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The SaaS Venture

20: Big Launches & Big Challenges

The SaaS Venture
The SaaS Venture

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[INTRO music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 20, Big Launches and Big Challenges.

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]

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

00:42 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:45 AW: And we are back in front of the mic and ready to catch up on... It's been about a month since we've connected, and we definitely have plenty to talk about and catch people up on. But I thought a great place to start... Just from some of the things that we've been talking about regarding Whitespark and some of the things on your plate. I definitely wanna hear about your big launch that you've recently had with the Local Citation Finder and get the nitty-gritty details on that.

01:21 DS: I know, it's exciting times. It's been really weird, actually. We haven't talked for a month, I think, 'cause we're both really busy. Kind of in a reactionary mode. With all this COVID business there is so much going on and everyone's trying to do their best to launch some stuff and put stuff out there. So yeah, feels like its been a while since we talked. Oh, yeah. Can't wait to talk about the launch of the LCF? But I guess before we get in there, I just... How are things going, what's going on with you at GatherUp?

01:47 AW: Yeah, well, we can get to some of that. I'm more of the big challenge part. We had a challenging week last week with a little bit of a reduction in staff. A few off of my team and that was incredibly difficult. And talk about, I guess, some of the more difficult parts of that, but within this, it's no different than a lot of businesses. There's hard decisions that have had to be made just based on so many aspects of what's going on in the economy and how it affects when you primarily serve small and medium-sized businesses and, in some industries, they've been so susceptible and have their doors shut and not had a way to even adjust, or if they have adjust, it's been a much, much different look to their business so that was definitely really difficult. We've seen some things leveled out from what April looked like as far as that first wave of panic churn.

02:50 DS: Yeah, totally.

02:50 AW: Yeah that kinda kicked in. And now we're just seeing stragglers in some of those situations from what's there. So just kinda adapting with that. But everything on the homefront is good. Everybody's healthy and the weather's been nicer. So we're getting outside more and just grateful for all of those aspects, and we've done a pretty good job of just shifting the... What we're happy with instead of what is different or what we're missing out on and things like that.

03:20 DS: Yeah, right.

03:21 AW: What about you?

03:23 DS: Yeah, so everything is going alright here. I've always worked from home. So it's not a huge shift for me in terms of my work and family life. It's not that much different. Just not seeing, not socializing as much really. And we had a bit of a health scare at the beginning of this, we were all worried that we had it. So we had to do some distancing in the house, but we've come out of that and everyone's healthy again. And so, we still don't know actually if we did have it. Even though we got tested. Apparently, we hear all the... All the tests are somewhat unreliable, especially if you're only carrying a small viral load. So we don't know if we have it.

We're interested to get the antiviral test, but because of that, we're extra sensitized. And so, we're not seeing anybody. We get everything delivered. We sanitize everything that comes in the house. We're just really playing it safe now for two reasons. One, we had a bit of a scare and was like, "Well, we don't wanna mess with it." And two, we don't know if we're carriers now and so we're extra careful around other people too, right? So we had that, but gosh, now that that's over, it's so nice to just be back to living our quarantine lifestyle.

04:35 DS: I spend a lot of extra time together, really connecting with my daughter these days. We all have really fun play time every night after dinner. So, family life has been good and the business has been surprisingly good too. We had a real big scare in at the end of... End of March, it was getting kinda bad. Lots of cancellations. And so it was like, wow, not looking good, and so we had to make a bunch of hard decisions. Similar to you. We did a few lay offs and we reduced hours across the team. And some of that was defensive planning for what was to come, but in the end, April actually turned out okay for us. So our revenue started to climb back up.

We launched a new Yext service, which is Yext replacement service which was well received, and then we launched the new Local Citation Finder. So yeah, it's all been going back in the other direction. So we've brought our team, many of our team members back up to full-time hours and we're forging ahead with a lot of stuff. The business is starting to come out of it looking healthy, too.

05:38 AW: Nice, that's good to hear. I feel like, on a sales and new business side, that has been... Was really, really quiet and I feel like in the last week or two, we've started to see more of a pulse there, which I'm...

05:51 DS: Same, yeah.

05:52 AW: Excited about so.

05:53 DS: Yeah, like the last two weeks. It really starts to feel like the sense that people are... There was this panic mode at the beginning, everyone's getting defensive, cutting expenses 'cause they don't know what's gonna come, but now they're like, "Okay, well, it's been like this. I think we're kinda getting used to this, and we still have to build a business. So what are the ways we're gonna do that," and then... We both run marketing technology companies, so they start looking to us, and so leads are starting to come back in again.

06:20 AW: Yeah. Awesome, let's...

06:21 DS: Yeah.

06:22 AW: Hope that continues. Ride that wave back up.

06:25 DS: Yeah, definitely. What are some of the things you've been doing at GatherUp? What are some of your offensive strategies that you've been working on?

06:34 AW: The one thing that we've really gotten into is we just double down really heavy on content. I finally got it kind of pulled into a thought process the other day, but we were on a call and talking about shipping product, and the importance of that, and things like that. And I was like, "Well, I think what we're doing, we're just shipping strategy right now," because we have a really robust feature set. And sometimes with that, there's just a lot of elements to it where people don't understand all of the pieces, or how to string 'em together, or how to best utilize the features.

07:15 AW: And I've found it almost cathartic to be writing and pouring myself into teaching. So, a lot of strategy type blog posts, and execution, and webinars. We had you on a local AMA we did. You, and I, and Joy Hawkins, and Mike Blumenthal. Yeah, really great. And we have our monthly customer webinars, and we had our agency webinar. So, we've just really gone all out with sharing things that, with not doing as much outbound, without as many demos things, like that where it's like let's just give people as much education as we can and try to help them through it to do the best that they can and for their business. So...

08:...

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