What's up everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and today I'm talking to Julian Shapiro, a good
friend of mine who I met a couple months after launching IndieHackers.
Julian runs a growth agency called BellCurve.
He started an open source application called Velocity.js to help with animations on the
web and he's done a whole bunch of other stuff, sold a few businesses in the past and
generally become a growth and marketing expert over the years.
How's it going Julian?
Hey Cortland.
So you and I met, I like the story, we met over the internet about a month after I launched
IndieHackers and I was getting all sorts of messages on Twitter and over email and the
really good ones I get tend to stand out to me and yours really stood out because you
basically said, hey Cortland I like IndieHackers and I noticed that you're doing advertising
and I have advertising experience helping clients basically buy ads so let me help you
and show you how you can sell ads and do a really good job and not many messages come
from people who recognize something that I'm trying to do and then provide an actually
helpful solution for that problem.
So that stuck with me and we ended up having like an hour or two phone conversation after
that which says a lot because I'm tremendously introverted and I do not like to talk on the
phone to people.
Well I'm glad it stuck.
I would say it's because if I ever reach out to people, it's because I first make sure
I can provide value, very clear value and so when they click on my name, whatever my
personal website is, whatever my Twitter history is, my history of tweets reinforces the value
I'm offering and I do so without asking for reciprocation.
So in your case if I saw some low hanging fruit for growth optimization or say, okay
you could perhaps you know double your conversion rate on your homepage and if you click on
my profile it's like, okay this guy probably knows what he's talking about then for me
it's a pleasure to hop on the phone and chat with someone who's producing work at such
a high caliber, the design, the content production, the marketing you're doing for indie hackers
were all things that were inspiring to me.
It was such a nice you know, the whole package was so well done that whoever was behind it
must be worth talking to.
So for me it was like a Trojan horse to be useful.
Have a chat with someone doing really cool stuff because I want to do similarly cool
things and really the takeaway is for anyone listening is provide value, don't ask reciprocation
but if you provide value, be able to reinforce it.
It's one thing to say, hey I want to help you with your ex but if they look at your
tweet and they're like this person's a novice at whatever they're talking about then it's
more of a burden for them to entertain your pitch and then try to be nice and handhold
you when things aren't, when the output's not very good.
So that's one way to pitch people you really want to chat with is build up your online
persona to reinforce ways you can be useful to have conversations with cool people.
So you obviously have a lot of information to share and there's a lot we're going to
cover in this episode but to start let's talk about your growth agency.
So you run a growth agency called bell curve where you're essentially hired by businesses
who are your clients to come in and help them achieve traction, basically help them bring
in customers to their product or their service.
Can you tell us a little bit about how that works?
Absolutely.
So a growth agency typically most people would think of it as an agency for running your
ads, so Facebook ads, Instagram ads, AdWords, whatever channels work for your product.
What I did which I thought may be enough of a distinction to A, get clients quickly and
B, get them better results would be if we acted as their in-house CMO.
So we would actually own and be fully responsible for their entire growth funnel and we can
dive into what that funnel looks like.
And what is a CMO?
Oh yeah, certainly.
So chief marketing officer, which is someone who would ostensibly be responsible for the
brand and for growing revenue in some capacity, at least getting people into the pipeline
so someone like a chief revenue officer could grow the revenue more efficiently.
And so what I thought would be interesting is if I pitched bell curve, the growth agency
as your in-house CMO, then maybe the angle is you get four people in one and all four
of us at bell curve have a much higher proficiency in running ads and AB tasks which we can dive
into and designing landing pages and so on than one CMO could have.
And we're really tightly on top of these channels, channels being ad platforms like Facebook
ads and Instagram ads.
So we're at the cutting edge of its performance and so we can do a better job, we can push
revenue growth more efficiently.
So that was the idea and it turns out to actually have resonated quite nicely with a few YC
companies, just coincidentally they happen to make up most of our clients, people who
just raised a couple million funding and need someone who would not just run ads but would
also understand how to set up the corresponding webpage and the user onboarding flow and the
general copy and positioning of the product so that the entire funnel, that entire quote
unquote growth funnel could be sufficient for ads to perform well at all.
Okay, so that's a pretty ambitious job, you're essentially creating a company that will replace
an entire I guess executive at another company and do their job for them except you do it
across multiple clients if I understand correctly.
Exactly.
We have this interesting dynamic where we have a Slack channel set up or a group and
we'll create specific channels for each client and then they'll invite all their employees
in who would like to know about marketing or the marketing happenings with that company
and so they basically throw tasks on our shoulders as if we are their in-house CMO and we do
real time chat with all of them.
That's cool how you guys work with everybody in the company and you bring, you pretty much
just involve anyone who's interested in growth, which really should be everybody.
I mean if you think about the role that growth plays, well let me ask you, what do you think
and how would you describe the role that growth plays?
I don't know, that might sound like a stupid question to a lot of people but I think it's
not obvious to everybody how important growth is and when they should start thinking about
it, especially if they're in the super early stages of their business and they're not quite
sure even what they're going to work on yet.
To answer your question, the role of growth is one of validation.
Would people want your thing?
You could find that out really early before you're even charging, although you honestly
should charge before you attempt to find out if people want it because you really want
to find out would they pay, not would they just find this cool enough to sign up.
There's a validation component.
The other reason to take growth seriously early on is it's going to take you a while
to get good at it or to at least optimize the quote unquote growth funnel for your app,
your product to facilitate it and these things do not come organically, they never do.
For example, if you try just winging the best copy you could put on your homepage, so the
best text calculated for the purpose of conversion, it will likely not be nearly as good as whatever
you would have optimized through an A-B test or through a rigorous test of headline copy
in the form of ads on Facebook just to see what people click the most, which we can dive
into.
You're never going to wind up from the get go with your best performing words or images
or onboarding flow or even product features.
Growth is the source of volume that gives you sufficient sample size to test everything.
That's a perfect answer.
Ultimately, if you don't grow, then you're not going to be able to do a whole bunch of
other things that you want to do in your startup, so it's important not to neglect growth and
it's important not to underestimate it as well.
A lot of people come into this thinking, I'm just going to come up with a great idea and
then people are going to use it automatically and it's going to spread through word of mouth
like wildfire.
That is the vast minority of cases.
Even successful startups, most of them didn't grow magically because everybody talked about
it without any sort of strategizing or deliberate effort in that direction from the founders.
If you are planning on starting something and your entire plan consists of coming up
with an idea, building it and profiting and there's no part of your plan that's okay,
here's who's going to use it, here's why they're going to use it, here's where I'm going to
find them, how I'm going to convince them to share, etc., then you should probably go
back to the drawing board because you're missing a crucial piece.
There are two sobering data points, so to speak, as to why your company will just not
grow organically with a couple like one-off hits, here's what I mean by that.
If you get a couple one-off hits from press, let's say TechCrunch covers you, here's a
data point for that.
Maybe you get between 300 and 25,000 hits depending on what time of day you were posted,
what day of week and how enticing clickbaity the headline was that the journalist used.
All of those things matter.
I'll dictate the 300 visits versus the 25,000 or more.
Let's just say you luck out and get the 25,000.
The amount of people who would actually convert as opposed to immediately bouncing is going
to be pretty small and the amount of those people who wind up taking your product seriously
because they were actually in market for it even smaller and the amount of people who
find what you have compelling enough to pay for it even smaller.
That's just a one-time thing, none of those people who reduced down to that funnel, let's
say you get 25,000 that reduced down to 20.
It might honestly be a number like that, if not less.
All depends on how well-optimized your page was, how enticing it was, but let's say you
get those 20.
Now, how many of them are going to refer their friends and does it even matter if they're
just 20 people?
Let's say it's 200 people.
The people they invite will go through the same funnel, the same drop-off, although a
bit better because referral or word-of-mouth based traffic usually performs better than
everything else.
But the point is that doesn't lead to some follow-on tsunami of traffic.
It dies out immediately.
Press dies out immediately every single time.
You have some huge social network hit sort of thing which you almost certainly do not
have.
Once you're done hustling for your press, then what?
You're back to normal, but now you have an extra 20 customers.
That's not enough to sustain growth, those 20 people.
You have to have a high volume recurring sales or growth strategy in place, and that is not
easy to do.
It does not come organically like I've been saying, and quite frankly requires a bunch
of money or time upfront to figure out how to do it efficiently.
Yeah, I like that you brought up the press example because I'm sure many listeners have
seen Y Combinator's Troff of Sorrow Graph where the company releases and they launch
and it's this big glitzy launch and they get an article on TechCrunch or Hacker News or
Product Hunt and there's a ton of traffic, and then after that it just falls back down
to basically zero and stays there for months until the company actually figures out a growth
strategy.
I think that's the most common story in the world.
If you've done a startup in the past and you've gotten press when you launched, you probably
know exactly what I'm talking about because every startup that I've ever done had that
exact thing happen to it, including ND Hackers, which was at the top of Hacker News for a
whole day and then for the next six weeks had nobody visiting the site, so you can't
rely on a single press event to carry your site to the top and word of mouth would just
kick in after that.
On that note, I'd like to ask, how does somebody get into this type of work?
What kind of things did you do that led to you starting a growth agency?
I think the first thing is having a genuine interest in hacking systems.
