What's up everyone, 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 do they get to where they are today, how do
they make decisions both at their companies and in their personal lives, and what makes
their businesses tick.
And the goal here as always is so that the rest of us can go on to build our own successful
internet businesses.
Joining me today for the second time on the IndieHackers podcast is none other than growth
expert Julian Shapiro.
Julian is the founder of Bellcurve, an agency that not only helps founders grow their businesses
but also trains teams so that they learn how to grow their businesses on their own.
Julian welcome back to the show and thanks for joining me.
I'm excited to be back with so much to cover.
So much to cover.
The last time you came on, you told the story of Bellcurve and how you got started, how
you became an expert at what you do.
And today's episode, I think we're going to do things a little bit differently.
Rather than just telling your story, we're going to experiment with a little bit more
educational content than normal.
We're going to talk about the things that everybody needs to know about growing their
business before they get started with their business.
We're going to talk about things that people should know before they even come up with
the idea for their business.
And you Julian, obviously having worked with dozens of companies to help them grow are
I think the perfect person to come on and talk about this because you've seen story
after story, lesson after lesson of what works and what doesn't.
In fact, the reason I wanted to have you on in the first place is because of a tweet you
sent out a few months back.
It was a little bit cryptic, but you said, quote, given equal founder skill, e-commerce
and mobile apps succeed much more frequently than software as a service startups do.
So you're saying that people are better off opening an online store and selling goods
or starting a mobile app than they are building a web app from scratch and trying to charge
a monthly fee.
So let's start there.
What are some things that led you to that conclusion?
So if you look at all the clients that my agency has worked with, and look at the rate
of success when dividing by the type of product they sell, say it's SaaS, say it's e-commerce,
say it's a mobile app, or even a Chrome extension, e-commerce succeeds the most frequently, then
it's probably mobile apps, particularly those that deal with transacting finance in some
way.
Let's say it's a Bitcoin app, let's say it's a friend to friend payments app.
Let's say it's like Robinhood investing.
So mobile apps that help you transact money.
The third was Chrome extensions, which was super interesting to me, because they're a
wonderful Trojan horse to getting easy one click installs.
And then once you have that install, that install base, you can piggyback off that to
monetize as long as you're offering value.
But the point here is the friction to install is so minimal relative to getting someone
to create a fully built out profile on your SaaS product, or even downloading and installing
and signing up for a mobile app.
So we can get back to that.
But the point is, for our purposes here, that the very bottom of success frequency are SaaS
apps.
This isn't to say don't pursue SaaS, you're going to fail, nor is it to say that if you
have a great SaaS idea, it's going to perform worse than a bad ecommerce idea.
It's controlling for quality of the idea, quality of the market, and founder skill.
I feel pretty confident with that sort of hierarchy that I just shared.
So I want to dive things back a little bit, because I think it's easy for people to underestimate
how hard it can be to grow something.
People tend to focus on their ideas, they tend to focus on what they want to build or
create.
But it's totally possible, even likely, that you can have a great idea, and you can put
in all the work to turn it into a real web app or a product or a mobile app.
And then it turns out that you don't get any users, you can't find any customers, and you
realize too late that growing your business is actually the hard part.
How often do you work with companies whose businesses are just stagnant and not growing
at all?
It's actually, if they're coming to us, it usually means they care about growth and they
understand the value of growth marketing, which is the type of marketing you do when
you care about tracking results very carefully, and optimizing how you spend money on marketing
to maximize those results, as opposed to, say, brand marketing, where you're trying
to get the word out in quotes, you want to get everyone to know about what it is you're
doing, but you're not really tracking how much was spent that was then made profitable.
What was the full experience that that visitor had with your ads across both Facebook and
Twitter and elsewhere?
And did they pay you more than you spent to acquire them as a customer?
And so it's that sort of data focused means of ensuring you're spending profitably.
And all of the skills that are involved in that process.
That is what defines growth marketing.
And so if a company comes to us, and they're cognizant of growth marketing and its importance,
they're usually not in a dead zone.
So I sort of have this odd selection, this odd viewport into companies that are more
often succeeding than not.
But what I do have to work with very often are companies that are just starting out,
and it's a complete blank slate.
So they don't have any of the systems in place to do those measurements to ensure they spend
profitably.
And sometimes they'll start by asking me, hey, should we kick it off with brand marketing?
Should we get the word out?
Should we be very cautious to be consistent in our visuals, meaning should all our ads
look the same?
Should we hire a designer from day one and really hone our brand voice?
And my response is always, that is a luxury that you should indulge in once you're actually
demonstrating people want your product, and that you can spend money on marketing profitably.
And so it's not to say you want ugly ads.
It's not to say that you want inconsistency.
Those things are nice.
But neither one of those opposites, meaning pretty ads and consistency, aren't what make
or break someone's ability to do growth marketing well.
It's many other factors that we'll dive into.
I like that you're talking about ads, I like that you're talking about paid acquisition
channels.
I was talking to a friend yesterday who said, isn't buying ads kind of like cheating?
There isn't that like a cheap way, shouldn't you just be able to build something and people
show up because what you've created is great.
And it gets me thinking about how much of a herd mentality that can be among founders
and people who want to start businesses.
We look at our first, our favorite stories, look at the people that we admire, we see
how they've grown their businesses, and we think, you know, that's how it should be done.
That's the only way to do it.
But in reality, there are a variety of channels and strategies that you can use to grow your
business and get it off the ground.
And depending on the idea you're working on, some of these channels might be a good match
or there might be a bad match.
You've worked with all sorts of different companies, you've written about this online.
What are your thoughts on how people can choose the right growth strategy for their companies
and how people can become more aware of all the different options for how they can grow
their companies?
So the interesting thing about ads is there has never been a client or company I've seen
where I could have said to them, no, don't run ads, unless they simply could not have
done them profitably.
But for any client that even approximates profitability, ads should always be run.
So they're not they're not self indulgence.
They're not an excuse to distract yourself with other means of acquiring customers that
some may argue are better, and they probably are right.
But it's always a complimentary thing.
It's never a luxury to get ads to work.
And the reason for that is it is the quickest, most in your control, most scalable, most reliable
form of getting traffic, so getting people to your website.
And having that control is so important for a few reasons.
Number one, when you're trying to figure out what works on your website, you want to move
forward through those tests efficiently.
If you're just waiting on word of mouth or organic traffic, meaning traffic coming from
Google, that could genuinely take months, half a year or a year to build up to any sort
of significance if ever.
And so if you want to run a whole bunch of tests on your website to figure out how can
I improve his performance, meaning how can I get more people to buy, that is going to
require just from the sake of physics, a bunch of traffic so that you can test your changes
on people.
And the more traffic you have, the more tests you can run in any given period of time.
And we can get more to that if you'd like.
Also, ads are very often made profitable.
