#19 - Steve McLeod of Feature Upvote</a> and Saber Feedback</a>.
#19 - Steve McLeod on writing emails that get responses, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and taking your time with B2B SEO.
On this episode of The First 10 Podcast, I talk to Steve McLeod, Founder of Barbary Software, the company behind Feature Upvote and Saber Feedback. He also hosts the Bootstrapped.fm podcast.
Key Points
Your early customer avatar might not be your final customer avatar
SEO takes persistence
If you can, delegate.
Cancellations are great feedback
Talk to your customers as much as possible
Show Notes
Contact Details
Transcription
SPEAKERS Steve McLeod, Conor McCarthy
Steve McLeod 00:02
The prerequisite you have to learn how to do that you have to stick it at doing the same thing. If you just like flitting around from marketing attempt to marketing attempt, or you know just doing it for two months and then not doing it for a while, I think you're just going to frustrate yourself and waste your time.
Conor McCarthy 00:19
Hello, hello, everyone and welcome back to the first 10 podcasts where I interview Business Builders on their first time customers who they were, how they found them, how they talked to them, and what effect they had on their business so that you can learn what worked and what didn't. Before we jump into the conversation today, I just want to do a little housekeeping. I'm releasing a new course called the freelancer marketing habit on March 29. The goal of the freelancer marketing habit is to help you get more freelance clients by working with community of committed freelancers to develop a great marketing habit. I've seen firsthand the compounding power of a good marketing practice. And it's something I wish I had started years ago. So that's why I'm starting this group. The Freelancer marketing habit is 30 days long. It's just 30 minutes per day. And all we do is work on marketing your freelance services. It's for coaches, it's for designers, it's for consultants. Basically if you're a freelancer, you're more than welcome to come along. Check out my website Conor mccarthy.me For more details, and there's a link in the show notes too. And now on to the show. My guest today is Steve McLeod. Steve is the founder of Barbary software. That's the company behind to SaaS products called feature upvote and Sabre feedback. He also hosts the bootstrapped.fm podcast, Steve is a serial bootstrapper to his core on a really love talking about his journey here. It's a real kind of highs and lows adventure, we chat about loads of stuff, such as the process of spotting and acquiring failing businesses that still have potential about how your early customers might not be the customers you finally end up with, and about how cancellations can actually be really great feedback. When you're a SaaS business. We also touch on the power of sticking with a solid b2b marketing strategy, and how hard that can be about understanding how SEO just takes time, and what metrics to pay attention to, and when to pay attention to them. We talked a little bit about onboarding sequences, and also the value in making hypotheses about what channels to use when you're going out there looking for customers, and also about how to be persistent with those channels. So with all that said, Please enjoy my chat with Steve cloud. Hey there first 10 podcast listeners. I'm here today with my friend Steve McLeod. Steve, first of all, thank you very, very much for taking the time to be with us here today.
Steve McLeod 02:44
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be on the show.
Conor McCarthy 02:46
Do you want to tell us a little bit about you're starting out as a business builder? Sure,
Steve McLeod 02:51
sure. My first attempt was a long time ago, and I did everything wrong, and it failed dramatically. And it's I'm still got the scars from that. So I will try to not talk about that one. Then about four or five years ago, I started a product called feature upvote to allow customers to get demanded feedback from the customers. That's doing pretty well. And that's what actually pays the bills these days. So that's how I got the start. Would you like a more comprehensive version of this?
Conor McCarthy 03:23
Go comprehensive. Let's see what comes out.
Steve McLeod 03:26
Okay. Okay, so I'm going to add another bit that I've skipped between the dismal failure and the feature update, about 1213 years ago, somebody your listeners might know of Patrick McKenzie, he was on the same internet forum that I was on. And this is a guy now works for stripe and has a lot of following amongst and startup community. But back then, he was just this guy that haven't been on the same forum as I was. And he issued this challenge, a 30 day challenge to start with an idea. And within 30 days to get it. On the web published the payment process done. He like they recorded an MVP today a minimum viable product. But back then it was just like a version one, you're embarrassed stuff. And the idea is that a whole bunch of us would do it together. We'd all blog together. And some people would somebody would come in, like aggregate all those blog posts until one mega blog post and the ideas, the community idea would push us forward. And I jumped at that thought that sounds great. And I would use this as a chance to have a second go starting a business. And this time, I'll try not to make the mistakes I made the first time and I'll just aim to get in any form I can a product that's actually purchasable by people. And it was just supposed to be an experiment for me. I didn't actually expect it to work. I wanted to learn lessons. Well, actually within six months it became my livelihood when I cancelled by quit my day job and so on.