I'm very interested in finding the high leverage, low workload ways of getting a lot of exposure
for something.
This started perhaps four years ago and I built an open source animation engine called
Velocity JS.
When I started, I had zero open source credibility.
Nobody had heard of Julian Shapiro.
I thought to myself, there's quite a few hacks, quite a few open opportunities here in the
open source world for me to push out awareness for velocity that won't cost me a dollar and
would certainly be a lot easier than say getting awareness and distribution for any startup
I was trying to launch.
We can go into the reasons why, but when I started realizing all the tricks I could do
to market velocity and when I started seeing the success of that work, I was very motivated
to see if I could then take on the much more difficult task of applying those same hacks
to startups proper because if I could make the transition that it could be a little bit
less about raising awareness for the work that I thought was cool and more about making
money or either making money for others as an agency or making my own startups more successful.
It started with velocity and then when I saw how doable things were, it then transitioned
to startups and getting good at startups, at least to a point where I felt confident
to start an agency, was really a function of freelancing for friends, companies and
saying, hey, can I just take over your Facebook ads, for example?
And then when you do that and you do a really good job, then they refer to someone else
and it just steamrolls from there as your audience is familiar with in terms of freelancing
lifestyle.
Usually most of your clients are referrals.
So I just took my work very seriously and I wanted to get very good at ads.
And then once I got good at ads, I was like, okay, well, I see ads are performing well,
but they're now getting bottlenecked by other components of the startup.
So I want to learn those really well too.
And so it was just this iterative process of doing work on behalf of four others and
using their marketing budgets for me to learn how to do things properly for myself and then
cut to a couple of years later and I've hustled enough to have a pretty broad knowledge.
That's interesting that you mentioned ads eventually hitting a point where they butt
up against other limitations at the startup and I think it's pretty common for people
to have this misconception that growth is this thing that's entirely separate from your
company, right?
So you've got your product and you've got your hiring and you've got everything else
happening in your company.
Then you've got growth, which is this totally separate thing on the side that you can kind
of turn on and off and when in reality, it's actually completely interlinked, right?
Like there are other parts of the product itself that if they don't work correctly or
if they're not optimized, they're going to hinder your growth and you're gonna run up
against problems or ads don't perform as well, not because the ads aren't good, but because
your product isn't right.
Exactly.
I would go so far as to say if while developing your minimum viable product, if you cannot
demonstrate some traction on one of the ad channels like Facebook ads, for example, and
traction meaning you can get a sustained volume, whatever volume seems appreciable for your
product in your market at a price point that if it's not yet profitable per user acquisition,
there's at least a trajectory toward getting there, meaning maybe you're within a two,
three multiple and maybe if you improved X, Y, and Z on your landing page or in your product,
you could bring that down.
So my point here is if you can't make that possible, I would actually rethink either
your business model or the features that comprise your MVP.
Yeah, I totally agree and I think I really want to talk about that.
Someone on Twitter actually earlier today asked me exactly that question.
When do I determine when to turn on the marketing juice and how do I know I'm not spending my
marketing efforts too early or too late, et cetera, and it has a lot to do with that early
traction.
So that's something that's really worth getting into, but let's go back a bit and talk a bit
about VelocityJS because that's kind of your origin story in terms of growth and I know
you've covered this elsewhere.
You did an awesome podcast for the changelog late last year that I listened to and you
described your entire life in detail basically and how you got to where you are now.
But give us the kind of whirlwind overview of VelocityJS and how exactly it was that
you learned how to do growth activities and marketing activities.
Sure.
So no particular order here, I'll talk in my head and let's take press.
So what's interesting about getting press for open source projects versus say your startup
is whereas TechCrunch is inundated with cold pitches and for you to stand out is difficult
and then not even standing out but actually getting fully through the funnel, getting
a really interesting article that's well positioned, well titled, dropped on the right time of
week and time of day so there's enough exposure.
All of those variables add up and they're usually not working in your favor and it may
not even be a positive coverage necessarily whereas I saw a distinction between that hustle
and simply emailing the kind editor of a popular open source news blog for example.
And I knew these people in this camp, in this part of the tech industry were not getting
bombarded with spam and cold pitches.
So I took the time to get to know who they were, figure out what type of content they
wanted and I prewrote an entire pitch or tutorial for how to use velocity.
So I just wrote like an A to Z on how you'd get web animation off the ground if you've
never done it before and then I sent it to them and so I was doing two things here.
One I was going to a channel that I knew wasn't totally, you know, spammed so I could actually
get through and I would take the time to therefore tailor my creative like the messaging I was
sending them to be something they would likely want.
I could justify that time input and number two what I was providing them was something
that was already good and pre-written and ready to go.
So if you're just cold pitching a blog saying hey can I submit a guest blog post for example.
They may not want to say yes because in doing so if they don't know how good of a writer
you are or whether you're reliable they may be they may be tying themselves up into an
awkward situation where they'll ultimately either have to reject your work because it's
not good enough or spend hours copy editing your work and neither one's very you know
desirable.
So if you just come to them off the bat with a cold email saying hey this is exactly in
the format you write it's the same it hears the same style guide that you would publish
your own native content in and it's a fantastic thorough witty clear post your audience would
love this.
Would you like to put this up?
All of them said yes.
So that was the first thing is kind of exploiting the underutilized you know quote unquote press
in that sphere.
These are people who were not getting cold emailed at all.
They were scrounging the web for their own content to post.
So I was giving them new content so that's one way.
And why do you think that was that they weren't ever getting cold emails?
I think they're just well actually that's an interesting question.
I think there's a couple reasons but the most interesting answer is I think open source
developers do not take it upon themselves like the average startup founder would to
get the word out about their project.
Maybe it's an ego thing in the sense of they want to be humble they want to be seen as
self-marketing they want to keep true to their code and the community and so on and focus
on you know issues with the code but that's kind of silly because if you're going to justify
the time input on a project you have to also consider getting distribution so other people
can benefit from your time and your time will have been warranted.
You need to have an impact if you're going to do something otherwise if you're just doing
it for yourself why even bother putting on GitHub at all?
Yeah couldn't agree more.
I mean when I started in Indie Hackers it was kind of a similar situation where okay
it's not an open source website but it was kind of a resource for people to use to help
them.
You know it was meant to help me but also to help other people and it made no sense
for me to just do Indie Hackers without having some sort of business model behind it otherwise
it probably would have shut it down after two or three months and it wouldn't been good
for anybody.
So same thing in open source you know if you're doing an open source project you might as
well try to charge money for it or at the very least you know learn how to market it
and grow it because if you just write the code you don't worry about those ancillary
things and you know who knows how many open source projects have been completely abandoned
or didn't get the adoption that they needed because they didn't actually hustle and try
to figure out how to promote what they built.
Basically if you build something incredible it would be selfish to not put in the hours
to share it with others so their lives get better.
And furthermore once you share it with them they can provide feedback it's more people
to provide feedback and iterate on it so it gets even better and your life gets better
and so does theirs.
There's just no reason not to put in the marketing work and if developers are uncomfortable with
the marketing work that's a separate issue as opposed to being unwilling and if you're
uncomfortable you know there's great content out there and you can Google open source marketing
with Velocity.js and see my post about this on Mozilla.org and there's a bunch of other
material out there just educate yourself and you know break down those barriers of oh it's
marketing it's spammy it's SEO it's salesy it really doesn't have to be any of those
things you can just write great organic content for blogs that you would love to read.
Okay so your first big insight with Velocity.js is that hey this is an open source tool there's
not going to be that much competition in terms of pitching the press compared to you know
other startup resources and other startup press.
Your second insight was if you're going to pitch these people you're going to try to
make their job as easy as possible by actually writing quality posts for them rather than
just saying hey take a shot on me.
Was there anything else that you learned while marketing in Velocity.js?
So another thing I did is I found out where my power users hung out.
So you'll very often hear about influencer marketing you know getting Twitter influencers
or Instagram influencers for the purpose of startup marketing and that doesn't usually
work out very well for a few reasons we can get into.
But in the case of open source it actually made a lot of sense for me to attempt pursuing
that and this was certainly not something I had seen other people doing prior.
It's a little bit counter intuitive but it makes a lot of sense because in open source
there's a there are a lot of name figures that other coders seriously look up to.
You know if DHH of Ruby on Rails were to recommend Velocity although it's a bit out of out of
scope there that's something a lot of people would pay attention to and I knew the his
followers would be sufficiently engaged and it would be a sufficiently relevant audience
that would probably move the needle.
So I went on codepen.io and I found the people who had the the most popular quote unquote
pens which are these little like embeddable animations or you know code tests that you
can share with others and you can modify with others and fork and so on.
And so I found the people who had the most successful pens in terms of you know distribution
had the most hearts and so on.
And I said to them here's 50 bucks or here's 100 bucks use velocity to remake some of these
things or to create entirely new experiences in codepen that will blow people away like
gorgeous complicated animation sequences that no one's ever seen before that that are now
possible thanks to velocity.
And so they did this and enough of them said yes and for them they didn't care about the
money you just oh cool this velocity thing seems interesting I couldn't do a portion
of these things before and and I was going to do more animation work anyways let me just
do it.