People just simply don't do them right.
And so they cannot sustain the profitability indefinitely.
So you'll hear very often people downplay the importance of ads because they burned
on them.
Like they tried them, they got something approximating profitability.
And then after three or four months of running those ads, suddenly the performance crashed.
And they were no longer profitable.
And they thought to themselves, oh, so ads are unreliable.
Actually to be frank, you lack the skill or the experience to keep those ads running profitably
for a long time.
And that's something we can get into.
One more layer on that, and I'll wrap up here, is not only do people burn out ad performance
very commonly, almost every client that has ever come to us reach that state prior to
reaching out to us.
So that happens all the time.
It's very normal.
I like that you mentioned that a lot of growth strategies can take a ton of time to kick
in.
I've interviewed a lot of founders and seen this exact phenomenon.
I talked to a woman named Christy Lawrence, whose app took 10 months to get built.
And the entire time she was working, spending those 10 months on actually growing to ensure
that when her app was done being built, it actually had an audience, you can find customers,
make money.
And if she hadn't put in that time, she would not have been able to sell.
I've talked to also, you mentioned mattresses.
I talked to the founders of a mattress company called Tuft & Needle.
And they actually used paid advertisements in order to sort of validate their idea.
So they got a mattress, they wanted to try selling it, rather than doing all sorts of
very slow methods of reaching customers.
They literally just took out an ad and put it at the top of Google for mattresses to
see if anybody would have clicked through their website and actually buy this mattress.
And that sort of proved to them instantly within a day that their idea was something
that at least someone somewhere would care about.
Exactly.
And in proving within a day or so that people are interested in what you have, which was
only achievable through just quickly spinning up ads and spending money for an afternoon,
you could have just saved yourself going down a rabbit hole for four to six months waiting
for the traffic to accrue, in which time you've blown and waste all these hours going down
the wrong direction.
So it's not only efficient cost wise, it's also efficient time wise to just rely on ads
in the very early days.
And then as you get other channels working, a channel being a sort of place that you get
people from.
So word of mouth is a channel.
Buying traffic on ads is a channel.
SEO, right?
So search engine optimization, getting traffic from Google to your blog, for example, that's
another channel.
Referrals, sponsorships, there's a whole bunch.
The idea is that until those take off, ads is great in the short term at minimum.
But the argument I want to make is even in the long term, they're usually also great
as well if you do them properly.
So let's talk about these channels, because this is what I was bringing up earlier where
people aren't really that familiar with what their options even are for how they're going
to grow their app.
They kind of copy what they see one or two other people doing, and they leave a lot of
other channels and options untouched and really unexplored.
Let's say I'm a founder, or would be founder, I've got an idea I want to work on.
How should I be thinking about evaluating which channel, which growth strategies are
a good fit for the idea that I have?
Sure.
So the first framework you can consider is, are you a direct to consumer business?
Or are you selling to other businesses?
So an example of the first category, the B2C, business to consumer, would be something like
selling a toothbrush to your website, right, is an individual who buys the toothbrush.
In contrast, a B2B business will be something like you are selling email marketing software
like MailChimp, if anyone's heard of that, to a company that is trying to email their
users or their customers.
So if you think of it, if you start in that framework, that'll help you narrow better
into which of those channels are most likely to work for you.
And once you've decided between the two, there's then a little bit more of a sub segmentation
we can follow.
So let me give you a few examples.
So if you are a B2C business, if you're selling to consumers, you can be an e-commerce business,
that's one sub segment, you can be a mobile app, like we discussed earlier, or a sass app,
or you can be just bricks and mortar, you can have a real retail physical presence.
So let me give you an example comparing those sub segments against each other, which channels
are most likely to succeed.
So let's take B2C e-commerce selling physical goods.
So you'll most likely succeed.
So if you succeed at all with ads, these are the channels you will most likely succeed
with based on me or my experience, having worked with a few dozen startups over the
last couple of years, and talking to a bunch of other companies as well and figuring out
what works for them.
So most likely for B2C is going to be Instagram ads, content marketing, and a little bit of
PR public relations to kickstart some of these organic efforts.
So sponsoring influencers, or getting affiliates, you can kind of bucket that partially into
PR, getting the word out through non advertising or content means.
You might also succeed with Pinterest ads, Google AdWords, and Google Shopping.
So we can dive into those individually, but right now I'm trying to give a high level
overview of just some channels so you can have them in the back of your brain.
And let's let's go to a couple other sub segments that are most common, I won't go through all
them just yet.
But let's say you are a B2C SaaS app.
So you're selling software to consumers.
For example, an example of this would be Streak, S-T-R-E-A-K.com.
They are a Chrome extension that is also a SaaS app.
And what they do is they allow consumers, people like you and I, to send emails in a
more organized fashion.
It's one way to think about it.
They're also for businesses as well.
So they will most likely succeed with Facebook ads and content marketing.
And they might succeed with Google AdWords and affiliate programs.
And let me give you one last example of a sub segment in the B2B category business to
business, just so we can kind of get the lay of the land of what channels are out there.
Let me take a look here.
So let's say you are a broadly appealing B2B product with a high amount of revenue
that you make per user, which we call a high average revenue per user, so ARPU.
And a company like that is one that might make $1,000 per month per customer.
So maybe there's something like, I don't know, Salesforce, perhaps.
So they're software that target businesses, they charge a lot per month to big companies.
If that is you, you'll most likely succeed doing sales.
So that's one of the key differences here, if you are selling to businesses, you may
have to rely less on ads and more so on traditional sales.
And sales can break down further into cold emailing, sending emails to people who you've
never spoken to before, just traditional networking, say at conferences, and even sending sort
of like cold LinkedIn messages as an alternative to cold emails.
And you can also rely on lead generation.
So getting businesses that might be interested in your product, that's what a lead would
be someone who might be interested, you know, you don't yet know they're not yet a customer.
You can do lead generation through Facebook ads, and Google AdWords, and you might succeed
with Instagram ads as well and content marketing.
So I'm going to pause there.
The idea being there is a sort of framework here to think about what is most likely to
work.
And when I say most likely, what I mean is, not just a matter of every dollar in will
come back out your way more profitably, it's not just that.
It's also whether it can be made to work at all.
So for example, sales will not work at all for many B2C companies that are selling toothbrushes
because the amount of labor that goes into a sales call, or a sales email will be unjustifiably
expensive relative to how much revenue you make from the sale of that toothbrush.
So that is an example of how one channel might only be appropriate for one type of business.
Conversely, if you're doing Snapchat ads, that channel might not be appropriate for
Salesforce because Snapchat's audience might be predominantly younger people who are in
a frame of mind while using Snapchat, that is not at all conducive to saying, yeah, what
enterprise software should I sign my sales team up for, right?
So there's a contextual component, does your audience even exist on that channel component?
