17: Selling GatherUp - Part 2, The Process

Helpful links from the episode:

• Alpine Software Group
• Steve Kozachok, Attorney and Partner at Taft
• Lost and Founder, book from Rand Fishkin

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[INTRO music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 17, Selling GatherUp - part two, the process.

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

[music]

00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:47 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:48 AW: And we are diving into part two of our three-part series on the acquisition of GatherUp from the end of 2019. If you haven't had the chance, part one of the series is the why, laying out things within the decision process, how to, things to consider and think about prepping your company to sell, just a number of aspects with this and today we're kind of hoping to transition into some more of the process items and small things, and being able to share just even how some of those things felt at the time. So looking forward to that but before we dive into that, Darren, it's been a few weeks since we've talked. What's new with Whitespark?

01:30 DS: What's new? Let's see, it's not really too much new. We just keep forging ahead with a lot of our product developments. Man, we have so many things that are so close right now, I'm just really excited about these launches that are upcoming, brand new local citation finder, a whole new account system. These are just on the cusp of being launched and it's funny because we have this local citation finder and it's been quite neglected for years as we build other things in the company. And it's truly... We get 300 free users signing up for that every week.

02:04 AW: Nice.

02:04 DS: And a lot of those are converting, but it's amazing to me that they're converting to the existing product because it's old, it's outdated, the data's not great, but and so, I look at that and I think I can't wait to launch the new one. And I think when we launch the new one, our churn rate will plummet. Our sign-up rate will drastically increase. I think it's gonna be huge for the company. So yeah, got lots of things on the go right now, busy with that, I don't have any trips planned until June. So yeah, I'm gonna see you in Minneapolis in June, that'll be good.

02:37 AW: Yeah. Minnesota search will have a great time as always, have a few beers.

02:41 DS: Yep, looking forward to it.

02:42 AW: Maybe come up with another crazy idea to start a podcast or something.

02:46 DS: Yeah, we'll start a different podcast.

[laughter]

02:50 AW: That's awesome. And I know the feeling with where you're at when your right on the cusp of launching things that was me towards the end of December and then January whereas we had three, four features that were kinda log jam together and then they were starting to shake loose. And then really we just had to start mapping out like, okay, what's our cadence of releasing one of them kind of every two weeks so that we have the right marketing message. And the team could focus on launching it the right way and landing the right way, and then calm the waters and then cycle back to the next one.

We've been in that sequence here from mid-January and it'll keep going through the end of this month, so it's so fun when you have features coming out that you know will make an impact in getting to put them out there.

03:37 DS: It's a funny thing that I'm trying to get better at but I have this tendency like once we start building something, I just wanna keep adding stuff to it. I'm like, "Oh, we could do this, and we could do this, and we could do that," and then the project scope just keeps creeping and we never launch the damn thing. [chuckle] So I'm trying to get to this part where like, "Shut up," it's like, "Okay, Darren, you got ideas, you put them on the phase two list and we're gonna get this core functionality released." And then the beauty is you've got multiple releases and you got multiple opportunities to push more marketing and more just promoting of the product every time.

So if I just kept working on it, then we'd have one big massive release or we do the basic release and then five other releases after that as we keep adding all these extra functions that I wanna build.

04:24 AW: I've actually gotten a lot better at that in the last year. I used to be very similar to what you're describing where it's like, "And one more thing, and one more thing, and one more thing." And now, I've done a much better job of saying like, "No, this is gonna be the V1 of this. Here's the dates we need to hit and then we will look at fast follow items or V2 items," things like that. And if anything I've found myself saying no to some of the things that the team is like, we should do this or consider this or whatever else. And it's been a strange reversal 'cause I used to be the one where they are just... I could see their eye, I could feel their eyes rolling when I was like, "Hey, I got one more thing we need to squeeze in here in the next few days."

05:10 DS: Yep, totally. Yeah, we implemented a new process in our development on our dev team. So it's like a Monday planning call and a Friday retrospective call and we try to keep them short and it's just like on Monday, it's like, "Okay, you guys, what are you doing?" We have our ClickUp boards where we look at all the potential tasks we could do, and they just, they pick the ones that are doable within that week.

Then on the end of the week, we look at it and we're like, "Did you get it done? If you didn't, what went wrong? Where were some of the challenges?" And sometimes they get more things done, and they squeeze it in. But this weekly really focused, "This is the goal for the week." I'm trying to block out everything else. It's like if something else comes up, it's like, "Put it on the list. We'll look at it next week." And so we're really trying to keep the team focused on the core goals and the core milestones and it's been helpful.

06:03 AW: Yeah, awesome, good for you, keep it up. The discipline and prioritization and saying no is so powerful.

06:11 DS: Yep, anything you just go on the list and we'll get to it one day, but right now, this is what we're focused on.

06:16 AW: The ever-expanding list. That's something we can talk about some time.

06:20 DS: Yep, totally. How's everything going with you? How's everything at GatherUp post-sale? It's all going great and continue to grow the business. You just had a huge feature released. The social sharing stuff looks awesome.

06:33 AW: Yeah, super excited about that. We started that feature late last September. It was one of those where made a call. We had it slated later but with the drop of schema stars in search results from the review widget, we really felt like we wanted to get a marketing feature back out there that was a visible and tangible, got people excited. So social sharing was probably more slated to start work right about now but instead, we push that ahead of some other things.

It's a great feature, basically gives you one more way to use your reviews and that we created a feature so it would turn your review into a visual image that you can then share on social media channels. And it's fun to have... I'm kind of putting together a post where what we're really saying is a review just ...