So they were super happy to do it but I treated those codepens like ads so at no point that
I just say oh this would be cool and throw things out there and hope they would stick
and somehow come back to me I treated every outlet like a genuine growth channel.
So even when I was writing content and handing it to blogs I made sure that content incentivized
you pretty well to come back to the github repo and check out velocity for yourself.
And by the way just going back to that point the the blogs I reached out to which I'm sure
would still be open to you guys today if you want to repeat some of these steps smashing
magazine has covered velocity or at least I've covered myself on there a couple times
creative block David Walsh dot name and CSS tricks and Mozilla's own tech blog and a few
others.
So back to this point codepen when the animation was complete I then made sure at the end it
really strongly incentivized you had what we call a CTA call to action to click a big
button that would bring you to the velocity repo and also have some corresponding copy
which is growth speak or marketing speak for just text that's calculated for a specific
purpose in this case conversion getting someone to click the the CTA that would further entice
you it wasn't just a cool one-off thing right I considered the entirety of it that's another
thing I did was influencer outreach and then I would share those codepens with well-known
people on Twitter who had big audiences in the open source space and okay check this
out and usually they would retweet it.
So two things here one just like the outlets were not inundated with with with pitches
and were therefore willing to to cover me with zero friction similarly the influencers
in the open source space were not being spammed by people trying to get them to hawk their
their apparel or something and so there was no friction and I think the larger lesson
here is a lot of people like to think growth hacking is a series of like super resourceful
tricks it actually usually isn't it's usually just being very methodical about running ads
and a be testing your home page which we can get into but this is an instance where because
there was so much low-hanging fruit I was able to be spectacularly resourceful and exploitative
of this this not not the community but the channels in that community to to push velocity
really hard because nobody else was doing it no one else was taking like a startups
growth approach to an open source project which would make sense because open source
projects typically are not monetized so the incentive to do all this is usually not there
but for me I wanted the opportunity to learn more about growth it's absolutely fascinating
to me how much friction there is between good ideas spreading from one community or industry
to another so in this situation there's all sorts of very common advice for how to market
and distribute your products or service on the internet that you find floating around
you know startup circles or bootstrapper circles things that we're all very familiar with it
we talk about a lot if you're interested in sort of thing but you take kind of one small
step like not even a very big step just a small step in a direction to an adjacent community
in this case the open source community and suddenly all this information on how to market
and promote your products is completely lost and people aren't doing any of it you know
and you go sort of even further out to other industries that would really be able to benefit
from this information and they're not doing anything close to what you see people doing
and the startup community so a couple examples on Twitter someone was talking a few months
ago about how all the information regarding self-publishing books online is just absolutely
terrible and that when he wrote his ebook he completely ignored all of that and did
things that you know we might be more familiar with promoting our products and services with
he like set up a landing page set up a MailChimp list to connect emails did a drip email
campaign etc etc and his ebook was far more successful than most self-published books
that just throw them up on Amazon or another example I was talking to this guy Rob Carraway
who made a few hundred thousand dollars from his mobile apps and a few years and the thing
that was most surprising to him was just how far behind the advice for marketing a mobile
app was compared to the playbook for marketing a web application so we ended up marketing
all of his mobile applications the same way that he would do if he had just built something
on the web and ended up obviously making a lot of money doing it that way so I think
in any industry no matter what you're doing if you're building something that could benefit
from being promoted online in some way rather than just blindly copying the status quo and
the best practices for your industry look at what's going on and the startup community
look at the best advice there for how to market your product and get the word out about it
and follow that the other thing that's really important about how you grew velocity JS was
that it's very clear that you understood who your target users would be so velocity is
an animation library for programmers it's going to be used by other programmers and
being a programmer yourself you knew where other programmers hung out online you knew
where they got their news and their recommendations from you knew what sources they trusted you
were aware of the particular influencers who would be helpful for spreading velocity JS
and the websites like codepin that would be helpful for demonstrating what velocity JS
could do and that gave you a huge leg up in terms of growing your library and attracting
followers to it and I think people drastically underestimate how important it is to actually
understand who your target customer is you would not have been able to do any of this
unless you understood developers in the open source developing community you would probably
just spun your wheels with Google ads or posting on random websites and not had any of the
success that you had so to people who are listening or maybe kind of at a bump in the
road where you're not sure how to grow your product ask yourself how well you really understand
your customers do you really know who it is that's using what you're building do you know
where they hang out online do you know where they get their product recommendations from
and if you don't that's research that you need to do so fast forward a little bit you're
dumb velocity JS today you're working on bell curve and you're also writing up a ton of
content on Julian calm and one of the things that we've talked about a little bit is your
new guide to growth where as far as I understand it you're basically just talking about all
the different lessons that you've learned as a growth consultant and growing your own
apps and services and putting them into this kind of mega guide where you just cover everything
that you think people need to know about growth can you talk a little bit about what's in
that guide and how you've structured it sure so that's the one that I'm working on right
now and it breaks down in the same way the quote unquote growth funnel would break down
so now is a good time to explain what that means so essentially for no matter what the
company or what the project is there's some loose funnel that connects all the steps between
when you acquire a customer and then you get them to pay you so usually it looks something
like this you have acquisition meaning you acquire a customer you then have conversion
meaning you've at this point you've acquired them to say your webpage but you haven't converted
them yet into a user someone on your platform so that's conversion the next step is once
they've converted you want them to be engaged in some capacity either they're regularly
using your product let's say it's a social messaging app so they're they're regularly
messaging their friends or if it's a b2b sass product maybe they're creating projects on
it and sharing it with their team members so that's engagement they can't they won't
wind up paying you until their first well not necessarily but very often they won't
wind up paying you until their first to some extent engaged at least for sass sass products
and then once they're engaged you then try your best to optimize revenue extraction right
so you want to offer them enough value in a compelling way that they're willing to not
only give you their credit card but pay more over time as they can get more value to the
product and then usually the last step of the funnel is described as referrals so you've
already gotten a customer who loves using your product and sees value from it and now
for you to get even more value out of them beyond monetary you would ask them to then
re-kick off that whole funnel by bringing it all the way back to the acquisition event
and having them refer other people to become new users so that's the growth funnel and
the guy that I'm writing currently roughly follows that structure so how would you acquire
users meaning which ad channels would you use how would you you know rock facebook ads
and twitter ads and instagram ads at a professional agency level like I've been running for bell
curves clients so what's everything you need to know to run ads properly and there's there's
not been a lot written about this online at least not comprehensively to the point where
you could do it as well at least hopefully as well as I could so that's one portion of
the guide and then it'll talk about conversion so how do you onboard users in you know a
methodological way mythological jeez I'll start that one over in a way mythological
it is a great word I've never heard that mythological method I'll copyright that I love that I'm
going to trademark that before you before you keep all this in I'm not even going to restart
I'm gonna make it impossible for you to restart so we're keeping all this in now so speaking
of mythological so you want a methodological way of getting people from the point of awareness
of your product on your web page to the point where they actually become a user they sign
up and they get engaged and so that that consists of the onboarding process or the first time
user experience as it's sometimes called and that means making the onboarding process really
easy and self-evident and exciting them through the sign up form to actually see the end goal
so an interesting example is like on Ashley Madison which is this you know quote unquote
dating sites kind of this obnoxious ploy to get people to cheat on each other but then
you just wind up chatting with bots so there's a site called Ashley Madison and the way they've
designed their onboarding experience or their FTU experience is as you're filling out a
form behind the form slightly blurred out is a big collage of beautiful women and so
they're enticing you with the end goal of filling out the forms that you don't bounce
halfway through the form you know so that's one tactic as part of the onboarding experience
of which there are many to get people to convert so once you have them converted you then you
got to get them engaged the guides primary focus is on growth the acquisition portion
and conversion portion of growth so I don't talk a lot about developing a you know really
awesome sticky product but I do skip over to the referral the final referral step where
I have a bunch of tactics using content marketing and user-generated content and we also talk
about the metrics and the inner workings of reality and where is it you know like BS unicorn
speak and where is it the real thing you could leverage for the average product so it's that
full totality of how do you grow a startup efficiently that I'm currently writing about
so you've got your growth guide and you cover the growth funnel from beginning to end from
user acquisition to conversion to engagement on through referrals where customers are actually
referring other customers to use your app and what's interesting about this is kind
of what I was talking about earlier in our conversation which is that none of this is
just disconnected from your actual product it's in fact amplified by or limited by the
quality of the product itself and so you really should be starting to think about growth from
the very earliest phases of your company when you're deciding what idea to work on and evaluating
one idea versus another part of that evaluation process should be okay I have this idea for
product but do I know how I'm going to get this in the hands of customers first of all
do I know who my customers are do I know where they hang out online what distribution channels
might be effective etc and of course you're not gonna figure all this out immediately
in the very beginning but you should at least be thinking about it because a good idea without
a plan for growth is not actually a good idea beyond that I think what a lot of listeners
and the states that a lot of listeners are at right now is maybe they have an idea or
you know maybe they're trying to test out ideas and they're trying to put up a landing