Then there's the financial component of assessing the channel.
For example, is it simply too expensive to buy ads there, given how much money that I
make from my average user?
And then putting ads aside entirely, you have things I alluded to like affiliate programs,
PR, content marketing, and a few other non-paid channels that we can get into if you'd like.
Okay, great.
So that's a lot of information to address, and I think it really gets the point across
that there's a lot to think about here.
It's not as simple as I'm going to build an app, and it's going to work.
You really should put that into the different channels you can use and whether or not they'll
be profitable and workable for you in the short term and the long term.
And there's a ton of different options.
Let's say I am an aspiring indie hacker.
I don't know what I want to work on.
I don't know what I want to build yet.
But mostly in this episode, and I'm thinking, gee, I don't want to pick the wrong thing
that's going to be a lot of trouble to grow and that's not going to be successful at all.
How would you think about being in that position, Julian?
I know you say that e-commerce is better than SaaS.
Should I start an e-commerce business as an aspiring indie hacker?
So there's advice that's out there, which says choose what you're passionate about and
solve problems that you have, meaning those are the criteria people often say should lead
you to the type of business you start.
The reason for the passion one is so that you sustain your motivation to see the business
through.
And the reason for the solving your own problem is so that you can be your own customer, because
when you're your own customer, you have a better understanding of how to solve the problem
more intimately.
And when you fail to solve the problem sufficiently, you can be a good judge of that.
So it's good advice, but I would argue it's the wrong advice.
And this goes against much of what you would hear from other people.
Having grown so many companies and having seen their struggles so early on, and having
seen them pivot, sometimes on account of the recommendations my agency, Belkrib, has made
to them when seeing their struggles, I believe that in contrast, you should start with what
is most likely to succeed, and from there and succeed meaning profitably to the whatever
your milestone is for being happy financially.
That is what I mean by succeed.
I'm not saying go choose the idea most likely to make a billion dollars, if you don't care
about that, whatever would make you happy realistically, if it's a lifestyle business
that maybe pays what you would have been paid had you worked for someone else.
And that's what you're looking for.
Awesome.
Start with what is most likely to achieve that.
And the way that you assess that is by figuring out what is most suitable for growth.
And so we'll get back to that in a moment.
But the second step is once you've identified that, then you ask yourself, okay, within
those possibilities, within all these things that I think are likely to succeed, what am
I most passionate about?
And which of these do I actually have the problem they're solving?
So they still should be criteria for narrowing down the top level criterion of what's actually
going to work.
Because I don't care how passionate you are about an idea.
If it's failing miserably for half a year, you will feel miserable, you will give up
and it will be it will have been a poor use of your time.
So I really want to stress that don't work on something doomed to fail, because there
is an infinite amount of ideas you could be pursuing.
So to pursue the one you're most passionate about, and disregard the growth potential
of it is doing yourself a disservice and is being naive because I guarantee there is an
idea out there that is both, you are both passionate about it, and it has growth potential.
So to kind of wrap this up, how do you assess whether something has growth potential, meaning
how can you get it to a point where it's sustaining the financial lifestyle you want without too
much friction.
And essentially, you want to look at the data of what types of companies succeed most frequently,
which is how we started off this call.
So e commerce does succeed more frequently controlling for founder skill, and the quality
of the idea more so than software.
You also want to look for how big is the market?
How badly does the market want what you're offering?
And if you can find specific examples, if there are competitors that exist, that are
doing great, that is a very good thing that shouldn't scare you, you shouldn't say too
much competition, the world is huge, the population is growing quickly, the amount of people amount
of people in countries with that quickly increasing purchasing power, and with access, the internet
is rapidly expanding.
So it doesn't matter if competition exists, there's a reason why there's a half dozen
matches companies popping up every year, or every quarter even.
So they all do get a small piece of the pie.
And remember, if you're not trying to be a billionaire, by this idea, you don't need to
have something that dominates the entire market.
So competition is not a bad thing.
The point I'm getting to here is, it is actually a great signal that the thing you've identified
at the intersection of you what you're passionate about, what you understand, you understand
the problem that's being solved, and has growth potential, that can be assessed by that signal
or other people kicking butt doing it.
And specifically, you can identify this in a couple ways.
One, you can go to alexa.com, A-L-E-X-A.com, scroll halfway down the page, at least at
the time of this recording, and enter the domain name of that competitor.
And you'll be able to see the traffic trend that they've received over time.
So over the last year, for example, it'll show you how many more visitors they've had
in one month versus the next.
And typically, not always, but typically, if you see that steadily increasing, it means
they're buying more and more traffic, usually through ads, or maybe it's word of mouth.
And if that trend holds, then it means they're probably doing pretty well.
Because each month, they're being more motivated to keep pumping more money in, because when
they put a dollar in, they get more than a dollar back.
So that's one sign of finding out, are they successful, or are they just blasting me with
ads and they seem successful, but they're going to be going out of business.
And again, it's not a perfect metric, but it is a place to start.
Another one is look through, subscribe to their Facebook page, or like their Facebook
page, and look at the level of engagement on their Facebook ads.
Is it a ghost town, or are people truly engaging?
And is the number of engagements, likes, comments, shares, just exploding over time?
So there's a few metrics that you can use as a proxy to assess their success.
And the reason I'm spending so much time on this point is because, much like the growth
marketing mindset as a whole, you want to be data oriented.
You don't want to go off hunches ever.
Hunches can propose things for you to try, but data should then be what validates them.
Hunches should not be what concludes on experiments, or concludes on really important decisions.
I like that you bring up this point about hunches, because it's so easy when you're
listening to other people's stories, or doing research, to fall prey to survivorship bias,
where you say, I see all sorts of people who say that they followed a hunch, and it worked
out for their business, but you're not really looking at all the people who followed a hunch,
and that growth strategy didn't work out, and their business failed, they never really
wrote about it.
And so you really should take the denominator into account and consider the possibility
that just because you see something very often doesn't necessarily mean that it has a high
percentage chance of success.
And the opposite is also true.
You might very rarely see people talk about making these data driven decisions that you're
talking about, but that doesn't change the fact that it might be a more successful approach.
Can you give us any stories or examples of times where you've used these strategies like
looking at Alexa.com, or examining another company's Facebook ads, and come up with a
good growth strategy for yourself, or for a company that you've worked with?
Yeah, let me give you a counter example, a different way to think about how to identify
the right direction for your product, beyond just looking at competitors.
So if you start out with a test, and let's say you have a product that does a lot of
things, it helps you get money back from companies that have wronged you.
So maybe companies that maybe a restaurant spilled food on your clothing, right?
Or maybe you bought a toaster that broke while on warranty and the company will not refund
you or exchange it.
So the reason I'm giving you this example is because that is exactly a client that we
work with service or get service.com.