Conor McCarthy 04:53
Cool. That's amazing. I love that. What a what a what a happy meeting of minds on the internet.
Steve McLeod 04:58
It's great. You know, do you know Patrick McKenzie?
Conor McCarthy 04:59
I follow him on Twitter.
Steve McLeod 05:00
Yeah. So it's just amazing for me to think that this this guy who was just a very helpful guy in a forum back then it's now become this like, really influential person. And to see that happen, it's remarkable. It's kind of I kind of feel like I was a little proud that I got to know him before that happened. Yeah, it's
Conor McCarthy 05:20
kind of what the internet should be, isn't it? Whereas Yeah, people, people put challenges like that is in the interest of the people who will hear it and look, look into where you are today. Because of that, that connection, that relationship, it's really cool. So that
Steve McLeod 05:32
product never really became huge. But like I said, it became a replacement for my day job. And after some years, I got kind of sick of working on it, it was a desktop app for consumers. And I was facing the same problem every day. And I seem to have exhausted the chance to grow it. And one of the problems I was facing with that is I was getting too many feature requests from existing customers, so I didn't have a good way to manage them. And that became the basis for our next product, which is I mentioned this feature update, which became much more successful. And I was able to sell the first desktop app to somebody else. And now I have nothing to do with that product.
Conor McCarthy 06:08
So interesting. This is a great already, this is a great story of a journey, you know, where you met someone online, you did this project, you took the learnings into the next project. So feature float became your your main, your main gig? Yeah, my
Steve McLeod 06:21
bread and butter. Yeah, now a small team working on this, a few of us are working part time and remotely.
Conor McCarthy 06:27
Okay. And do you remember, I know we're going to talk about a different business in a second. But even just for a moment to speak about the early days of feature offer, do you remember getting those first 10 customers, you know, it's
Steve McLeod 06:37
a bit dim, in my mind. It's amazing how much we forget so quickly about the challenges and the struggle. So I pulled up this excellent assess that I use the chord chart mogul to track statistics or metrics for my business. And that tells me the or the customers, my customers, I overhead ordered by when they started. And I can see exactly those first 10 customers. And it's, it's like a walk down memory lane. And it's really fascinating, because I can see they have nothing to do with the type of customers we're getting today, I can see that those first customers were a particular type of company. And today, we've really changed direction altogether, even though the product is fundamentally the same. That is the marketing that's changed. And the target audience.
Conor McCarthy 07:27
That's fascinating. Just because this is audio, you're looking at the actual charts now, which I love. You can see in real time. It's like, Oh, that's Wait a second. We started that there. And we ended up over here. That's a fascinating anecdote, actually. Because I think a lot of people starting to think I need to find that customer. And then I'm good. That's it forever. Whereas you actually changed your customer over time.
Steve McLeod 07:51
I did actually the very first two customers we ever got to Eva got the first one cancelled after three months, and the second one cancelled after two months. So maybe it was good. I changed direction. I remember the time being so excited. They both became paying customers in the same evening, I think within an hour of each other, and I was just ecstatic. And then when they both cancelled so quickly, I started asking myself is my product to DOD? Have I made a big mistake? Have I put all this time and energy into something? And actually, once people start using it, they realise they don't want it. And I have forgotten about that. I only remember now looking at those, these net payments, where one gave me a total of 71 years and the other one also 71 years.
Conor McCarthy 08:35
Yeah. And it's interesting what you what you slipped in there, you know, they started using it and realise they don't want it. And that's, that's a harsh truth, but a truth nonetheless. Because that in itself is amazing feedback.
Steve McLeod 08:47
Yeah, yeah. And, and then I look at the next eight, we got to make up the first 10 and three of them are still customers today. So Wow, some Yeah, that's that's the change here and you just don't know what each customer signs up. You don't know if you're gonna keep them for a month or for four years.
Conor McCarthy 09:07
Yeah. Wow. Okay, that's great little trip down memory lane there. That's really cool. I like that you can see that the live data as well. So jumping forward into your, your latest business. And I have to say, like, so we met on Twitter, what, two weeks ago, something like that. And because you you talked about getting your first 10. And of course, my that was a trigger trigger phrase for me. And I think your story of what a Novus so far is really interesting for for this podcast in particular. So do you want to join it? Tell us what you're up to?