page and I see this a lot on the indie hackers forum probably the number one most popular
type of post on the forum is somebody showing off their landing page and they end up getting
kind of the same advice over and over and over again which is your marketing copy is
not compelling the button to sign up is not really visible or easy to click or easy to
find etc etc and I know you've got an entire landing page section of your guide so how
do you as a growth consultant think about landing pages what's interesting about landing
pages is there shouldn't actually be much variability among them there there's a pretty
clear rubric for how to develop a landing page that reliably converts given what your
product is if you have a very unappealing product a landing page of any sort probably
won't you know put too much lipstick on that pig but if you have something decent a landing
page should not be complicated even a great one so there really isn't much an excuse to
do these poorly so if I were to just recap some of the points in my guide first of all
there's a very clear hierarchy or a clear structure in terms of the nav bar than the
hero section and then the social proof section where you post logos if you have them of your
biggest customers or of the press that's covered you followed by the features and objection
section which every landing page should have for the most part which addresses the key
benefits you provide and then you also proactively address the objections you know people likely
instinctively have when you pitch those benefits so you're kind of doing like you know call
and response and that gets paired with compelling imagery from your product and then you'll
you can tie off the page with a couple CTA so call to action sections which the purpose
of those is to say hey let's take a pause real quick if I pitched you sufficiently up
to this point here's what you got to do next to go ahead and convert so let's say you want
to capture their email or get them to buy your e-commerce product whatever it is and
then you can also tie in you know a little bit of information about your team and so
on so there's a variability in the last third but for the most part there shouldn't be much
variability and so in the guide I break down that structure and what each of those sections
should contain and how they should be written to be maximally compelling and the key the
key takeaway is usually are be incredibly specific so let me give you an example of
a bad piece of copy that would be at the very top of the page let's say making you're making
work faster and more seamless so that's not good copy for the purpose of capturing someone's
attention at the top of the page and having them continue reading because you've told
them nothing and every other page on the web uses those same adjectives faster revolutionary
whatever so my motto is whatever copies in the head of the header of your page should
be so descriptive that if the viewer stopped looking at your page if they bounce after
reading the header they could describe to a friend exactly what it is you do and that
almost always demonstrates a better conversion better time on site all the good metrics you're
looking for then being vague so there's really no room for like traditional brand marketing
when it comes to performance-based growth marketing a specific header copy would be
something like design websites visually without knowing how to code right so that's a webflow
dot com that may not be great copy but that's an example of specificity that's important
and then you would pair that specificity with specificity everywhere else so your sub header
copy I think that's the kicker that gets them to keep reading and then the titles of each
section and even down to the paragraphs in your features and objections and even if you
have a team profile section don't be vague don't you know in the team section for example
don't don't you know project your mission as a company that's usually pretty boring
and people think it's fluff instead describe what it is you're currently kicking ass out
like we are doing acts extremely well because of why period join this movement with us as
opposed to we look to change the world by doing it doesn't matter what are you doing
now how is it material to me and how does that demonstrate your credibility as being
great at what it is you do so you know name drop the credit the credentials of your team
or pass acquisitions or whatever it may be so specificity and data converts better and
a lot of us don't think that way a lot of us think oh well we have to mimic what we've
seen in television commercials where they're broad and very lifestyle based and Coke says
enjoy life or whatever that stuff is not measurably better for growth yeah I like what you said
about landing pages not really being the place for innovation I see a lot of people share
their landing pages on the index form and they say you know I'm I put up this website
and I'm selling my product and people come and they just bounce they don't sign up they
don't browse around the site and I look at their page and it's this totally new looking
thing that I've never seen a website like it before in my life it's you know got like
one text box that says sign up and then it's got no text overhead that explains what it
is they're doing just totally just random stuff that I've never seen before and I always
think like there's no reason to deviate from what's worked well in the past for a landing
page we know what converts well for landing pages and so I think there's a lot of wisdom
there to say that it's not a place to innovate but on the other side of that coin is the
fact that you can't just copy what other people are doing blindly without understanding why
some landing pages work and some landing pages don't because you'll end up doing exactly
what you were saying not to do and that's ending up with one of these like overly broad
marketing pages it's basically brand marketing and I think a lot of people don't understand
what brand marketing is but it's it's like what you were saying it's it's coca-cola it's
McDonald's saying all these very vague fluffy feel-good things because guess what they're
already billion dollar companies that everybody knows right they're not working to actually
you know convince you to buy what they're selling because you already know what is what
they're selling right versus if you have a small unheard of startup people have no idea
what you are who you are what you're selling why they should use it etc so you're wasting
an opportunity if you don't go into the specifics spot on and I can give you some counter examples
of where you can be unique or unique somewhere but you can be innovative you can try to push
boundaries and like we like we agree landing pages are not really the place for that maybe
creatively like in terms of imagery and multimedia and your video if you have one you know do
something cool there if you'd like stand out but in terms of where else in the growth funnel
does it make sense to actually try to push boundaries I think well first of all uniqueness
of your app you should have a really cool product that itself through its features and
the way in the UX that should stand out it should still be self-evident and intuitive
but it should stand out another thing is the ads you run so to grab people's attention
when there are native ads everywhere on the web now in every single mobile app you do
actually have to stand out and you have to work to stand out so while your ad should
be descriptive because again like Cortland said you're not coke people don't know who
you are so if you act vague they will continue to not know who you are after they scroll
past your ad and you will have accomplished nothing you have to stand out because they
don't they don't they have nothing to hold on to and I think a lot of it is like a curse
of knowledge to like people make a website and you know everything about your website
and you overestimate how much visitors are going to know they're just like oh I've clearly
this is what my website does and they're just super vague exactly exactly that's why getting
feedback which is a key is the recurring theme of this guy to survey your users or survey
prospective customers because you probably don't understand what they find most interesting
what their biggest objections are and what you haven't told them yet that you think you
clearly messaged on your site or in your ads that you failed to so that's incredibly important
in terms of a few other ways where you can really push the needle I think content marketing
is a good one too you don't have to write a blog post that's like every other blog post
doesn't have to be structured like it it could be totally crazy and random you can you know
your personality and videos injected and multimedia interactive widgets whatever so there are
a lot of areas where you should kick ass and be unique in that sense but landing pages
not one of them totally agreed and so we've kind of been going through you know the funnel
from the beginning to the end so you know when you're thinking about coming up with
a product idea you should think about your marketing channels from the beginning when
you're putting up a landing page you should be very clear about what it is that you do
don't assume that people understand what you do and make sure to you know follow some sort
of structure that's proven and that's not overly unique just for the sake of being unique
and fails to communicate what it is that you do what is the next step it's conversion right
absolutely although I let me go back from because I realized I should clarify why you
can't be crazy on a landing page it's because just like with an ad and just like this theme
of specificity there are certain things you have to get across and if you fail to you
won't get them either sufficiently interest like you won't have piqued their interest
enough or you won't have addressed enough objections for them to sign up on yet another
landing page you know your landing page is not unique it's one of a dozen they may see
that week if not dozens upon dozens so you can't afford to miss the key beats that are
part of like the key ingredients that are part of the conversion recipe there's a tried
and true formula there's a rubric and so that's what I break down anyhow so after that you
have conversion so that's the onboarding experience but there's actually something there's actually
something in between those two which is how do you then after you have your landing page
how do you optimize it how do you know it's the best it can be to actually get people
to the next conversion step and this brings us to the concept of a B testing so a B testing
being you have your original version of whatever it is you're testing and add an image a blog
post even like the introductory paragraph to a blog post or for our purposes right now
a landing page so all the copy on it its structure its images everything and then to a B that
means you create a variation of it so you clone it and you tweak some components of
it to try to see if you were then to send traffic simultaneously to both pages meaning
you have some a B testing tool on your website that randomly selects users for either a or
B so they don't know that they're being bucketed but you are your a B testing tool collects
data to determine who based on which variation they saw winds up performing more of the metric
you're looking for so conversion meaning signing up on your going through your signup form
or purchasing an e-commerce product whatever that is and so there's an entire strategy
to how do you select what you should test what you should vary how long should you let
that test run for a significant sample size so that your your results are meaningful and
then what should you do once you have an answer and very often you'll have an answer and you
won't know why it's better it'll be completely opaque to you like let's say you changed you
swap the order of sections three and five on your landing page and now your page performs
twenty percent better if I made that change I may not necessarily even you know after
having done this for a while for various companies and having seen like you know having seen
a lot of industries and how people react within them I still to this day don't have a great
reflex or intuition for why that a B test was necessarily better and so it's an odd
form of pattern matching because human psychology is nowhere near as easy as marketers would
like you to think it is in terms of knowing how to exploit it systematically so to this
day my a B test not just on landing pages but ads continually surprise me and the only
thing that I get better at over time is my base level content so the first iteration
of my landing page today that I make for a client or the first set of ads that I run
for them are way better than the first iteration in terms of performance then what I would
have done for them two years ago but that doesn't mean that they're nearly as optimized
as they should or could be so I'm still never near optimization on my first go around never
not even close I listened to something recently and I'm not sure exactly who it was but I