So they started as a product that did exactly that.
They were basically customer support as a service, they brokered customer support conversations
for you.
They didn't really have a monetization strategy that was solid just yet they were exploring
the market, which is an okay thing, if you're very diligent with your growth.
And so they were looking for the signs in those early tests, of which types of customer
complaints had the highest affinity, meaning when that problem or when that complaint occurred,
customers were really passionate about seeing it through, about getting it resolved, and
they're willing to put up with anything to get to a conclusion that would be high affinity.
So they're in a situation that a lot of companies find themselves in where they've got lots
of customers doing lots of different things, and they're trying to analyze all of their
data to figure out, okay, where's the signal here?
Where should we double down and focus?
That's exactly right.
And that can be an okay thing, just doing growth modestly, meaning not spending too
much money temporarily for the purpose of learning more about your market and the problems
you should be solving, based on what is going to succeed growth wise, that is okay to do.
They did that, they found one particular use case that was by far and away the winner.
And then I said to them, why don't you double down on that now?
Because if we focus your product, where the only thing it does is just that one complaint
resolution, it's going to give us an opportunity to focus our growth efforts, meaning our website,
our ads, the in app experience, because it's a mobile app, all of that can be very narrowly
tailored to that use case.
And that use case, by the way, is what's called flight remuneration, which is where if a flight
is delayed by an airline or canceled, depending on a few stipulations, you may be entitled
to a cashback like mileage back.
And so that was the thing that ticked off consumers the most because no one likes a
delayed flight, right?
And so when that problem occurred, people felt a lot of anger toward the airlines, their
affinity was through the roof, and that was the type of person we knew would fall in love
with our app, if we could solve their problem.
So we redirected all of our growth efforts, doubled down on exactly that, and went from
spending almost nothing on ads, because we weren't making money.
And there wasn't enough focus to spending more per month on Facebook and Instagram advertising
combined than any other client I'd ever worked with before, because it turned out, it hit
a lot of those things that I mentioned a few moments ago, it hit a lot of those criteria,
you should be looking for to assess whether your idea will succeed from a growth perspective.
So I'll go into those in a moment.
But it was only because we afforded ourselves that learning period, that we had the data
to be extra confident, we would then head in the right direction.
And we didn't need a competitor to tell us this, we had our own data.
So sometimes you can go with internal data.
So really briefly, why did that idea succeed?
The markets huge, everybody flies, at least everyone in the geographies that we're targeting
North America, they get in an airplane and fly, perhaps on average once, twice a year,
and there's a whole bunch of people, business travelers who travel so frequently, they would
kill for our app, because they would be getting so many hundreds of dollars back, no exaggeration,
or 1000s back, based on all the times they've been wronged by the airlines.
And the market is simply huge.
And the affinity like we already spoke about is high, which means the market demand is
high, even though it's latent demand, meaning people weren't saying, hey, why doesn't someone
build an app for me to go ahead and get money back from airlines, because no one knew that
was the thing that could even be done before service blew up, and everyone started learning
about it.
So demand doesn't only have to be what is on the tip of people's tongues, which would
mean they already know that you they already know about the solution you provide, which
was not the case, it might just mean once they learn about you, they're going to go
crazy for you.
That is okay demand as well.
In fact, that is hidden demand or latent demand that usually makes for the most explosive
businesses.
Airbnb, nobody knew people wanted that for years.
But there's no reason why it could not have existed 40 years ago.
There's no reason, perhaps the lack of the internet, but from an actual usage perspective,
going to someone's home and so forth, you know, that could have been done through a
mail order catalog, who knows.
So it could have existed, there was a latent demand.
And it took data tests that the Airbnb team did, just like the service team did the same
methodology, to use their own data to figure out, okay, you know what, there's something
here that no one else realized, which means not only do I have a market play here, because
the growth potential is real, but there isn't a single competitor that currently exists.
So if I play my growth, right, I might be the next biggest thing and service became
exactly that.
I like that you said that one of the criteria here is that the market is huge.
Everybody flies, everybody has to deal with delayed or canceled flights, and so the potential
number of customers that this company could reach is humongous.
People talk a lot about product market fit, and I think it gets misinterpreted by a lot
of people starting companies as, I need to make something that people really like.
And that's great and all, you should make something that people really like, but you
also need to make something that a lot of people can potentially use.
Like the market you're targeting has to be huge, it has to be a market where people actually
pay money for things.
How do you actually research to figure out which markets are worth targeting?
So I would think a bit less about markets and a bit more about audiences.
So one might say, how big is the market for flight remuneration?
You're like, I don't know, it's not really a thing.
But if you said how big is the audience for people who might want that, okay, well, technically,
let's add all the frequent business flyers and the more casual vacation goers.
And then we might have an idea of how can we break that down by affinity?
Who would want us the most within that audience?
So if you look at the highest affinity, probably the business travelers, because they deal
with this problem the most.
So that's affinity based on frequency.
If that's the case, or just for a point of contrast, I would contrast affinity based
on frequency versus affinity based on magnitude, meaning when this type of audience or sub
audience experiences the problem, how bad is it, right?
So there are different ways to break down an audience.
But the point being, if you start with the audience segment by affinity, then you can
ask yourself how large is the audience that would want me the most.
And that is typically how you want to think about whether the quote unquote market is
good for you.
And there's a few other things, there's a few other hidden components which are sort
of self evident, but I want to tease them out.
So is what you're doing actually successfully solving their problem?
Is what you're doing the sort of thing that can be conveyed very succinctly and effectively
to people, you might have the world's best problem.
But if your approach to it cannot actually be digested into a really powerful punchy
ad that gets people to click, then this might not be a very effective solution, actually,
at least from the perspective of growth, which as I've been arguing is kind of the most important
thing.
And this is another way of just saying, does your business function?
Is it even capable of self sustaining?
And so that's how I would normally think of it.
But to answer your question more directly, if I'm trying to identify a business opportunity,
what should my next business be, which I think is the real question, I would go back to that
framework of what is likely to succeed.
And so service succeeds, not just because the market is huge, or because the affinity
can sometimes be very high.
But it also succeeds because it can pass that test of being conveyed and being pitched very
efficiently.
So we have one ad that we call a hero ad, meaning it by far and away outperforms every
other ad we've ever made for service.
And all it says is PS airlines will pay you up to 135 bucks.
When your flight is the later canceled period, that is the entire ad, there's no other text
on the image that is responsible for seven figures in ad spend.
And had I tried spending seven figures with a lesser ad, it probably would not have been
profitable.
So my point here is, assessing the viability of your idea is not just a matter of assessing
the market, it's a matter of assessing how well can you pitch it, and does it really
solve the problem.
And a few other things, I'll give you one last item here, which is service also made
it a no brainer to sign up.
So not only was the pitch effective in the sense that here's what we're doing, and you're
like, damn, I need that solved.
