28: Vision and Mission

FULL EPISODE NOTES:

0:00:12.1 Aaron Weiche: Episode 28: Vision and Mission.

0:00:16.0 [INTRO]: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped 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.

0:00:44.2 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:48.2 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:49.5 AW: And, Darren, I think from our conversations that we have weekly, you and I, we've both gotten one shot in the arm now, which is nice to report.

0:01:03.6 DS: That is really good to report, yes. I'm just waiting for the second shot and hoping things come back to normal, but a bit apprehensive about things going back to normal, because of variants and whatnot. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, feels good to have some protection that I likely won't die from COVID now.

0:01:26.6 AW: There you go. Yeah, that's pretty much... Once you're fully vaccinated, that's proven to be 100%, your protection, depending upon what you're getting, 50% to 90%, mid 90%, depending upon which shot, what application types. But the fact knowing that it won't take you out is definitely reassuring and that's awesome. And, yeah, I can... I've fully accepted the way things were 16 months ago might never be the case, but...

0:02:06.8 DS: Same.

0:02:07.3 AW: I just... I've come to, like, "Okay, here's how to hedge your bets and to be smart, get vaccinated, all those other things, and... " Yeah, I'm excited to just dip my toe a little bit more into the social world. I'm definitely gonna get on a plane in June, so I'm excited about that. That'll feel awkward.

0:02:32.0 DS: Amazing, wow. What an experience.

0:02:34.0 AW: Both my co-founder and I will be fully vaccinated, so it's like we're long overdue to have a two, three-day jam session in person, melt some white boards and do something more than Slack, Google Meet, Zoom, everything else we've done.

0:02:53.3 DS: I like that, it's a SaaS jam session. Rather than melting faces with guitars, you're gonna melt brains with white boards.

0:03:03.6 AW: Yeah. We're just gonna be so high off of expo markers, it's gonna be wonderful. [chuckle] Other than that, what's new with you?

0:03:17.0 DS: What is new? Let's see. In the world of Whitespark, we did launch our new account system, I think I talked about that in the last podcast, that we were about to launch that. We launched it, and it was generally a pretty great launch. Nice and smooth, team did a great job on that. We have obviously lots of kinks to work out post-launch, as there would be with a whole new billing and account system. With that, we launched our new services packages, which have been very successful, so businesses thriving on a listing service side of things, so that's great. Busy planning the next Whitespark Local Search Summit for 2021, that's coming up right away. We're gonna be having that near the end of September, so we gotta get our speakers lined up, everything pre-recorded, get our sponsors in place, we're working on all that.

0:04:09.0 DS: I've been really busy with these Whitespark weekly videos. I put in a good five to 10 hours every week, making these videos and then getting them published. It's going really well. I think that they're driving business for sure, we definitely feel the uptick. And we're growing our YouTube channel. We're at 1200 subscribers on YouTube or something, so that's been good.

0:04:30.5 AW: That is such a massive undertaking. I would feel that that is so daunting, and you do such a great... I mean, when you tackle these topics, it's not just, "Hey, here's a few things in this direction." You are pretty exhaustive in what you're putting together on these, and great long-form content, blog posts, the videos, I see it all on my social channels. These things are legit and take a whole day out of your week, too.

0:05:03.3 DS: Yeah. They might take me five to 10 hours to build and to actually prepare the deck, prepare my notes, figure out what I wanna do, all the research, record the video, then... I don't know how much time my video editing team spends on it, then I got Jesse working on getting it all up on the blog and doing all the promotional stuff. This is just a ton of work, but I believe in the rewards, particularly believe in the long-term rewards. If you can stay with it consistently week after week, month after month, year after year, you end up hitting this point of... It's like the TSN Turning Point, where all of a sudden now we have 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. And the thing is just a snowball that continues to drive value. So, I'm just gonna keep at it a good two years in. If two years we still don't have more than 1200 subscribers, then I'll totally give up, but I believe in the power of this, particularly long term.

0:06:04.5 AW: We talked outside of our podcast recordings on this, and I think... And it's something you agreed and you're gonna implement, finding more calls to actions within this content. Because it is so great, it's attracting eyeballs, and it's taking it that last mile and giving people a clear next step on how to get a little bit deeper, start using one of your tools, investigate one of your services, but really working not just a traffic tool but a conversion tool as well.

0:06:40.1 DS: I have already started implementing that, yeah. So, that's already... We're going through our content and finding good spots to drop, like little subtle banners. It's not like in-your-face blinking, but it's like, if you're looking for help on this particular aspect, hey, we have this software, we have this service, whatever it is. And so we're definitely integrating that into the content. And again, speaking about long-term value, that content will continue to drive views and people checking it out, and so that's getting our products in front of more people all the time.

0:07:14.7 AW: Now, I feel that's especially important with the amount of time you and even the team is sinking into this, for you to have clear metrics that even go past traffic acquisition. I think you need to see... You can definitely tell, right? You feel there's a relation between putting these out and seeing just spikes in sign-ups and things like that. But you definitely wanna get probably pretty confident in the data that's there when you're gonna peel a quarter of your week off on to one thing, right?

0:07:52.7 DS: For sure. And we have... All the little ad placements we'll put within the content will have GTM tags, and they will track conversions in Google Analytics, so Analytics will be able to see if you can go to the campaign and see actually how much money they generate. We're getting all of that technology connected, making sure that we're tracking it well and pulling it into a dashboard. That is another thing we're working on actually. Within the launch of new accounts, we had everything, all of our subscriptions, in Payflow, which is a PayPal product, and we have since launched on Stripe, which offers a ton of benefits to us. And I didn't realize this, but you can send an email to PayPal and say, "Hey, we've moved to Stripe, can you please send us a dump of all our subscription data?" And then you can... Stripe will import it. We're gonna get everybody off of our legacy payment provider and put them on Stripe, which is phenomenal, so that gives us... Within the next week, we're gonna have everybody on Stripe, which means I can set up their metrics, gonna have excellent reporting. Can't wait.

0:09:01.5 AW: That's awesome. That's a big win, and not having to cycle through users and have them re-add credi...