remember they were talking about having a room full of basically professional copywriters
and how they would all sit in a room and brainstorm things that come up with stuff and the things
that they would come up with be would be absolutely garbage these professional copywriters you
do this for literally for a living they would just be terrible so there's a lot of truth
to the idea that you know you're probably not on your first iteration going to come
up with the optimal thing or your second or your third iteration exactly you know when
you have the scale of the Facebook audience there is Facebook ad platform to let millions
of people or more realistically let's say a couple tens of thousands of people give
you some idea of which of your variations performs best you have no excuse to just wing
it you can never write over any copy on your landing page and let it stay that way forever
you have to run tests whether it's on your own audience or this is a trick I love I'll
use ads for the sole purpose of just testing two pieces of copy that I will then take the
winner and put on put it on my landing page and the reason why that's a great trick is
because it would be very expensive to get enough visitors to my landing page let's say
I had to pay for all of them through Facebook ad clicks and let's say that totals to hundreds
or thousands of dollars to get a big sample size although usually doesn't have to cost
that much but let's just say for sake of example if I instead ran ads and just add impressions
cost nothing you can pay as low as like three dollars and fifty cents on Facebook even lower
for per thousand ad impressions and so if you just run ads for a few thousand impressions
you can determine which was click most and then we know which copy now is most enticing
and yeah it's kind of excise from the context of your landing page but this sort of methodology
is what I'm starting to write about in the growth guide and it applies to every part
of the entire growth funnel that's a really good trick man I've admittedly I've barely
changed the landing page copy on any hackers since I launched the site and I just haven't
had the you know the time really to set up any sort of A B testing framework or the interest
but using Facebook ads to just run two different lines by thousands of people and saying which
one performs better is a really great trick and I'm gonna start using that I asked some
people on Twitter before this interview kind of what they would ask if they could talk
to a growth expert or a marketing expert and these are all people who are presumably have
run businesses or in the situation where they're running a business right now and I got a lot
of interesting responses so what I want to do is kind of ask you some of these questions
and see what you think the first question was my favorite the question was okay what
kind of questions should I be asking so I'm a founder starting a business and maybe I
don't know anything about growth and marketing where do I even start which we can go pre
growth thinking and go to the very core level of start with something you're passionate
about that you can see your foresee yourself working on for a long time but let's skip
that because I feel like a lot of the existing indie hackers content speaks to that so the
earliest that growth should come into play is okay I have an idea that I'm passionate
about and I know how to make it good I know what that feature set would look like I know
how to execute it but is there an audience that's the that's the first major question
is there an audience if you can determine there's an audience somewhere even tangential
to your current spec for an MVP you can then survey them or work with them or run a B tests
on them to determine where you should then focus in terms of those features initially
proposed features you can narrow in really early on that's the first step and what if
you already have a company and you've already picked something you're passionate about you've
already built a product your growth is negligible you're kind of in this trough of sour point
where you maybe you've got some press early on but nothing's going on what kind of questions
do you ask them are if you're as a growth market if you come into a company you know
and they're in that situation what kind of questions you start asking at that point growth
can do one of two things constructively for you if you execute very well and your product
meaning your product itself and your growth plan so your acquisition so the ads and the
landing pages to get users from Facebook and AdWords and so on if you crush it now's the
time for you to actually see positive return on investment ad spend so maybe you just execute
a great ad strategy but if you are middling if you're like some sort of zombie mode where
nothing's really moving the needle you can get traffic that's pretty well targeted to
your web page but people don't convert or if they do they don't wind up converting into
a paying user or they turn really quickly they disappear after a few months because
you weren't that useful to them in any case growth can still play a pretty productive
role which is it can verify your hunches it can get you sufficient sample sizes to determine
whether an AB variation you run say your landing page let me give you hypothetical here before
I continue that thought let's say I take my current landing page and I clone it and I
completely swap out swap out all the value propositions so whereas before I was I was
talking about how it will make spread sheeting way easier for you and now I'm talking about
how it'll make prospecting for you know leads for your sales tool way easier for you again
and the reason I'm thinking that way is maybe that's something I had in the back of my mind
as a future feature or as a minor pivot that we could take pretty easily in either case
I can use the traffic to this quote unquote dummy page to determine whether this alternative
way of presenting my company and this alternative feature set would be more viable for conversion
and the way I would measure that because I don't yet have a product to back that up is
I would have a CTA form somewhere on that page that would say coming in coming next
week for example enter your email address or more realistically not to deceive people
you can say coming in the future enter your email and if you do so we'll give you the
first three months free all you gotta do is enter your email address there won't be any
spam I promise so if you get a lot of people signing up for that you can you could then
compare that to your existing home page or more if you want to do a more controlled environment
take that clone page that we just discussed make another version of it that has all the
same value props that you currently have on your existing real home page but remove sign
ups entirely and just do the same ending CTA pitch where you enter your email address to
get three months off free for example so now you're comparing apples to apples and now
you can truly see which set of value props would be better and when you know then you
can determine the future of your product because if you're going to stay in zombie mode with
growth being capable of moving the needle for you you have to change something and this
is the best way to do it because getting that initial burst of traffic to determine you
know which is the winning variation in this a B test will cost you nothing there's another
one what analytics and tracking should I set up at the beginning of my company if any hmm
well if your mobile app or your sass product you want to do event-based analytics so something
like mix panel or heap analytics there's also amplitude I'm not gonna get too deep into
why that's a whole different conversation but relative to Google Analytics for example
if you have a very rich user journey within an app where they create an account interact
with various dashboard widgets and so on measuring that event to event journey is much more complicated
Google Analytics you want something built for that and that's what mix panel and heap
do and regardless of whether you're using that you always as like a base layer want
Google Analytics installed a few reasons one it's reliable it works it's free it'll track
you know I mean your listeners at minimum know what Google Analytics is I won't go into
pitching that but I will say something awesome or I will announce something kind of awesome
which is Google just released something called Google Optimize which is everything we've
been discussing rolled into Google Analytics so it's Google Analytics own a B testing tool
for free amazing interface that competes with Optimizely and VWO which were you know the
two large a B testing tools that people go to that are also can be quite expensive so
that's pretty darn cool so you have GA you have the event-based tools beyond that the
only other critical component to track growth is to have the conversion pixels which I'll
explain in a moment that are offered to you by the ad channels so Facebook LinkedIn Twitter
Pinterest AdWords all of them have something called a conversion pixel it's a little JavaScript
snippet that you bet on your web page just like you would embed Google Analytics itself
and it'll do a couple things but for but on a base layer it will connect your website
so to speak to the ad channel so on that ad channel for example now if you have that conversion
pixel installed you can do something called retarget which is where you show ads to people
who've been to your website you know you can follow them around Facebook and Twitter and
LinkedIn with ads about your site even though they're now off the website and we go into
why those are so valuable but so one feature is retargeting another one is when you when
you do eventually set up ads on those on those platforms you'll be able to track conversions
within those platforms dashboards so that you know how well your ads are doing beyond
just how many who which ads got the most clicks that's only so helpful what you really care
about what you're paying money for to run ads is to get conversions you want those sign-ups
in those credit card authorizations and so on and so when you install the JavaScript
snippet you can track that back to which ad specifically resulted in that conversion and
the reason why I'm mentioning this as part of the answer here this seems like I'm jumping
the gun going right into ads the reason why this is so important is the sooner that you
install conversion pixels on your website even if it's day one of your launch the more
traffic you'll be logging to later retarget so if you have that pixel installed on day
one you get a big press hit and you get 500 to 10,000 people whatever it is all of those
people so long as the conversion pixels installed will be logged forever and then later actionable
for like up to 180 days up to a year by these platforms so even if you're not yet going
to do ads you'll have the perfect audience to run ads against and this isn't the reason
I say perfect audience the reason why retargeting is so valuable is because anytime you run
what's called a prospecting campaign so you're running ads on Facebook to people who've never
heard of you never been to your website versus the retargeting campaign people have been
to your site at least once retargeting always performs better the CPA the cost per customer
acquisition is way lower maybe a tenth of the cost so if you start with that audience
you can do ads better and quicker and cheaper yeah that's great advice I think I've never
done any retargeting myself but I've seen it as a user just going around the web will
go to a website and then I'll see ads for that website everywhere for the next few months
and it works sometimes you know it's like I wanted to buy that shirt and I didn't buy
it today but it's almost like the ad itself was a little to-do on my to-do list it follows
me around everywhere I go then I eventually I'm okay now I'm ready to buy that thing and
then I buy it yes someone once told me a joke they said retargeting is kind of like that
crazy aunt who once heard you mention how much you love ninjas as a 12 year old and
now every single year for the rest of your life she sends you ninja gifts like ninja
branded scars and stuff you know that's what retargeting is okay so another question from
Twitter is how do you know what's the signal if your product is ready for mass marketing
so I'm assuming this person is someone who's perhaps maybe in the beta phase and they're
not sure okay should I start pitching this product hard or you know should I should I
wait until later right right that's really more of a question about product development
but I can speak a bit to it so a product when is a product ready for mass marketing it comes
down to do users stick around really and better yet not just have you reduce churn but also
have you increase the referral rate so that every user who does come through your funnel
winds up bringing others at least to some fraction that would be a huge bonus if that's
not feasible for your product for whatever reason at least make sure your revenue is
fairly optimized so that you're not leaving a ton of low-hanging you know financial fruit