But once you actually download the mobile app, you weren't charged anything.
The value proposition, meaning what they were pitching to you as what they were going to
do for you was, hey, create an account, put your credit card on file, that's it, we're
not going to charge it.
We're going to do everything we can for free to go and try to talk to the airlines and
get you money back.
And if we succeed, then we'll take a portion of what we get you back.
So you have nothing to lose here.
And that was the genius of services business model.
That is, in fact, my last point, which is, how compelling is the way you solve the problem?
Not just can it be conveyed well, which I gave you the example of the ad, but do you
actually solve the problem in a way that people go, wow, yes, sign me up for that, I don't
perceive any friction here, go.
So what about people who are in a situation where they maybe don't have a great idea already?
You've seen tons of companies, you've seen what's worked and what hasn't.
What kinds of audiences do you think are being underserved?
What types of channels do you think are maybe emerging and people aren't really focusing
on and that show a lot of promise?
So these are my two most reliable frameworks for deciding whether you should pursue an
idea or perhaps more so finding an idea you should pursue.
First from the B2B side, when you're basically looking to sell something to businesses.
You should be the buyer, you should see the problem and have it yourself.
And you should go and talk to your own business and say, hey, would you guys pay to solve
this problem?
If so others may be willing to pay for it, go survey similar companies and find out,
get a whole bunch of yeses before you actually venture into building something.
And that's a very tried and true framework, nothing novel on my part there.
The one that's a bit more novel on my part is identifying e-commerce trends where branding
is the differentiator.
So okay, what do you mean by that?
Yeah, so let's look at Instagram data.
As often as I can, I'll try to bring this back to some sort of source of data.
So things trend on Instagram, there are hashtags, there are third party tools that let you assess
what's being discussed the most month over month on Instagram, based on hashtags.
And if you see beauty products, makeup, skincare, whatever, trending really strong, meaning
there's a new trend in there, maybe it's using a certain type of powder, or using a certain
type of medical ingredient and skin cream, and it's really starting to get some traction.
That might be an indication that that will explode soon and you might want to jump the
gun early and be there from day one.
How do you assess that?
You then go to Google Trends, literally just go to Google and type Google Trends and you'll
be brought to a dashboard where you enter the name of that trend.
And Google will show you a graph over time of how many people search for that keyword
or that thing that trend month over month.
And if that's spiking up much like the Alexa graph example from earlier, if people are
searching this thing more and more and more than it might be on the precipice of exploding.
And if you're there from day one, you might be the one that wins the branding war, you
own that category in the minds of all the people who would be in your market.
And now another way to look at that.
Here's a different perspective into how to choose an e-commerce product is you can find
something that is boring, old, perhaps even overplayed, like everyone in the world has
a mattress, some form of mattress, at least everyone in North America is going to have
a mattress.
So you might think to yourself, you know what, there's nothing to be done here.
I can't bring something new to mattresses.
And that very often isn't true, because branding alone can sometimes be the differentiator.
Like there are people selling like the quick toothbrush or I'm sure there's a whole bunch
of others.
But the idea here is how differentiated are they really?
How differentiated is one modern toothbrush from the next?
Is it just prettier?
Probably.
Is it a little bit cheaper?
Probably.
Is it easier to buy the one personalized to you based on their website functionality?
Probably.
And none of those things are game changers.
You add up those small things together, it feels modern, you then paint a brand story
around it like this is the thing where your teeth are never going to be as good, you know,
it's going to make your teeth better than they've ever been.
And you show people ecstatic about it, you show all the social proof meaning you show
their customers testimonials, and you build this bubble that you trap people in where
they think you are the new hottest thing.
And then the next time they have to buy a new toothbrush, they'll choose you instead
of going to the CV at the local, you know, pharmacy.
And that I have seen become the only differentiator branding positioning.
For many companies that have succeeded wildly recently, I don't want to encourage a lot
of people to think that way, because I think it's bad for the marketplace, I think it'll
burn out.
And I think unless you know branding really well, you won't actually see much success.
But if you're a branding expert, and you're not a coder who can make a SaaS app or something,
it is an honestly good option available to you.
There's a lot of channels that we haven't discussed here that I've seen various indie
hackers use to their success, influencer marketing, getting popular famous people to talk about
what you're building, ranking high in app stores.
So you mentioned Chrome extensions.
Most people find Chrome extensions through the Chrome app store, the Chrome web store,
or mobile apps, it's the same thing.
Public speaking, some businesses grow tremendously for their founders.
Public speaking, some businesses, that doesn't make any sense at all.
How can I as a founder go about evaluating these sort of slower, more gradual channels
to determine what's going to be best for my business?
So the only way to assess those typically is to just do them.
And it's less about how can I tell whether they're going to work quickly?
How do I assess them?
More so about how do you distribute your resources efficiently?
Meaning how can you run small tests in each of those channels from in parallel, as early
as you can, especially the ones that take a long time to pay dividends actually work,
like SEO, so that you plant all of these seeds.
If ads fail, you can go back to the, you know, the plants and the trees that have grown out
of those seeds over time.
So start networking, start doing a little bit of PR here and there, it does serve a
purpose at times.
And at least for the average company, I mean, in general serves a purpose, sometimes it
can be pretty interesting for pairing it with ads.
And just don't let anything that takes a long time to snowball build momentum go unaddressed
for too long.
In fact, that is exact same strategy I use for all of bell curves growth clients from
the ads channel front.
So even just focusing on those channels where you do have to pay money, we run very small
tests in each, like 500 to $1,000, which is small for them, because these are usually
companies have raised several million.
And we try to find out very quickly, does this channel do Snapchat ads have potential?
And if not, we'll stop and we'll come back to it a later time.
But we want to know early on, because if it turns out that Snapchat is a quarter of the
price of Instagram, and we only tested Instagram, we're shooting ourselves in the foot.
Sometimes that reduction in paid acquisition cost can single handedly be what makes or
breaks your business.
So the real methodology here is go in with an open mind, figure out what is the quickest
way I can validate this particular channel with paid channels, it means just spending
a little bit of money being very thoughtful about the audiences you're testing.
With unpaid channels, depends very much on a per channel basis.
And I'm not an expert and say, you know, conferences and PR, both content marketing, one example
of doing a small test would be something like doing keyword analysis, which is a whole different
topic you probably won't get into.
But if you Google something like keyword analysis, for my blog, you'll be able to figure out
what are people searching for.
And then you can just start already blog posts to the things that are most commonly searched
for that other people are not writing much about.
So make it easy on yourself and see, okay, people who do come and read these blog posts,
that should get a decent amount of visitors, do they actually wind up converting into customers.
And one more point there on blogging, which is, it's not just a matter of will this get
enough traffic, relatively speaking, but is this a topic I could write about that would
actually segue naturally into a pitch for my product.
