09: The CEO Journey - 4 stages of a SaaS CEO

Helpful links from the episode:

• Stripe
• MnSearch Summit
• MozCon
• a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO
• David Ulevitch on Twitter
• 
  

FULL SHOW NOTES

[music]

00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode nine, The CEO Journey.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to The SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Here the experiences challenges wins and losses, shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:45 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:47 AW: And we are back in front of a microphone, sharing our business secrets, our love secrets, everything in between, and making them public, so that we can share them with our listeners. And, if anything, sometimes it's probably cathartic and healing and everything else, wouldn't you say?

01:07 DS: Yeah, definitely, I have not yet shared any love secrets, so I'm not sure where you're going with that, but...

[chuckle]

01:15 DS: May be a future episode. I don't know.

01:17 AW: I'm just trying to keep things broad, all the time, right?

01:20 DS: Broad, yeah. 'Cause you know we never know what we're gonna talk about.

01:22 AW: Yeah, no, if this turns into a relationship podcast on how you and I get along, and our friendship and being there for each other and everything else, we could pivot right, like, software is all about pivoting at different times.

01:35 DS: It really is, yeah, and I think we should definitely keep that in our back pocket.

[chuckle]

01:40 AW: Alright, so with that, we'll both get up off the davenport and the attempt to talk on a few different topics today, especially the deeper content we want to get into on kinda the CEO journey. We have a lot to cover there, we will probably, once again, have a hard time keeping ourself to 40 minutes but hopefully the content is appreciated. But what have you been up to since our last episode on churn a few weeks ago, Darren?

02:12 DS: What have I been up to? Well, we've talked about this Local Search service a number of times, and how we're re-pivoting that actually, speaking of pivoting, into a Google My Business Management Service. And so I hired someone new for that. Basically Allie is my primary person that is running that service and she's at capacity, so we need to hire, and so can't really launch it until we have new people hired and trained and ready to do the service. So, I hired Sydney, she worked with us in the past, she's pretty awesome. And so she started yesterday.

And I put out a job posting too. And so we're just trying to get the people in place to be able to service the service because we have a waiting list of 30 people that are interested already. I don't even... Honestly, I worry that we might never even launch the landing page because we'll just keep picking people off the waiting list, 'cause the waiting less seems to be growing faster than we can hire and train people to build the service up.

03:10 DS: So, it's very interesting to me that there's that much interest in the service, I think it's gonna be very successful for us, and I think we've dialed in our processes really well. So, the next thing to dial-in, is hiring and training and scaling it up so I'm excited about that. That's big for us, for sure.

03:24 AW: That's awesome to have that type of demand. That part has to feel really good.

03:29 DS: It feels great, and I think it's like... I had read a tweet or some one... Some luminary of the modern age, had tweeted that the biggest success factor for companies is not really product or anything, it's timing. And so having the right product at the right time, that people need, and I feel like that's precisely what we're doing with this service. So I'm excited about that. And I know there's competition out there, but it's early stages. We have a great reputation that we've built up in this space, and so I think we're really well positioned to do well with the service.

04:01 AW: I'm interested, you seem to be comfortable in productized services and things like that, where the whole reason, not the whole reason but one of the reasons I got into SaaS after well over a decade in agency is I wanted to get away from services and I wanted to be strictly product-focused. But you have a good comfort level with that. But yet, man, I would be really, I would be frustrated right now. Like really, I gotta wait on services to get this awesome new thing launched?

04:32 DS: Totally. And you're like, you have a software, you just flip the switch. "Okay, sign up everybody." And so there is something beautiful with that. There are two types of services. There is a complex agency, SEO service where every case is different and everyone's got different needs, and some clients are more of a hassle than others. Same thing with something like web design where you're building out a website. There's just so many touch points with the client that it's really hard to scale that.

And what I have found is with a very simple streamlined one thing type of service, so citation building, for example, it scales really well. It's like, this is what it is, you buy it, you basically get a product, really, it's a very specific thing. And there's not a lot of back and forth, there's not too much... Not to many questions about it, right?

05:22 DS: And so everyone gets the same thing. And that's where the pivot happened actually, 'cause I had turned the Local Search service into something more complicated than it needed to be, which opened the flood gates for all of that like different clients and how do we handle practitioner listings, and just lots of complication. So scaling it back to just this really helps us to build something that's scalable. And so I am comfortable with this as a productized service but I totally hear you on just services in general. They can be a real pain in the ass and very hard to scale.

05:53 AW: Yeah, well, good for you. You are a braver man than I am and totally... Nothing wrong with it. Not in my wheelhouse of a fit right now but how is it right? You said you're posting, and I know this, I've talked a number of episodes on hiring, especially for sales positions, which I'll give an update on and we're continuing to do. But in talking before the podcast, you kinda have a few little tips for people in hiring and posting to job boards.

06:27 DS: So yeah, this, this job posting I actually forgot to do it when I first launched the job posting. I put out... So I posted the job and I had done this last time, but we use Indeed.ca, I think, I'll see if there's any indeed.com, but we post our jobs to Indeed and so, we get a flood of applications and most people, they just press the button to apply through Indeed.

I have a very specific note that says, "How to apply," and it says, "Include your resume and cover letter," and it says, "and email it to darren@whitespark.ca." It also says right in the, "How to apply," "If you just apply through Indeed, instead of emailing Daren directly then we'll know you didn't read this and it'll be really helpful for us for filtering our candidates."

So this is awesome because I get... So far I've probably had about 40 applications for this job and only five of them read this instruction. Most of them are just like, it's like ...