on the floor when a user comes through your funnel if there are ways to incentivize them
to upgrade make it happen and so upgrade so in terms of paying more in terms of referring
more in terms of staying around longer you know those are the three things that you want
those are three types of categories of metrics you're looking to optimize in general and
if you have those already in place before you begin marketing every dollar you thereafter
put into marketing will go a lot further it'll be for customers who stick around longer and
want to be more profitable and it's specifically important because there's this concept of
ltv right lifetime value which is just a simple formula of how many months do users on average
stick around for and how much on average are they paying you per month so if they stick
around for six months an average of 10 bucks a month at 60 bucks and that that's your ltv
and so how much you can afford to spend to acquire a user this term cpa i've been using
a few times your cpa on these ad channels is dictated it's capped by the ltv and the
rule of thumb is you want to pay a third or less of your ltv per customer acquisition
the essence here is unless you do have that portion of your product built well built out
well and you know how much a user is worth you can't really go to marketing having the
confidence that you're not overpaying for users yet and that's a really good reason
why you know for people who might be considering building a product where you don't charge
up front you should probably not do that because if you're not changing any money in front
you have no idea whether or not people are actually deriving value from your product
whether or not you could profitably acquire users using advertising or other efforts so
charge up front and another thing you said that i really like is you talked about churn
and this is something that i for a very long period of my entrepreneurship career ignored
at my own peril but every single time somebody who's a user of your app stops paying you
or stops using your app then you need to find somebody else just to replace them and so
ultimately i think a lot of people have these apps that you know have super high churn rates
and they don't really understand that a churn rate is not just a number on a page it's something
that makes growth extremely inefficient right if your churn rate is 50% and half of your
users are leaving your app then you have to double the amount of users that you're bringing
in just to you know keep up with what you would otherwise so before you start pouring
a ton of users into your app before you start paying for a ton of ads before you start pitching
all the press agencies make sure that people actually derive value from your app long enough
to actually stay and keep using it so we've covered a lot of ground we've talked about
a lot of different topics related to growth and one of the things that i'd really like
to get into is talk a little bit more in depth about the clients that you've worked with
at bell curve because i'm sure there's a ton of stuff that you've done that's been educational
not only for you but that you know all of us would find extremely educational are there
any stories that come to mind of clients that you've worked with and projects that you've
worked on where you learned a lot about growth are you encountered some surprising insights
that we might find helpful to help us grow our companies sure i think the most interesting
stories are the ones that didn't play out like i thought they would the the growth strategies
that failed and then what we had to do to supplement them so i'll just start with let's
say let's say service so there's a client of bell curves called service and what they
do is they allow you to enter any sort of support inquiry like i want better customer
support for this bet i just bought or i just went to a restaurant and they spilled food
on my shirt and they're not willing to repay me so you you give service your customer complaints
and then they go and handle them for you and if they can get remuneration from the business
they'll then take a cut of that before they give it to you kind of an odd business model
to be honest i didn't think it was going to work at all and it didn't and so when when
they signed us on we looked at what were the narrow set of cases that did in fact work
which were the ones that led to the highest lifetime user value and it turned out that
when service responded to airline uh delays or cancellation support inquiries very often
the airlines would in fact give up to three four five hundred dollars depending on your
elite flying status back to you as as a way of saying hey please don't leave us like we're
sorry we're sorry we canceled or delayed your fight and so each time service would take
like 30 percent out of that and we're like well if that's such a such a well-defined
financial bounty why don't we just focus on that kick out everyone else all these other
use cases and now let's build a landing page around that particular use case let's completely
pay with this business to airline focus only so we did and we built up a landing page you
can actually go look at it so i'll give you guys something to kind of sink your teeth
into as to how we delivered goods for them for this particular pivot so if you go to
start dot get service dot com you'll see the mobile landing page that we designed for them
and we wrote for them which is really the key word what would be most enticing to this
audience so knowing full well that this is a mobile app in the app store we thought why
don't we just start spinning up facebook ads and instagram ads and pinterest ads and twitter
ads and adwords for sending people directly to the app store and what we discovered was
when we sent them right to the app store this this a value prop of we'll get you money if
your flight was delayed or canceled sounded too good to be true because no one knows about
this this is actually a real thing airlines will pay you at least the united states and
most of western europe if they delay or cancel you and people just wouldn't believe it because
they hadn't heard of it so when we send them to the app store the app store failed to sufficiently
address the sort of bs alarm that went off and so you're seeing terrible conversion people
may download the app but those who did would not then enter their credit card to allow
for us to move forward with the claim processing and to give them compensation for us to get
a cut so it was performing terribly despite us knowing that that user segment within the
app loved that feature so what we thought was why don't we spin up a landing page which
is what i reference a moment ago start dot get service dot com which may not may not
look good on desktop it's really more for mobile and the idea here is what if we took
a whole page to explain the value prop break it down such a way that would be compelling
to each type of audience segment and address all their concerns and here's where like alarms
went off in my head typically if i'm trying to make a growth funnel efficient so the funnel
being you know where you acquire someone and finally gets to convert and everything in
between and thereafter to referrals and optimizing revenue and so on you don't want to add new
steps into that funnel at all you don't want to add a page between your ad in the app store
that's another place for users to drop off and stop and get get annoyed get bored whatever
and just bounce but in our case we had to take that risk to add enough context and i
think people can start seeing how this will apply to their product you don't you'll just
want to throw someone onto um your sign up form right so i'll get back to the real world
implications of this or the you know extra service implications of this in a moment so
we write this up and what we realize on the home on this on this landing page that we're
sending all the ad traffic to you all of a sudden is not only has to be compelling but
it also has to convince you that we're legit and that this claim we're making this big
claim is something we could actually satisfy from a company you've never heard of before
we're going to get you hundreds of dollars sounds like a scam so number one we explain
technically how is it possible that we do this for you and you can go look at the steps
on the web page and again this applies to anyone's home page how is it possible that
you pull this off better than your competition explain it to people specifically that's the
first thing second thing is what is the social proof you're providing for people to see that
other people have validated your claims so that's why when i tell people to design a
landing page to put some some of some form of social proof like a logo wall or the press
that's covered them or their biggest um or their customer count or how many reviews they
have in the app store or their local business how how well starred they are reviewed on
yelp and so on social proof is a key component the more you make claims that are bold you
have to back them up in fact on that landing page i went so far and this this kind of this
tickles me because i've never had the opportunity to do this before for a client or for anyone
um is i have a tweet from Jared Leto the you know the dude who now plays joker embedded
onto that landing page because he's actually an investor in service and so he tweets about
it every now and then and so i embedded that because i'm thinking if you know Jared Leto
if i embed the damn tweet you're gonna say wait a minute this is this is this is interesting
so this is going this is big this is broad a lot of people must know about this if Jared
does and then to kind of add some reinforcement there if you don't know who that guy is or
never look at twitter i also embed the buzzfeed logos and the quote from buzzfeed and cnet
as the really nice things they've said about service and i go one step further uh and at
the bottom of the page i have a 30-second video of service having been covered on the
today show which for non-us viewers is kind of like you know an early morning talk show
in the us so um a lot of social proof a disproportionate amount of social proof relative to the average
landing page i would design for anyone but in the case here because of how bold the claim
is like i mentioned totally warranted so lower the over the outcomes of this this page performs
tremendously well if you're coming from facebook or instagram there's a 55 conversion rate from
that page to going to the app store not necessarily to installing the app that is its own conversion
rate but about 55 which is phenomenal because this isn't a squeeze page which is like trying
to force you to click to the app store it's a long page with text and social proof and it means i've
hooked over half the people to go keep clicking very impressive rate there and so you can study
some components on that page or you can refer to the julian.com growth guide has it has a page on
how i design that landing page what was the structure i followed to see how to get a similar
rate perhaps for your product but so very performant so these are the takeaways here
uh from a landing page perspective and that's kind of how i responded to the failure of not
providing enough context for people when i was sending them direct to the app store so we can
go into a few more things there like the ads and so forth i'm going to pause if there's anything
you wanted to dive into korlin yeah there's a lot there's a lot in there that you talked about that
i think is really good and i just want to highlight for people in case they may be missed some of it
and maybe add a little bit of my own thoughts the first thing is that you wanted to help this
company service and getting this company to grow involved actually modifying the product that they
are working on right they were working on something super broad and vague and it was to help everybody
in every situation ever and you guys ended up focusing the app down to one small iota of what
it actually was doing earlier that was well defined and easy to understand and from that
point on you could easily create uh for example very specific copy that said hey we're going to
help you with this specific problem getting your money back from airlines and i think that's a
something that people should really take to heart which is that growth is not this thing
that's magically divorced from what you're doing and what your product is it's actually
inextricably linked to your product itself and so you need to optimize your product to make it
something that can grow right and part of that means if you can't come up with a good tagline
or a good headline for why people should use your product probably your product is way too vague
and not helpful enough the other thing that struck me was that you had kind of an education problem
here which was people didn't know what this was and they didn't even know if the claims that i'm
making it was making were true and so your point about social proof i think a lot of people don't
understand social proof but like you said it's something that pays dividends if the product that
