's like things change constantly.
And yet a lot of the fundamentals remain the same.
So I mean, one thing so like this is my first software business.
So it's it's all it's all news to me like I am learning a lot every day.
And something that's been so fascinating to me is I really didn't have any concept of
how how much time the infrastructure and stability stuff takes up the the larger you get.
And also the edge case stuff, I understood it in theory, okay, if you have more users,
you have more edge cases.
Then when you get to this point where you actually have 7,000 customers, you just really
see firsthand these edge cases can take up 100% of your time if you so choose, which
it's actually a huge advantage when you're starting out.
And again, looking at like, why would you start a company in a space where there's a
lot of competitors?
When you're starting out, you don't have to deal with these problems and you can put all
your dev time on like creating great features and making the product great, while your competitors
are trying to fix their scaling and fix their infrastructure and like, try to figure out
how to make 1000 people happy that all have their own weird scenario, you know, so so
you actually have a huge advantage there.
So and also as the team size has grown, you know, you have to do all the real company
stuff, you have to do all the benefits and the taxes and the HR and that stuff just keeps
adding up the the bigger you grow.
But as far as user acquisition goes, I don't feel like our strategy has changed that dramatically.
I mean, as you grow, you get to depend more on word of mouth.
But I think it's sort of you have to be careful that you're not thinking of yourself as like
a three year old company, like you mentioned that you had never heard of us, right?
There's most people on this planet, and I would even most people in our target market,
I think most people in our target market, some have heard of us, but probably most still
have not.
And so you have to remember that to those new people, you are totally new, they don't
know about your past three years, they don't have any stories about you, they don't have
any existing connotations.
And it's a constant challenge not to look at things from the inside, but look at things
from the outside, and I think to circle back to your question before about marketing copy,
I think that's the biggest place to increase your skill as a copywriter or as a marketer
is to keep working on that skill of seeing your business from the customer's perspective
and not your perspective, and really focusing on what the customer cares about, which is
often just so different than what you're looking at every day and how you describe your business
from the inside.
Yeah, good memory, by the way, going back to the marketing copy question, which I totally
forgot about.
But yeah, I've seen a lot of people, I think the intuitive thing when you first get into
selling and marketing your business is at least what I see a lot of is people just listing
features.
Here's what I built, and here's another feature, and here's another feature, and then customers
come and, of course, don't care about just a long list of features.
And also, I think what you said was pretty funny about the edge cases.
So a long time ago, I started this company called Siffer, and it wasn't super popular,
but we were processing emails, and when everybody gets a few hundred emails a day, it's very
easy to get up to the point where you're processing tens of millions of emails, and then you
start getting one in a million things happening because you're dealing with millions of emails.
So I can only imagine at Edgar, you have all sorts of customers with crazy requests.
How do you handle that?
Do you try to accommodate these edge cases, or do you just try to focus on your target
customer and the people who fall in line with what you're doing?
So I mean, one thing for context, we don't do any custom stuff for clients.
So we don't have a sales team, we only have marketing, so we're 100% small business focused.
So we don't have clients who we're building things for.
When big companies use us, we don't have demos or sales calls or anything.
If they happen to sign up, it's just self-serve like anyone else.
So we're never building anything custom for one client.
So for edge cases, yeah, we do try to look at numbers, like are enough people suffering
from this?
And then we try to put as much on customer service and as little on product until it
gets to that critical mass.
So can I rephrase my question a little bit?
So one thing that I've seen that's changed a lot between, that tends to change a lot
between companies in the early days and later on, is the amount of time that they spend
talking to customers.
And I think at Edgar, you had a pretty good idea of what people needed early on.
But how much has having individual conversations with customers influenced your product?
Has it been a big role at Edgar, or has it been something where you've pretty much known
what you're doing all along?
We are definitely more of the philosophy that we build based on our expertise as opposed
to being super reactive to what customers are asking for.
So Instagram is a huge example of this.
So Instagram, you can't actually schedule something that goes live on Instagram.
The closest you can do is set up a reminder and then you have to go on your phone and
you have to press the button on your phone that pulls that reminder on Instagram and
loads it up.