Steve McLeod 09:35
Sure. So I mentioned that I sold this desktop app to another company. And they gave me some cash in the bank. And I didn't really know what to do with it. Like, I mean, the smart thing would be to save it for a rainy day, or to put it towards a house or something. But I decided to do something not so smart. And I decided to acquire another business. See, you know, those shows like what's this name Gordon Ramsay. See Kitchen Nightmares shows, I love this shows, or there's an American one called the Prophet where they go into a failing business. They just take a look around, they come up with their recipes to turn it around. And voila, now they have success. And I always think of myself as being able to do that, you know, I wanted to read the Gordon Ramsay of like SAS products. So there was this one company I'd had my eye on for, for some time, the previous owners now I own it to dump it. But the previous owner blogged very openly about what he was doing about the struggles and progress. And I've been following his blog. And it got to a point where he had clearly lost interest in the product. He had kind of stagnated. couldn't grow it anymore. And he went back and took a full time job. So he was just running this on the side, and it was basically in dying mode. And I saw an opportunity to take over this and do a Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares on it. So I contacted him and asked him if he was interested in selling and like, he clearly was convicted, he replied pretty quickly and said, Yep, what is your office? We I looked into the numbers, he shared his books with me, I came up with something that was reasonable. And yeah, I acquired that company. So that takes us up almost to the present day or to about a year ago.
Conor McCarthy 11:23
Okay, I just. So why did why did you have your eye on it? Is it in? Is it? Is it something that you're deeply interested in? Or did you more see the kind of business potential of what he was doing?
Steve McLeod 11:33
Kind of I kind of Sorry, just not too different from what my main product was. So I thought I would already understand how to go about marketing it. But I also saw potential, I turn this around. So I knew that he wasn't doing what I would consider some of the fundamentals of marketing, the b2b SaaS, and I had learned that the hard way over the last few years, and I thought, well, why not see if I can take what I've learned and repeated on another product, but also this time, tried to do it in a slightly different way, and jump straight to the things that work rather than experimenting along the way. It was a really solid product, it is a really solid product, Sabre feedback as the name of it, by the way. And I could see that it was a solid product that it was impressive people using it. They're big universities and other large companies as well, some smaller companies. But you know, the user base was about 40 or 50 people. And I thought solid product or marketing. If I could take that and just concentrate on marketing for a couple of years, maybe I can really make something out of this. So that's that was what triggered in my mind and the fact that I had the money available, and I could see that he had kind of lost interest in it.
Conor McCarthy 12:49
Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. He's kind of he's he proved the concept almost. And you saw the marketing potential in it. So when you say, and and just just to get clarity of what Sabre feedback does, do you want to give us what's the what's the timeline? Sure,
Steve McLeod 13:04
unless you add a feedback button to your website, it's really great to put onto your Docs or on an online course, or on a forum where people might run into problems since this little floating feedback button on the right hand side of the screen, and people click on it and the form opens up, they intend the problem, click Send, and it goes straight into your inbox. Or if you've connected it to JIRA, or Trello, goes into there as well. Okay, so a basic tool that a developer might think they could code up pretty easily. Of course, there would be wrong because there would be sort of little tricky edge cases that it has to work on every browser in every operating system, etc, etc. but very important for people whose sites are heavy and content and it has to be accurate. Hmm,
Conor McCarthy 13:48
okay. Okay. I want to go back to the thing you said a moment ago, you know, doing the basic b2b SaaS marketing doing it well, what are what are some of those things that you did to kind of get that engine going?
Steve McLeod 14:03
Okay, so, person after person, reverse successful b2b. cess says SEO was helpful. And they always say they wish they had they had started on SEO earlier, because it takes so long to ramp up. So I figured, let's just take it and concentrate on nothing but SEO for for the first couple of years. And I had a freelancer working with me at the time, but I was very good at creating content and with an eye for making sure met SEO guidelines. So she's not an SEO expert, but she has a good understanding of it. She writes good content, I figured why not just unleash her on it and see what we can do. Another fundamental was to talk to customers, rather than guessing at what goes on the website. Contact as many customers as possible and ask them why are you using our product? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? How would you describe it? What would you change about it? And if you're going to recommend it to somebody else, what about it? Is that it is that you would recommend, and well tuned out hard to get people to answer, but we've had a few people to answer and we use that as the basis for creating a new website.
Conor McCarthy 15:16
I love that. That simple. You know, when you say b2b SaaS marketing, people might think, Oh, my God, this is sounds like a really big deal. Like a strong part of your approach was just to talk to customers and ask those simple but important questions.
Steve McLeod 15:32
Yeah, and you know, I just still don't do enough of it. So we contacted people early on, when I say we, the freelancer did it for me. It was also something I was experimenting with Sabir feedback was, rather than doing everything myself tried to delegate as much as possible, also as an experiment. So you're the freelancer did was context now, then, because of family reasons. She's not available for a while. And I've completely let go of contacting customers. And I've only just started again last week, realising Actually, this is something I have to keep doing, I have to keep contacting every single person who buys the product, and ask them, why did you buy it? Why do you what are you doing with it? What do you like about it? What don't you like? Some people answer? Not many people do, but some do.
