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The SaaS Venture

18: Selling GatherUp - Part 3, The Transition

The SaaS Venture
The SaaS Venture

FULL SHOW NOTES

00:00 Aaron Weiche: Hey everyone, this next episode was recorded on March 5th, 2020, so ahead of COVID-19 and everything we are all experiencing right now. I just wanted to pop in ahead of that as we haven't published it until now in mid-April (April 15th, 2020), and didn't want the conversation, our tone, or our excitement for certain things to be taken out of context. So, thanks for listening. We hope everyone is well, and we hope to get on the other side of this soon. With that, we'll bring you the third part of "Selling GatherUp" and Darren and I will be back in a couple of weeks to give a further update on how our businesses are doing now, during COVID-19 and the pandemic.

[INTRO music]

00:56 AW: Episode 18, Selling GatherUp. Part three, the Transition.

01:02 Speaker 2: 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]

01:30 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

01:33 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

01:35 AW: And welcome to the month of March. Things are taking off quickly in 2020 for me. I don't know... What's that look like for you, Darren? Has the first two months of the year been a blur, or a little slow progression into the year?

01:50 DS: It's been pretty blurry. We have a lot of stuff going on right now, so yeah, it's been busy. I'm just really excited about everything that we're building right now. So it's gone by like nothing. Where'd those two months go?

02:03 AW: Yeah. Do you ever feel like you're already looking, especially at the end of this month, when you're like, "Okay, Q1 of the year is done, and now I only have nine more months to accomplish all my hopes and dreams for the year." Do you ever look at that that early and just feel like, "Oh my gosh, I'm behind the eight ball"?

02:21 DS: No, I have a really terrible sense of time, and so I always think everything is gonna... Everything, all my hopes and dreams are gonna launch in the next three weeks. That's what I always think.

[laughter]

02:34 DS: But then it ends up like nine months later, right? But yeah so that's kinda... I don't understand how time works and so it always takes a lot longer than I think. So I feel like we're on the cusp of launching everything and it's all just about to happen. But then there's a testing phase, and tweaking phase, and beta testing phase. So it just ends up taking a lot longer. But I just really feel like this is the year, man, all my hopes and dreams, they're just about to burst out of our email newsletter. "Oh my God, look what we launched." It's gonna happen. We've got a few things lined up. They're all really close.

03:10 AW: That's awesome. I love the internal optimism too. That means all the way up until December 31st you're still like, "Yeah, we're gonna get it out there. Just wait."

03:18 DS: Well, even if that rolled around on December 31st, I'd be like, "Guys, two more weeks! We're almost there."

[laughter]

03:24 DS: So close. You just feel perpetually like, "Ah, two more weeks." I'm always so damn excited.

03:30 AW: You've definitely dropped that before in past episodes that you feel like you're always saying, "Just a couple more weeks."

[laughter]

03:37 DS: It's always two more weeks. It's a running joke at Whitespark, actually. Two weeks. 'Cause people ask me, "How long is that gonna take?" and by default I just say "Two weeks" now.

03:46 AW: That's awesome.

03:47 DS: How about you? How has it been the first couple of months of the year in the new company structure?

03:53 AW: Yeah, and that's definitely a lot of what we wanna talk about today is post-sale and what that transition's been like. In the day-to-day business realm though, it's been really good because we had so many things that almost kind of started to log jam and be on the same path at the same time towards the end of the year, and that really caused us to pause and then look at, "How do we release these in the best cadence to start the year?" So it became very much like... Alright, this is gonna happen on January 15th, this is gonna happen on January 31st, this is gonna happen on February this date. And so we're able to take three to four larger things and really map them out ahead of time, and then just a normal plan the work and then work the plan. And that went really well for us.

04:48 DS: Nice.

04:49 AW: Yeah, kinda all wrapped up last week with our new user management system, which is... It's really cool. This is one of those things not to... I don't wanna get too far off on a tangent with this, but when you release certain features, it's a lot of fun because they have a lot of sex appeal to them and it might be innovative or no one's doing it in a certain way and that can be really fun. And when you get into user management, this is one of those plumbing things and underlying fabrics that no one gets all that excited about it. It comes up in conversations and things like that, but it never escalates to the point where it's like, "This has to be dealt with," or "This is a must," or anything else.

But last year we really started looking at things related to our user management, just because we get a lot of different set-ups and how people wanna handle it, and things like that. And for the life of our product, we basically have always had just two user types. One was the account owner, which could only be one person being the account owner, and then everyone else on the system was just a user. And then that user had, I think we had five different special permissions that would either enable or limit that user in what they could do.

06:00 AW: And it was unbelievably basic, but for thousands and tens of thousands of users, it worked and it was never a big enough... There's never a big enough pain where people were like, "I just can't do this anymore." But last year we really started thinking, "How do we improve this?" One of the things that we've been asked. And we started modeling it out... It really started happening at our summit.

I kind of put together a really loose structure and brought it to the team as a whole when we were face-to-face and said, "This is how I see this, this is how I think this could work and let's just start poking holes in it, and see what buy is there." And after an hour discussion, everybody was kind of like half-nodding their head like, "Yeah, yeah, I think this can work." The outcome of it, about six months of work. And it turned into a system where we created really six distinct user roles, and then inside of each role, it's an upgrade basis.

06:55 AW: At the lowest end, you have a read-only, then you have a contributor, then you have a team member, so each user level steps up into what you can do. And then, to take it one step further, that type of structure isn't anything earth-shattering, but what we did inside of each role is give you a specific set of on and off toggles that allowed you to really customize the role and change it for how you wanted it to work.

So, not only did you have these five, six designated roles that you can just switch someone between being an admin and a team, and that will limit or enable what you need them to do, but now I can go into the team member role and I might have 10 options that I can turn off or turn on depending upon what the default is for that role.

07:42 AW: So, it literally made it limitless and it ended up being one of those things that was really cool, 'cause one, everyone on our team touched being part of building that feature, right? We wanted to know... ...

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