And then you have to press the button on your phone and say, yeah, I want it to go live
right now.
So Instagram does not work with our whole core value and core promise of Edgar, which
is you don't have to do anything.
You have your social.
Edgar sends it out for you.
You have your social going out all the time.
You don't have to go in every day and mess with it.
So Instagram is a huge platform.
It's obviously something that lots of our customers are on, but if we built Instagram,
we would now be asking our customers to go on their phones multiple times a day and hit
a button when they want it to go live, which is just not what Edgar is promising at all.
So at this point, we have made the strategic decision not to be on Instagram, even though
a lot of customers ask for it.
And we definitely lose people because a lot of people just they have it on their checklist.
They're like, here's the social networks that I'm on.
I need a tool that does these social networks.
So Edgar isn't on my list because Edgar doesn't do Instagram.
But I think looking from the long term view, once customers and a lot of them just don't
realize like other tools just say Instagram and they think they can full on schedule it.
And then they realize that they can't.
So looking at the long term view, I just think it's always better to really create the most
valuable experience for your customers, sometimes even in opposition to like what they think
they want in the beginning.
And of course, you have to be very careful with that balance because you can't get all
high and mighty like, oh, don't worry about what you want, customer.
I'm just going to give you what I think you want.
So it's a balance to strike.
So I want to talk a little bit about you personally, because you're obviously somebody who's accomplished
a lot.
You've been running various businesses for years.
And I think it's pretty clear from the high number of actionable tips that you can give
people that you've learned a lot from experience, what kind of principles guide you and motivate
you as a founder and entrepreneur.
One of our company core values is value for value.
And value for value is the idea that everything is an even exchange of value.
So when our customer sends us an email, we should give back the value of the time that
they spent taking the time out of their day to write us the email.
When they pay us money every month, we need to obviously give at least that much value
in exchange for the money that they've given us when someone is taking the time to read
our blog.
We want to respect and reward that time by giving them value for the time that they took.
So I think just applying that framework to everything in business internally and externally,
everything that our employees are experiencing, everything that our customers are experiencing,
is it that even exchange of value?
And what about your own personal work schedule and work habits?
Is there anything that you do to, let's say, avoid burning out?
What's the problem that I hear a lot of people dealing with?
Or avoid getting frustrating when things get tough?
Getting frustrated?
Yeah, so I've built my company, especially this one, in a kind of unusual way.
So a big goal for me has always been not only that I can take a lot of time off, but I can
take time off last minute.
But I don't have to plan ahead because I don't like to plan and travel ahead.
So not only can I travel for a few months out of the year, but a week before I can be
like, hey, guys, I'm going to be gone next month.
And it won't mess anything up at the company, which actually is the state that I have achieved
right now.
So my role in the company is big picture, vision, and direction kind of stuff.
And I'm checking in, especially with our leadership team, regularly, and kind of advising and
coaching where I can.
But there aren't deliverables that depend on me.
There aren't decisions that I have to make that, if I don't make them, are going to halt
progress at the company.
So that's how over the years, I've just tried to work and work and work to take myself out
more and more and look at where I'm bottlenecking things.
So any decision that I'm making, I should not be making.
Like I should be sitting down like once a year and saying, what are we doing over the
next year?
So we're big on quarterly planning.
So our team set three big rocks per quarter.
So I work with the department head.
But I mean, they're doing it.
They're just saying, hey, Laura, here's the three things I want to do.
And I'm like, cool, sounds good.
I mean, that's largely how that goes.
I offer ideas if I have them.
So this was really important to me because I was pregnant when I launched Edgar.
So I knew that I was going to have a baby when the company was like six months old.
And it was, you know, he was my first.
So I had no idea what it was going to be like to be a mom and have a kid.
So I'm like, I want to take three months off entirely.
Like I don't know how this is going to be.
I don't want to put too much pressure on myself.
So I took three months off work, like for real, totally off when the company was only
yeah, the company would be six months old, six or seven months old at that point.
And you know, we've grown quickly.
Like we reached a million in ARR less than a year after launch.
So the company was growing quickly while I was away.