So you can write about all sorts of stuff.
But if it doesn't usher people toward a sale, you have to think about what what is value
is versus trying a different topic, for the purposes of assessing content marketing as
a channel in an efficient manner.
So put yourself you know, put yourself in the best possible position to win during the
in these in these channel tests.
Yeah, I like your emphasis on testing, you keep using the word testing.
And I think for people learning how to build a company from scratch, we see these examples
of other companies that have succeeded.
And we only really see what worked in the end, they say, Oh, yeah, I put up this type
of ad, or I started doing this type of link building strategy, or I reached out to these
influencers and my website blew up.
But oftentimes, those people tried dozens of things that didn't work beforehand.
And they were just very efficient about ruling out what wasn't going to work and moving on
to the next thing.
I want to ask you some specific questions around topics that we talked about a lot on
the India actors podcast and see how you would approach those from a position of growth.
So the first is, how would you go about creating a small to moderately sized e commerce business
quickly, people listening in might be saying, okay, I'm sold, e commerce might be the way
to go.
What sort of your roadmap?
What would you do first?
And what can other people sort of learn from that?
So let me first tie back to something I said earlier in the chat, which is, I want to substantiate
why is e commerce better than SaaS, at least for the frequency of it succeeding financially
or profitably.
So with e commerce, typically, you're selling a good like a toothbrush or a mattress that
people are already buying.
Think about that for a moment.
So if I'm creating SaaS software, in contrast, are people already buying is the average person
in America as the average adult already buying a tool to allow them to live chat with business
customers on their website and get analytics for the live chats, like that's a very niche
thing.
So when you're selling a niche thing, particularly through the lens of growth, meaning you're
pitching it to someone through an ad, a niche thing has to be explained from multiple levels
of a ladder of product awareness.
Number one, why do I have to solve this problem?
Oh, because when you have chats with people on your website, x, y and z, it's okay.
In explaining the problem, you've now taken up half or more of the real estate available
to you in your ad to actually pitch why your solution is amazing.
And so let's compare that back to e commerce.
If everyone knows what a toothbrush is, and I run an ad pitching a toothbrush, all I have
to do is point out why mine is amazing.
I can just show how pretty it is.
I can show a couple of its cool features, I can bull point 123.
This is why it is awesome.
I don't have to pitch the problem of why somebody needs a toothbrush or a mattress.
They already know.
And so you save or you can more efficiently use real estate and running as many ads as
I have I know full well, that efficiency is the key to ads.
You have to get to the point quickly.
If you ramble too much, people stop reading and people don't click.
And then it's very expensive to run ads profitably.
So this is a huge component.
The second component is kind of the flip side of this coin, which is, if people already
buy this thing, it means they're going to buy it again.
Just a matter of how expendable is that good.
So they're already going to want to buy it no matter what.
So if you show your ad to them at a point in their life, when they're ready to buy,
you have an extremely good chance to get that sale.
Part of the hustle of growth marketing, running ads competently, what we do for clients is
we figure out how do we most narrowly identify those individuals who do in fact need that
good right now in their life?
What are the signals?
What are the patterns or behaviors that correlate with someone about to buy a mattress?
I'll give you a specific example.
So on Facebook, they allow you to do something called behavioral targeting.
That means you can target your ads to people on Facebook, based on the behaviors Facebook
detects in them.
One such behavior might be they recently moved, so they went from New York to California.
That is a perfect example of what I would call a trigger for introducing someone into
our ideal audience of buying a mattress.
When you move, if you're not trucking your mattress across the state or across the country,
you're going to have to buy one.
There we go.
And sure enough, that'll outperform just generally targeting all Facebook users as a second type
of ad set and ad set is sort of like the means by which you target someone on Facebook.
It'll always perform better.
So just wanted to tie all that up together before I answer your question of why is e-commerce
awesome?
Those are two reasons.
Maybe I'll rapid fire a couple more off the top of my head because I think people are
interested in this because I've spoken so much about why e-commerce, why e-commerce.
It's visual.
Usually people also know they have a price expectation.
So people have an idea that for a mattress, they're going to be spending hundreds and
hundreds of dollars.
Now for a SaaS app, in contrast, they usually use what's called value-based pricing because
there's no actual concrete marginal cost that is in the hundreds of dollars when trying
to sell something that's software-based usually.
So they're like, oh, let's just charge 500 bucks because we think it provides that much
value to our customer, and so we can get away with it because they'll be happy paying it.
So that's, however, purely conjecture.
Or maybe that's substantiated by some user tests you've run.
But the point is, you simply don't know if people will really put their money where their
mouth is and say, yes, that I'm willing to pay, that's as much value as I theoretically
get from that software.
In comparison to e-commerce, if you are selling a mattress, and one of your key selling points
is that you cost $400 as opposed to $3,000 for an extremely premium mattress.
People are like, wow, I know for sure that's how much a mattress costs normally.
So I know for sure you're giving me the deal of a lifetime, and I have no problem paying
your $400.
I can go on and on about why e-commerce is awesome.
And this is not something, by the way, that almost anyone that I've spoken to in the entirety
of Silicon Valley, other than investors who are savvy enough to figure this out and double
down on it, even know about or talk about ever.
It's never spoken.
And I think part of that has to do with a lot of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley
and San Francisco and Northern California and elsewhere.
There's a heavy emphasis on technical founders.
And when you're a coder or founder, and you're trying to follow this advice to solve your
own problem, usually the problems you have are software related, or your reflex when
solving a problem is to ask yourself, how can I use software to do so?
And none of that is conducive to coming up with e-commerce ideas.
And e-commerce is also dismissed as a non-sexy, archaic, Costco level warehousing thing, plus
the logistics of actually shipping things across the country can be very intimidating.
Fortunately, however, falsely intimidating, because there are tons of full solution providers
that will do all that for you.
One last note on this is there is a part of North America that's crushing e-commerce.
And that's Los Angeles.
They're sort of like Hollywood first, brand first, marketing first, Instagram, social
influencers, celebrities, all that stuff.
Investors in an environment where e-commerce is better supported, emotionally, data wise,
what your friends are doing, what investors are looking for.
And if you go look at the startups coming out of LA, how many of them are selling physical
goods is relatively high, people don't realize this, and very successful, super high rate
of success.
So something to chew on.
Yeah, it's interesting how much as founders, we tend to over focus on what we already know.
So we look at our role models and our peers, and we see what they're doing, we copy that,
we don't realize how much that limits our perception as to what's possible.
Because there are so many people outside of whatever bubbles we're in, outside of whatever
books we're reading, or podcasts we're listening to, or people we talk to, or cities we live
in, who are doing things a totally different way.
I think that's one of the cool things about talking to somebody like you, who runs an
agency or talking to an investor, because people in those positions, you guys see a
lot of companies from all over the place.