you're making is extremely i don't want to say untrustworthy but people don't understand it and
maybe they don't believe it and if you're listening to this podcast the chances are pretty high that
you're a rational and maybe skeptical person so i'm sure that you've been to websites that you've
thought are sketchy and immediately clicked off of those uh in those situations like the the things
that your brain automatically searches for are clues to see okay is this sketchy or am i just
being paranoid and one of the top clues that you can search for is are other people using this
and so for pretty much any landing page having some degree of social proof is going to immediately
quell objections from a lot of people who might determine might be wondering if it's a scam that
you're working on or if it's an unpopular product that people simply don't trust etc uh so i think
that's a huge point and it should really be a part of any landing page if you can if you can swing it
are there any other stories and other companies that you've worked with where you know you've
derived some interesting insights from growth that might help the audience grow their own products
sure so let's look at a product like cinder so cinder is a different client of ours uh cinder
grill.com they are i don't know how many people listening are familiar with a cooking method
called sous vide but essentially you take a tub of water you heat it to a certain temperature
you then take food and you put it in like a ziploc bag essentially and you put that
ziploc food into the water and you let the food sit there until the food has reached the temperature
of the water so you maintain the water temperature with an electric circulator and that circulator
is called a sous vide device and the idea is it cooks better than putting something on a grill
so the first thing we thought of was why don't we do a crowdfunding campaign because it's kind
of futuristic uses really cool technology and it's the sort of thing that has a really strong
lifestyle play where when you use it you're like okay so suddenly every one of my family is a chef
and suddenly i don't have to spend so much time worrying about food and it improves my confidence
buying food because i know i won't ruin it all these all these cool dynamics which lend themselves
to crowdfunding by the way crowdfunding i don't think uh is necessarily exclusive to hardware
there are a lot of people who will write content like books or even design games like mobile apps
or board games that'll use crowdfunding to raise awareness and funding so this isn't just for people
doing physical products there's a really wide gamut of stuff here so you decided to put the
to use crowdfunding for the sender grill because it makes a lot of sense for this type of product
and then what comes next what's the first step for getting a crowdfunding campaign off the ground
so the first thing we did is we started queuing up press and we would prospect which is kind of
the sales term for building a list of journalists who would likely be interested in our product
and we did that of course by looking at the past coverage that they had written on related products
and it seemed if they had written about a sous vide device they may be interested in writing
both cinder there's a bit of a narrative thread there we could tug on uh further we would make
sure they're writing for publications that have some track record of writing about this sort of
space or technology so just making sure they're not that their story about sous vide wasn't a
total one-off thing so we made this list we went and looked at reddit posts we went and looked at
google news posts and we went we just scoured the web for what's been said and then we tracked down
the individual journalist emails using clearbit.com's prospecting tool that's how we were making sure
that we were getting the right emails not just guesstimating um their first name lasting
combination so we put together this huge list uh maybe 150 people and we had a fairly standardized
template but it did modify based on what they had written in the past so we did try to tailor it
and the way we we kind of scripted or automated that outreach through the template approach
is using a tool called streak so streak.com it's a free gmail plug and it allows you to do templated
emails very easily and you can piggyback off a google spreadsheet of your prospecting list
so very straightforward process so we wrote right up an email question then the first question we
have is what should the subject be we had something very interesting in our favor versus
say a software company we had a physical product and i figured why don't we play that up how often
did journalists get emailed can i send you a demo unit question mark that was our subject line
that's going to get your interest versus you know b2b sass app revolutionizes x they've heard that
many times so they open the email the first thing we do is we hit them with a link to the home page
which we make sure is very well written and very visually enticing with a video that helped get
you excited about the product so the first thing we do is we drop that link because we know the
landing page is going to pitch better than our email will because the landing page has been
heavily optimized through a lot of traffic our email template at best may ever see you know a
hundred pair of eyes right a few hundred pairs of eyes and it's very hard to ab test that it's not
a big sample size so the first lesson here is when you're doing cold outreach try to pivot your pitch
handed off to uh some sort of collateral like a web page that you know has been rigorously
optimized for conversion that gets people excited and do that quickly don't bury that somewhere in
the email so that's the first thing second thing is we explain to them why would they care about
this how does this relate to what they've written in the past hook into their interests and then
we'll do a quick bullet point of why this is so cool and revolutionary in the case of cinder it
actually is so we're able to use that word seriously and then i'll conclude with a call
to action which is essentially just let me know your shipping address and i'll shoot you one right
away really simple all they got to do is say yo here's the address we'll shoot them one
they get a fedex number once they get it we get notified and then we follow up maybe a week after
that and say hey how did your demo experience go would you like to write that coverage and
they almost always do so that was our first uh outreach was press now what we realized was
press is fleeting impossible to predict and very often doesn't even come through
so we had this tremendous success rate in terms of response and people actually following up with
publishing their coverage but we barely got traffic this is not exaggeration from tech crunch
mashable pc mag cnet digital trends and easily a half dozen others that are escaping me at the
moment we may have gotten like 700 visits so whoa yeah that's not a joke that's crazy crazy so and
in the past i've gotten to start up on tech crunch that got over 100 000 visits so yeah i've had i've
had post on hacker news that sat at the top and got 100 000 visits in a day yeah absolutely so
so the variability is so extreme that to put all your eggs in the pr basket is absurd it's
something you should do because there's basically zero cost to that outreach but it's not something
you should depend on or even expect to work well so that surprised us because it's such
a physical awesome product delivering you it's like a magical meat maker which is what the
gusmodo review said uh yet no one's uh no one's cooking so that was the failure and then i had
to figure out how do i supplement that failure what do i do next so there's a few other things
you can do and a lot of these for whatever reason i only learned midway through a crowdfunding
campaign because i couldn't find the answers online which was very peculiar to me i figured
others must have must have gone through this but then i realized two things one most crowdfunding
campaigns fail you know you're in the top 0.1 if you raise over like 400 500 000 i think that
number is roughly correct and number two most of the ones that succeed use an agency i had no idea
not not an agency like bell curve uh where we do growth you know for mobile apps and desktop sass
and so on but crowdfunding specific agencies and i thought to myself why are these agencies crushing
it so much better than we are bell curve uh for cinder crowdfunding contributions when we really
know ads and we really know landing pages we know copy what's happening here and so i actually just
cold called other agencies basically willing to let them do my work for me which is kind of an ego
hit saying like we can't we can't do it what would you do differently and in these discussions i
learned that the only way to make any sort of acquisition work for crowdfunding on it like on
a scale systematically recurring week over week to get to hundreds of thousands of dollars is to
do something called a custom audience on facebook now before i dive into that and how this applies
to basically everyone listening all their businesses i do want to mention i do want to
highlight here that i paused i reflected on i first appreciated the fact that i was failing
and then i went and i looked for other people who were in a similar situation and i asked them
point blank what would you do and so if you have a company and you're not doing great reach out to
you know the cmo of some company that's tangentially related not a direct competitor
and just shoot the shit get a conversation going and ask them what works for them and in doing so
be as helpful as you can tell them what has worked for you and offer them productive assets that you
may have that could help them out and of course this goes right back to what we were saying
earlier if you're going to reach out to somebody from help then don't just tell them what you need
find out what it is that they need or how they can be helped and then provide that help or that
information for them or provide something to make it interesting for them or worth their while and
they'll be way more likely to reciprocate and on that note getting help from other people is also
tremendously underrated i spent many years of my career just doing things on my own that there
are already solutions for no matter what it is that you're working on chances are very high that
you're not alone and other people are working towards the same goals that you are to accomplish
similar objectives and if you can tap into their knowledge rather than trying to derive the
solution to these problems on your own from scratch then it's like getting a tremendous
head start you're at least starting at the level of like the status quo starting at the level of
like understanding what the best practices are and you can go from there rather than starting
from zero and that's kind of a lot of the reason behind why i created nd hackers as well uh if
you're trying to start a business online and you want to turn a profit maybe quit your job you're
not the only person who's doing this you're not the only person who has this idea and there's a
lot of common lessons that you can learn from other people who are doing this too so for example one
good place you could go is the nd hackers forum and there's all sorts of people doing the same
things you can go on twitter you can find your community on reddit and talk to people who are
doing these things you can do what julian did and find an expert at a particular thing and just
email them and make it worth their while and see if they'll help you out but certainly by all means
get help from people and don't just struggle on your own trying to solve problems completely alone
anyway getting back to the topic uh you're talking about facebook custom audiences
so custom audiences that was the next step we were introduced to and i was actually very familiar
with this this term or this technique custom audiences by having run facebook ads for many
years but i didn't realize it was the key to making crowdfunding work specifically here's
here's what a custom audience is it's when you define a list of email you can email addresses
it can be people who visit your website and the ways you do that is through something called the
conversion pixel that ad channels like facebook and instagram and so on they let you install a
little javascript snippet on your page that allows you to collect um anyone who's bid to your page
and then you can retarget them so whether it's the retargeting through these custom audiences
so the custom audience being your retargeting list or whether it's you uploading a list of emails
into facebook and supplying that as a custom audience and facebook will try to match those
email addresses to users on facebook and then you'll be able to target those users specifically
as opposed to generally when you're doing facebook ads you're targeting people broadly
based on the interest they have or demographic criteria so here's the thing if you've run a
crowdfunding campaign for a client in the past so let's say i'm one of these crowdfunding agencies