So I didn't want to build a company that would just stop every time I wanted to hang out
with my kid.
I wanted to build a company that could continue to grow without me.
So I've been really deliberate in doing that.
What are some tips you have for people to get better at outsourcing their work or automating
things or delegating tasks?
Because I personally have zero management experience.
I've never hired anyone to do anything.
And I'm not particularly confident that, you know, if I were to be put in that position
today that I would do a good job at it.
So what are some maybe mistakes that you made?
What are mistakes you see other people making that they could turn into actually good tips
and good advice?
Well, so if you want other people to do things, you have to actually give them ownership and
autonomy, which is like the most challenging thing for a lot of people.
A lot of people want to like when I hear delegate to me, that means I'm going to have someone
else do the work, I'm going to describe exactly how to do it, and then I'm going to prove
it when it's done.
And that's going to save you like a little bit of time, but it's not really going to
save you that much time because you're still super involved as opposed to like at this
point, you know, the person who's in charge of our customer service department is making
all the decisions related to our customer service policies.
So I'm not just like, here's my customer service plan, you execute it, and then you come ask
me every five seconds if I like what you're doing, like you're in charge of this and you're
doing it.
So if you really want to take yourself out of things, the flip side of that coin is other
humans do not make all the same decisions that you do.
I do not do things in the exact same way that you do.
So you have to be okay that they're going to do things differently than you would do.
And you just kind of have to ask yourself, what am I really in this for?
Like would I rather have the outcome of a successful company that can thrive and grow
without me?
Or do I choose instead to make sure that I see every email the customer service sends
and that I make sure they're all written the exact same way that I would phrase everything.
So I think this is when your company grows like this stuff like core values, it sounds
so like dumb and vague in the beginning and you're like, why would we spend time doing
that?
But as you grow the team, you kind of realize like, oh, these are real guideposts that help
people make decisions that are in line with the way you want decisions made at your company.
It's hard not to be, especially if you're a perfectionist, you know, it's hard to just
trust this other person is going to get things done.
And I realize that's something that you probably learned a lot through experience or is it
something that you learned by reading books and having mentors and learning from other
people's mistakes?
I mean, I think it's it's definitely everything.
So it's something that comes to mind that I learned from a mentor, Cameron Harold wrote
a great book called Double Double.
He runs like training for COO's largely, so a great person to Google and he's been a mentor
of mine.
And when I was very first starting out hiring people, I felt very insecure about what I
was offering.
You know, we've always been a remote team.
So it's like, like, we don't even we don't even have an office and like, you know, when
it's your own company, it doesn't feel like a real job and a real company.
You're like, why would these people take me seriously?
You know, we have like three people on our team.
We don't even have an office.
Like, why would they why would they ever I kind of felt like why would anyone talented
want to work with me, you know, with how little I have to offer.
And I remember Cameron telling me there are so many amazing people working in just terrible
jobs at terrible places in toxic environments.
And if they have the opportunity to work with someone, first of all, who's just not a jerk,
like that's huge.
That is that is so not that's a massive improvement.
And when he said that, it just really clicked with me and I realized, you know, I've only
ever had one job and it was super toxic and terrible.
Unfortunately, what's become the norm in the workplace is people being rude to you, people
yelling at you, people expecting you to work 80 hours a week, super high stress, super
high pressure, tons of miscommunication, tons of bureaucracy, tons of red tape, like all
these things that people hate about jobs.
They're not making it up like this is true at 99% of jobs.
So if you are offering something that is missing like a few of those elements, you are offering
a really massive advantage.
And that was like a huge mental shift for me.
I'm not just this little remote three person company.
I mean, just remote, I was viewing it as a downside.
People want remote jobs so badly that like work from home is literally a scam.
If you search work from home, it's mostly a scam because it is such a big dream for
people that they want so bad.
Like they really want remote jobs and I was viewing it as like, oh, it's not a real job.
Like no, it's actually a huge upside and a small company is a huge upside too.
We've had people on our team that have taken pay cuts to work for our company because they're
like, I am sick of huge companies.
I want to work in a small environment where I can actually have an impact.
So you have to really, it's kind of like the customer stuff, right?