And so you don't really get limited by just seeing the same types of examples over and
over.
Exactly.
Also, I'm realizing now that we've done a nice chunk of me rambling.
So I would love to just maybe segue into some growth stories and hear what maybe you've
experienced Cortland based on some of the anecdotes I've shared or some of the data
I've shared.
And maybe I can share a few as well.
Does that sound cool?
Yeah, that sounds great.
And we've got a ton of questions from people on Twitter that we can mix in as well.
Awesome.
One question from Twitter is, how do you target a niche?
If you know that you're specifically going to be looking at a very small group of customers
who have a very specific need that's different from other people, does this affect the channels
that you can target and the ways that you can grow?
Great question.
So when you're going niche, let's say you're targeting people who love widgets.
There are a few ways to leverage the popular social networks to find widget lovers.
And this is important because if you're just targeting a quarter million people who would
be the perfect fit for you for your product.
If you try advertising on Facebook, just very broadly, where there's you know, over a billion
people and over 200 million in the US alone, something around that, it's going to be wildly
inefficient ad spend, so be targeting and spamming everyone.
So if you look at Twitter, they have something very cool, which is you can target Twitter
users based on who Twitter users follow.
And those are very niche signals.
If I follow widget co or widget fans or widget photos, that's a pretty strong sign that I
care about widgets.
On Facebook, you can target people based on the pages that they'd like.
However, many pages, particularly those smaller audiences, so who've been liked less frequently
or to a smaller degree, Facebook will simply not allow you to target them at all.
But Twitter gives you that full and federal access, even the most niche of things based
on the accounts people follow further, Twitter can be used to target keywords.
So if someone's publicly tweeting about widgets, you can target people who've entered those
keywords into their tweets.
Pretty cool.
The downside is Twitter is one of the worst ad channels.
It's usually worse performing than Facebook, Instagram, even Snapchat, meaning the cost
per click to your website is very high.
People's intent to buy once they reach your website is pretty poor.
But if that's the only place you can identify your audience, it's going to be probably your
best channel.
Also, SEO, piggybacking off keywords like widget, when people Google that, you can have
blog posts that cover what's called the full long tail, all of the niche topics that all
aggregate together to be a meaningful number of topics.
You can cover those in individual blog posts, even people are searching very small amounts
per month, maybe you can dominate that in aggregate.
And then one more thing I'll say on this, because I want to try to rapid fire these
better than I am.
Sorry about that.
But in regard to Facebook, they have something called lookalike targeting, which is where
as long as you have some people already visiting your website and engaging and buying, you
can without you having to do anything technical, you can instruct Facebook through their dashboard,
how to target people who have the same sort of demographic and purchasing behaviors as
the people on your website.
So they can identify similar people and extrapolate backwards from there.
Very cool, extremely effective.
Another question, several people ask this on Twitter.
What about virality?
What about referrals?
What if you're someone who doesn't want to deal with any of this gross stuff and you
want to build a product that's going to grow based on word of mouth alone?
What are your tips for doing that?
So virality does work, it can work, it probably will not work for your product.
And let me be more specific, there are a few types of virality.
There's inherent virality, which occurs as a natural function of your product's day to
day use.
For example, if you're paying someone on PayPal, your payments recipient needs to first join
PayPal in order to get that payment, right?
And so who's not going to sign up to get paid?
It's an extremely compelling offer in your email inbox, hey, sign up, and you can get
your friend's $1,000 that he's paying you.
So no wonder PayPal's user base exploded.
That's inherent virality occurring as a function of your product's everyday use.
That is the best virality there is, because you don't have to introduce artificial gimmicks.
Like here's 10% off, here's 25 bucks, here's some swag.
You don't have to rely on that stuff, which never works as well as an inherently compelling
reason for someone to go ahead and sign up for the product.
And because one person will pay more than one recipient in a year usually, it's one
to many, right?
You know, or for example, let's use Dropbox as another great example of inherent virality.
In order for me to use Dropbox in my business, I have to share it with my whole team.
That's step one.
Step two, when I want to then share a Dropbox file with my people outside of the team, like
Klein or something, I may have to invite them.
And now they have to sign up.
And that's inherent virality.
That's the best doesn't have to be incentivized.
It works organically.
No reason PayPal, or no surprise, Gmail, Hotmail, PayPal, Airbnb, Dropbox all exploded.
Those are all examples of inherent virality.
Word of mouth is a second type, you guys know what that is, basically just focus on building
a product experience where people are overjoyed and want to on their own volition, proactively
recommend your product.
And lastly, and I think that's a conversation for another podcast product experience.
So I'll skip past that.
Next is artificial virality.
That is the sort of contrived reward systems getting cash or access for referring others.
Everyone's trying this.
Every app I've ever used like, hey, get 25% off, hey, get a month free, hey, get 25 bucks
back.
Here's the problem with that.
I want to spend just a moment on that.
So this artificial virality is a matter of moving the focus off of why people are using
your product.
That is a bad thing.
Every single part of your customer's journey should be doubled down on hey, use the product
more and get more value out of it.
Not here's me paying you because I don't know how to get you to invite other people organically
or inherently.
And so first, so I guess the first point is try to avoid it as your only means of referral
if you have better options like inherent or word of mouth.
If you are going to do it, here's how I would do it.
You're offer a huge bounty, like get the product for free.
If I refer five friends, that's much more tangible than get $5.
I don't need some fraction of minimum wage.
That's not why I signed up for your service.
But if you tell me that I get a free lunch, that gets more people to take action, including
wealthy people.
It's very, there's some sort of weird psychological trick at play there.
Even though it's not even worth an extremely wealthy person's time, let's say there's some
billionaire.
If you tell them, hey, you get this thing for free, just don't be lazy.
All you have to do is invite three people, you shift the emphasis of the reward system
away from here's money to don't be lazy, you can do yourself a huge favor, which is get
this for free if you just invite three friends.
So it's an interesting perspective shift there that circumvent sort of wealth class and gets
more people to take action.
In summary, offer a huge bounty where it just becomes free, whatever that thing is for some
amount of time.
And usually to financially justify that on your end as the product offering something
for free, you'll want to figure out how many people does this person have to refer for
it to be profitable for me to then give it to them for free.
There's much more to say, but I'll stop there.
Actually, I'll do a quick plug because it'll be helpful for people listening.
Go to julian.com, so julian.com, my name.com.
Click on this guide called marketing.
And there's a page called onboarding in this long guide I've written on on marketing.
And the onboarding page goes pretty in depth into virality.
Another question that came up a few times on Twitter is about emerging or futuristic
channels.
So the idea here is that as more and more people know about a channel like, say, Facebook
ads, they use it more, thus driving up the price of Facebook ads and making it a less
effective channel.