and let's say i've worked with 10 other crowdfunding campaigns that were hugely successful
now when someone contributes to your campaign on kickstarter indie gogo the two popular
crowdfunding platforms you get their email address and so you can store that email address
compile that to a list and make it a custom audience on facebook so if i'm that agency
and i've just run five amazing uh amazingly successful campaigns and collectively have 10,000
email addresses i can then retarget or i can advertise to on facebook all of those past
crowdfunding customers for the next client i work with and the reason that's so valuable
is i know all of those people a know what crowdfunding is b likely know what either
kickstarter or indie gogo is because they contributed on that platform prior and c have
a credit card on file with those platforms so i'm reducing all the risk all the friction
that would come with typically targeting people trying to get them to buy my good on a crowdfunding
page and so now i have this super tailored audience of people who are primed to buy and
have already shown their willingness to be early tech adopters and if i hit them with my product
they're likely to convert much better than the broader interest base targeting i would have done
like people who like you know cooking people who like high-end cooking because remember this is
a cinder grill so people who are into sous vide those that those audiences failed utterly my
facebook ads failed utterly compared to these custom audiences so i spoke to these agencies
and i said can i get can i get my hands on them they're like uh no this is like our proprietary
trade secret here you know like we worked with these customers we have the emails you know you
either gonna pay us a big cut and we'll run your facebook ads for you or good luck and so we
negotiated a price they started running the ads and the ads start crushing it and suddenly we
were getting 10 to 30 orders per day for something like 40 or let's say 25 to 60 depending on the day
per conversion we're selling a cinder right now about 399 and the average purchase price with
other perks winds up being something like 470 bucks so extremely positive roi and now it works
i would not have known this and i would have continued failing on facebook ads had i not
asked questions so i had alex macaw on the podcast a couple weeks ago and i know you and
alan's have also worked together uh specifically you helped him with quora ads what is the story
behind that so quora ads is an interesting example of when you should be resourceful as a
growth marketer so quora ads is currently in the beta phase and by the time you hear this it may
actually be public but when an ad channel like quora is in the beta phase it means the uh the
total pool of people advertising is very small which means the competition over clicks is very
small and so what happened was i saw this random ad on quora a few months ago and i'm like wait a
minute there are ads on quora now i had no idea about this so i just contacted quora i asked a
friend then another friend of a friend i'm like i gotta get in touch with these people because
they're running ads for the first time i knew about this phenomenon i knew i wanted to be
resourceful and to see if i can get in as an early customer then maybe i could pitch them
as learning more from my learnings like listen i'll share all the data i have all the conversion
insights and any way i can be useful to you i will be and in exchange please button begin
advertising on quora i've heard uh by the way it's similar stories from people advertising
right when snapchat started doing ads and also right when instagram started doing ads
that they were able to uh basically get ridiculous numbers of clicks and impressions for super cheap
just because there was no competition on the platforms exactly uh we were paying on quora
ads beta five cents per very qualified ios click from someone in the united states which that on
instagram could be tens of cents on facebook could be a couple dollars so on linkedin that could be
seven or more dollars so it was an incredible deal and the volume was all hours for the taking at
that price point because nobody was competing there were like 150 other advertisers so it gave
us this enormous platform to test copy and to test landing pages and to test value props so
the way we pitched the product in multiple forms so it's an amazing test bed and in the process of
testing we got tons of cheap customers like we signed up tons of people for this clearbit product
and then at the same time i used it for my other clients and just started crushing it for all of
them because they happened to be there early enough and so sort of getting the nitty-gritty
of the ads i wrote and why they perform well obviously the takeaway here is when you see an
opportunity to advertise to acquire users whether it's an ad whether it's a brand new blog that
pops up in your industry that's getting coverage like indie hackers to me let's say for example
i reached out to you courtland uh not for the purpose of helping you with growth tactics but
for the purpose of trying to leverage your audience to advertise let's say i had some sort
of sass company that would be a good thing to do if i could if i say hey courtland have you thought
about putting an ad unit on your home page um among the interviews why don't you have one ad unit
that looks like an interview it's got like a logo for a company it just has promoted somewhere
it even has how much we're making so it looks just like organic content and that might be a
great way for us to get a bunch of high quality clicks and maybe there's a way for you to make
it also very useful for your for your customers uh for your visitors rather so reach out when you
see an opportunity for an ad that either doesn't currently exist or if an ad does exist and you
don't see any way to get your hands on it that means other people aren't getting their hands
on it either like the core beta program and go hustle your way into it all right so we've talked
a lot about landing page design about ab testing about the growth funnel and reaching out and
pitching press crowdfunding facebook ads one major area that we've totally left out is content
marketing and maybe we'll just have to save this for another episode because we're running low on
time but uh one thing i've never heard you talk about either on this podcast or in person just
between the two of us is social media so what role does social media play and how bell curve
goes uh basically what bell curve does when you go in to help a client grow their product or their
service it plays almost no part so in general if you're running a social media account
there's kind of two ways to stand out either be a curator someone who finds and retweets
pre-grams and re-shares great content or produce original niche content yourself
so an example of that may be if you sell photo frames maybe you have some beautiful
photos of your frames on various walls and wallpaper and you get people in in the photo
frame as like inspirational words or something so like you can produce cool content people can
easily consume and involves your product those have usually your two paths both take a ton of work
and both wind up failing because just look at the graveyard of like corporate company twitter
handles most of them have thousands of fake followers zero twitter engagement same thing
with instagram accounts so the truth is people have buzzfeed to keep them interested online
or they have reddit or they have youtube they don't need your marketing intern collating
inspirational images with pop culture quotes to entertain them so unless you give them a really
really good reason to look at your stuff they're not going to because they won't care you know if
you build it they will not come there's a there's there's a bigger reason here though not just the
lack of success and i'm not trying to poo poo social media in general if you can nail it and
if you are if you're a lifestyle brand apparel fashion beauty uh or like gopro anything that
really emboldens like a lifestyle choice with that lends itself to great image great imagery
and videos roll with it you're gonna have a much greater chance of pulling this off
but for most companies especially listeners doing sass software for example
every time you ask someone to follow you on twitter for example you're doing it at the expense
of replacing that call to action with getting them to do something that's more productive
for your growth funnel so instead you could be asking them to join your newsletter
every time you waste space in your on your home page or your blog footer asking them to follow
you on twitter that's space that could get them to subscribe with their email address and certainly
kids these days aren't using email but adults are and they're using it more than they ever have
and email is the only surefire way to get to the top of someone's inbox you know to get the top of
their attention i mean whereas you know on social media if you if you share tweets if you post a
tweet if someone doesn't see it that's it maybe you have a couple opportunities to retweet it
before people get annoyed and unfollow you but even then most people will not see it you know
during the time that you post it whereas with email it's in their face and you can keep hitting
them you can keep emailing them keep following up and you can track the metrics of who opened it
who viewed it who responded it's measurable it's optimizable and you can do a full post
so consider the opportunity cost of what you're asking people to do on your site you want to do
so many things you want to follow your twitter handle you want them to subscribe to your blog
you want them to sign up to convert into a paying customer figure out what's most appropriate for
the page at hand in the section of that page even and focus what matters most for conversions
usually not going to be social media yeah i totally agree and i like that you mentioned
opportunity costs because it's not necessarily a business concept it's more of just a general life
just a general life concept but any time you spend working on something it's time you're not
spending working on something else and it's very unlikely that any all of your growth channels are
equally as important as each other uh so to the extent that you can cut out the ones that aren't
going to have as high return on investment as the others you should you know and people ask me all
the time you know why are you doing x for indie hackers and why are you doing y and i would really
love to see this other feature and my answer is almost always the same i would love to do that
but there's only one of me and i can only focus on a few things at a time and that simply isn't as
good as these other areas specifically for twitter and facebook my facebook strategy has been
abysmal but on twitter i found it very useful for having conversations for actually talking to people
but not useful at all for driving large amounts of traffic to indie hackers or any other startup
that i've ever started and you know maybe that's just me not using it well but i think it's more
i think it's more to do with what you said which is i'd much rather have people on an email list
where they're going to be a lot more engaged and i can connect with them personally and there's a
lot higher of a chance that they're actually going to see what i write versus them having to be logged
into twitter at the exact time that i tweet something so i totally agree with that advice
and i think people should put your put your priorities in order and figure out what channels
are actually effective for you and double down on those channels and neglect the ones that are not
effective all right we're out of time that is by far the longest episode that i've ever recorded
for the podcast can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about yourself
about bell curve and to get this guide that you're working on when it's out
sure first of all dude you're the nicest guy ever letting me letting me get the word out i appreciate
it so julian.com is home to the guides i'm writing and you can also see some of the stuff
i'm working on writing in the future about to release twitter.com slash shapiro all right
thanks so much julian i'll talk to you later thanks for having me courtland i appreciate it
and i'm glad we got to do this if you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you're looking
for a way to help support the indie hackers podcast then you should subscribe on itunes
and leave a quick rating and review it only takes about 30 seconds but it actually really
helps get the word out and i would personally appreciate it very much in addition if you are
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join me and a whole bunch of other internet entrepreneurs on the indiehackers.com forum
it's basically a community of like-minded individuals just giving each other feedback
and helping out with ideas and landing pages and marketing and growth and other internet
business related topics that's www.indyhackers.com slash forum hope to see you guys there