Like look at your products from a customer perspective and not your perspective.
Your business is the same way.
You have to get out of being so close to it and see the great things that you are really
offering to your team.
Yeah, I think I'm in the same boat as you because I've only ever had one full time job
and only lasted about three months before I was like, I got to get out of here.
But I think that's very common among entrepreneurs and sometimes if you don't have experience
in that area, it blinds you to what you have to offer when you want to hire people and
what they're looking for and what their perspectives are because you just haven't been in these
horrible situations.
And yeah, I would say there's a huge upside to having that little work experience.
So yeah, my highest title was junior graphic designer.
I had never done an interview.
I had never interviewed someone else.
I had never managed someone.
But because I didn't know the way you're supposed to do these things, over the years I used
just a lot of my own common sense, like what would I want in an annual review?
What do I need to know from someone when I'm interviewing them?
And obviously, I've learned a ton from reading and from other advice and stuff like that
along the way.
But I think it can be a huge blessing to be naive and not know these broken systems and
just assume that you have to use them.
A lot of people are afraid that being an entrepreneur is a huge risk.
Do you have any tips for minimizing the risk of being an entrepreneur or maybe talking
about things that you can gain by being an entrepreneur that maybe aren't available to
you if you stay working at a job?
I mean, I think I don't have to sell anyone listening on why it's great to be an entrepreneur.
It is great if it's for you.
I absolutely love it.
And I think it's like less about minimizing risk and more about giving up that idea that
you can control things.
I think the more you can accept that you don't know the future, the happier you will be as
an entrepreneur and probably in life as well.
I think no one is short on ideas, especially if you're thinking about starting your own
business.
You are not sure which idea to do.
You have tons of ideas.
You don't know which one will be the best one.
And I think the more you can embrace that, you are hoping that you're going to wake up
psychic.
That's what you're really doing when you're like, I've been thinking about this for five
years.
I have lots of different ideas.
I don't know which one is the best one.
How would you ever know which one is the best one?
Like, okay, you're going to keep reading books and you're going to keep getting insights,
but you're never going to know.
You're never going to wake up one morning and be like, I have seen what's going to
happen in the next five years.
It is this one.
This is the successful one.
And it's the same with all those little day-to-day decisions in your business as well.
You don't know if this is the right person to hire.
You don't know if this is the right marketing strategy.
All you can do is take your best guess and then see what happens.
So I think taking that leap to becoming a full-time or even part-time entrepreneur is
so much easier when you're not thinking like this has to work out because it might not
work out.
Like, of course, of course it might not work out and that's okay.
So people get so paralyzed thinking like my family's depending on this.
This has to work out.
And I think it's actually great to really think about the worst-case scenario, which
sounds really negative, but the real worst-case scenario I think is often a lot better than
our sort of vague, fearful... Right, right.
We have these ideas like, well, I'm the breadwinner for my family.
So if this business doesn't work out, my family's going to starve.
Well, is your family actually going to starve to death?
Probably not.
Right.
Most of us listening to this podcast are in the very privileged situation.
We have a lot of safety nets to fall back on, right?
We have a lot of friends and family and worst comes to worst, go work at Target.
You can get a job.
You can get money to feed your family.
Your family is not going to starve long-term.
You might not always be doing your favorite things every day, but that's not going to
happen.
It's actually mapping out like, okay, I've decided I'm going to spend the next year pursuing
this business.
I'm going to put this much money into it.
So worst-case scenario, all that money is going to be sunk.
I'm never going to see anything back from it.
I'm not going to have any success at the end of the year.
Then what?
Well, then I'll go get another job like I have now.
If I can't find a job that's as good, okay, I'll take a lesser job and then I'll keep
looking for a better job while I'm in that one.
I mean, it's not a disaster scenario.
Personally, I know I kick myself a lot when I see myself repeating the same mistakes.
For example, for the longest time, I would just build stuff without talking to people.
And then when I did Indie Hackers, I was like, I chose this idea in part because it would
force me to talk to people.
So I knew I wouldn't make that mistake anymore.
Are there any mistakes that you've made as an entrepreneur that were particularly hard
for you to stop making?