Are there any tips that you have for how to find new and emerging channels that are promising?
And do any particular channels come to mind?
So anytime a social network is gaining traction, it is almost a given that they will introduce
some sort of ad platform, because that is the primary way to monetize a social network
is to introduce ads.
So Tinder, sure enough, at some point introduced ads, all of its competitors have or will.
And so when you're looking at those nascent social networks that aren't as big as Facebook
or Snapchat, if you can get on their ad platforms, the moment they release them, subscribe to
their blogs, create a Google Alerts, go to Google, literally Google the phrase Google
Alerts, you'll be able to set up a little email notification anytime there's news about
these companies.
So make an alert for like Snapchat ads, or Tinder ads or whatever product has yet to
actually release an ad platform.
And get on there as early as you can.
I was on Cora super early, and was able to take advantage of the fact that no one else
is advertising on Cora.
That is the first sort of emerging channel I'll share with you guys.
That's worth playing around with.
There's also Snapchat is not an emerging product, nor an emerging ad platform per se, but it
is getting much better as an ad channel.
So is Pinterest.
So they're emerging in the sense that they're now actually performing okay, whereas in the
earlier days, neither performed that well.
When I say perform, I mean, they simply were very hard to make profitable, but they were
hard to get people to actually go ahead and buy from you once they click through to the
ad.
Point being, not only do you want to look for new channels, you want to periodically
assess old ones, because they have hundreds of people spending the majority of their days
doing nothing but trying to improve the performance of their ad platforms.
And so give Pinterest and Snapchat another shot.
There's some of these audio platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and so forth, which are
releasing ad channels, rather ad platforms.
Give those a whirl.
I know Spotify recently introduced ads.
And in terms of other upcoming nascent ones, I'll pause there, I want to rapid fire these.
So what else?
This is a vague one, but the question is, do you have any advice specific to growing
mobile apps?
Mobile apps.
Yeah, here's an incredibly high leverage piece of advice.
Most people running mobile app advertising direct traffic directly to the App Store or
Google Play Store.
That might work best, but usually what works better, meaning if you do what I'm about to
suggest, you will see people purchase at a much higher rate.
So your install rate will go down, but those who actually do install will purchase more,
meaning your actual revenue will go higher, which is what matters, or your profit.
If you do the following, which is put a landing page in between the ad and the App Store.
A landing page just means a website, a page.
So people click on the ad, they go to your website, the website links them to the App
Store.
So that, in all of my client tests, has drastically improved performance.
And the reason for that, one, the App Store, the actual pages in the stores don't do a
very good job holistically and convincingly pitching your product.
The creative is minimal, there's not much room to play with there.
The copies of the text, the description is very minimal, and not fun to read like wall
of text.
And by creative a moment ago, what I mean by creative is the imagery and the videos.
And so if you have a website instead, you can do your full normal pitch.
You can show off videos, you can show off an interactive walkthrough, and you can have
really pretty stylized text and small digestible chunks.
It can be everything they need to know.
So by the time they get into your app, they actually buy from you.
Whereas if they just go to the App Store, it's so boring, and they're so used to skipping
past App Store pages anyway, that they skim them entirely, that by the time they get into
your app, they actually know nothing about your app.
They just know the broad category.
It helps me learn how to play guitar or something, but they don't know any of the specific features
that warrant them actually buying your product.
But when you have that page interstitial, a landing page in between, you give them that
pitch because they are going to skip reading the App Store page.
Another question from Twitter is, people want to know, how do you sell SaaS to consumers?
Assuming you have a SaaS business, you're not targeting other businesses, how do you
get consumers to actually buy your SaaS app?
Same way you would do e-commerce.
It seems like a generic boring question.
It's actually a great question because it gives me the opportunity to tell everyone
that which ad channel you use to identify your target audience doesn't matter very
much.
Here's what I mean by that.
Our best performing ad for one of our big enterprise B2B clients, they sell $50,000
machine learning computers.
Their best performing ad is an Instagram ad of a computer with doggy ears on it, which
is super counterintuitive, right?
Because you're thinking to yourself, okay, B2B, so maybe we got to target business people.
So maybe we got to target them on LinkedIn.
That's where business people hang out and LinkedIn has an ad channel.
Or maybe I got to do sales.
And maybe sales and LinkedIn do work.
But the point is that as long as you're targeting the right person on Instagram, it doesn't
matter that you're using Instagram to target them.
So the platform, meaning Instagram ads, is just a conduit to get to the people who you
know to be the best audience fit for you.
So if you're setting up your Instagram ads to target people who do really want to buy
machine learning computers, because let's say you figure out a way to target using that
criteria using Facebook's dashboard, which is possible, that's all that matters.
Because a person is a person is a person.
I'm a machine learning buyer, and I'm on Instagram, or I'm on LinkedIn, it doesn't matter.
I'm still the same person.
The context of my usage of the individual social network, whether I use it for business
or for personal reasons like Instagram, will not significantly affect my likelihood to
actually respond to a business to business or business to consumer ad.
And that is a huge learning we found early on in the in bell curve and we're working
with B2B clients.
And it holds true across every channel, not just Instagram.
I think that's kind of a good topic to close out on.
Is there anything that you've found in your time at bell curve that we haven't covered
that is counterintuitive that others haven't really talked about haven't discovered that
you think the indie hackers audience would benefit from hearing and knowing while they
go off and try to grow their own companies?
Yeah, great question.
So I'll give you two.
First would be video ads almost always outperform image ads.
If you can track people's eyes when they're scrolling through their feed, do it.
Another one I'll give you is demographics do actually respond differently to different
selling points.
So a man in his 40s might respond significantly better.
And when I say respond, of course, I mean, click through to higher rate and all that
stuff with the ad to one type of message than a woman who's younger, and this might seem
really self evident.
But I've looked at a lot of ad accounts, and I've never once seen a client I really don't
think I've ever seen it before other than after we've come in and change things.
Who's segmented out demographics for the purpose of giving them the ads that are most appropriate
for them, and those ads should then lead to landing pages, which is a fancy growth way
of saying pages on your website that are themselves tailored to that demographic.
So think about the full journey of each person you're targeting, think about them as separate
people to.
All right, well, we have gone on for quite some time.
Thank you so much, Julian, for coming on the show and sharing so much of your wisdom and
advice and learnings with the audience.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about what you're up to
with bell curve, and how they can learn how to grow their businesses before they even
get started?
Sure.
So let's start with what's free and easy to access.
So Julian calm, you can go check out many thousands of words ever in recapping almost
everything here and going much more into depth.
Also at bell curve calm, we work with companies to train their team members how to do growth
marketing as well as we do.
And we also have a job board for helping hire growth marketers.
That's really it.
So bell curve calm and Julian calm.
And I'm super grateful you had me back on quote and thank you.
Thank you, Julian.
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