Any lessons that were tough to learn?
Well, first I just say the way I think of this idea, I heard this great quote that
was like, do you have 10 years experience or do you have one year's experience 10 times?
Because I think that's where most of us are.
We have the year experience that we keep repeating over and over again.
So like you, I'm very conscious of trying not to do this.
And the thing I always remind myself of is you have to make different decisions to get
different outcomes.
One of my favorite phrases is just you reap what you sow.
So if you're not sowing something different this month than you were last month, you're
not going to get a different outcome next month.
So it's like, it's even hard to hone in on like, what do I do wrong?
Because I think I do, it's like, not that I think I do most things wrong, but I think
it's, it's a matter of like 90% of things I do kind of do the same.
And then I'm just like pushing myself on that 10% to keep doing them differently.
So like the marketing of our company, I think is one thing that comes up.
Like we've relied on these same marketing, like I said, like you asked me, have you been
doing the same thing?
I'm like, yeah, pretty much.
We've been doing basically the same marketing strategies since we launched.
And they've grown like in a small way over time where it's like, okay, a few thousand
more people are seeing that every month.
But if I really want to accelerate the business from a $4 million business to a $20 million
business in a short amount of time, we can't just like keep those same strategies like
a 5% increase.
So I have to ask myself, like, what have we not tried at all?
You know, are there other avenues?
So for us, like partnerships are one that we haven't tried at all from a marketing perspective.
And there's lots of reasons why we haven't done that.
But I can't just like say, well, we're never doing that forever because we need to try
new things to grow.
So it's like, I think you have to kind of question everything that you do and just look
for areas like, well, let me try doing that different.
Let me try doing this different and see different outcomes that you get.
I feel like that answer is super vague.
Well, yeah, I think the way that you described it rings really true though.
Like for me personally, what I do is, you know, to know I'm making progress or what
lets me know that I'm making progress is when I look back on my past self and something
I was doing like a year ago or six months ago and I think, oh, that was so stupid.
I can't believe I was doing that that way.
So one more question and then I'll let you go.
If Edgar ceased to exist today and your audience and your social media profiles were erased
from the internet, how would you go through the process of starting another business?
Basically, if you're in the shoes of one of our listeners who's starting from scratch,
what would the first thing that you do be?
I actually would start blogging and start the whole kind of like thought leader marketing
process over again and I'm not saying that's the best thing for every single person.
I think everyone has to embrace their own strengths.
For me, I like speaking.
I like sharing my ideas and once you've established a presence as someone who knows what they're
talking about, it's very easy to get other opportunities to come to you.
I'm not a programmer, so any software business that I do, I need a technical co-founder.
Well, it's going to be a lot easier to find that technical co-founder if I have a body
of work online and they can read it and they can think that I sound smart and I maybe know
what I'm talking about as opposed to just being like, no, really, I promise you'll love
working with me.
Even if you're a stereotypical programmer who is horrified of this idea of being on
a podcast, for example, you can still blog and you might be blogging about really technical
topics and that's cool.
There's a lot of people that are really interested in reading about those topics, but I think
starting by sharing your ideas with the world, only good can come of that.
That is awesome advice and just to follow up on what you're saying, if you're listening
and you're a programmer and you're a little bit introverted, I'm a huge introvert.
The last thing I thought six months ago is I would ever have a podcast, so just try it
and you might surprise yourself and if it doesn't go well, you will live to see another
day.
Thank you so much, Laura.
Can you tell us where people can find out more about you and Edgar online?
Yes, you can find Edgar at meetedgar.com, meetedgar on social, I blog at my name, lauroroder.com,
R-O-E-D-E-R, and you can find me on Twitter at L-K-R.
Awesome, Laura.
It's great to have you.
Thank you.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, you should join me and a whole bunch of other
NdHackers and entrepreneurs on the NdHackers.com forum, where we talk about things like how
to come up with a good idea and how to find your first paying customers.
Also, if you're working on a business or a product of your own, it's a great place
to come and get feedback from the community on what you're working on.
Again, that's www.ndhackers.com slash forum.
Thanks, and I'll see you guys next time.