Conor McCarthy 16:19
Yeah, yeah. And, and I have been on the receiving end of those emails after buying a product. And knowing that this product is is early in the market, and I really enjoy giving feedback. And maybe it's just me, but I when you know, someone is starting out, and that this feedback actually will make a difference. I think it's a really useful thing to do. You know, there's plenty of other automated emails from gigantic silver companies that I'm like, they don't need my help.
Steve McLeod 16:47
So kind of Do you have any tips for how to make those emails seem like they're not auto generated? Like I am literally writing them by hand? Well, typing them by hand, there's nothing auto generated, but I'm no as I send them, it must come across as something that's been auto generated. Yeah, any idea? Any tips on how I could make it seem like I'm human?
Conor McCarthy 17:06
Oh, god, this is, this almost gets into the field of copywriting. I think when I think back on the ones that I responded to, I think there was some element of a story in there. And you have to do it quickly. You can't take three pages to describe your journey. But if you can quickly impart the idea that this is this is that you're passionate about this, that this is something you're working really hard on. And that the feedback that the customer gives will actually make a material difference if you can impart those things in an email and in a nice way. But sorry, in a, I suppose more a compelling way in a way that people want to read it. I think that that is the stuff that people respond well to. That's what I've responded well to in the past at least.
Steve McLeod 17:53
Interesting. So that means what's hard to write good copy. Right? There's a reason why copywriters exist as a profession. And yeah, maybe I need to find such a person to to help me with the content.
Conor McCarthy 18:05
I mean, like I said, to be like words, words are free. But if you get it right words, words have weight. So you can you can draft you can keep working at this in like offline, if you like, and sending it to friends and confidants and people just to say like, how does this read? How is this reads like testing this stuff? And then test your real customers? Of course, but time spent doing that? I mean, if you could, you said you don't get that many customers reply. But if you could double that number, whatever it is, that's just a huge difference. for probably a small amount of time investment. In the fraudulence
Steve McLeod 18:40
what is working well is writing to sign up customers. So not once you've converted to pain, but the ones who have just started the trial. And I write just just the sentence like, what what business challenges do you have that made you sign up for cyber feedback? Again, if I can I just put in something that indicates I actually have looked at their site and know what they're doing. For example, late last week, a German company signed up or a guy from a German company signed up. So I managed to start the email on my clumsy German, and then after a sentence switch to English and said, it's better for both of us to like, continue in English. And he replied, and he replied, at length, because I was obvious I was a human.
Conor McCarthy 19:19
Well, that's really like, I'm slowly because that is hilarious. If I got an email that started off, it would like just switch to another word. I think that's, that's brilliant. There is a human work behind this. So that's, I like that a lot. You know, I'm surprised more people don't do of course, like, again, this is a scale issue. But you know, if someone signs up from a company, check that person out on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, you might find something that connects you even more deeply to that person and why they want to use the product. Because again, when it comes to first 10 those customers have a huge influence on what your product becomes. It's the initial initial conditions, like so. So actually on that, do you want to do want to talk a little bit about Would you when you when you took over the company? Do you remember how many people were using the product were paying for the product
Steve McLeod 20:06
paying for the product is different from yours? Sure, it was about 50? Well, I think 45 was 50 when we started the negotiations, but for various reasons, one of which mean pandemic, it took about three months to get the acquisition finished up. And I think we're down to about 45 customers, and maybe maybe even lower, maybe about 40. And since then, we're from last about 10. And we've gained exactly 10. And that's why I'm on the show the customer just just last month, and it was definitely in a decline. So it had peaked at about 50 customers and about four and a half $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue US dollars. And now it's down below 4000. But I think we've finally stopped the decline and started the centre. It's been hard work much harder than I expected. Gordon Ramsay makes it look easy. magic of television. I often wonder if you go back and look at those restaurants like a year or two later how they're doing?
Conor McCarthy 21:10
Yeah.
Steve McLeod 21:11
And then you find out the truth. And that was also the truth with me. It's either I'm not as good at marketing as I thought, or this stuff's just hard to turn around a company that or a business that clearly needs some work.
Conor McCarthy 21:26
Yeah, but but that is, but that works. I mean, the let's call it the back office, the actual value proposition of what it does works, because people are signed up and people are staying. Yeah, of course, you want more people to do that. And so So you went through your last 10 and you gained 10? What was it like gaining those 10? Do you remember any specific stories or any strategies used?
Steve McLeod 21:47
Yeah, so we got one the first month after I acquired it, and on the next month, and I thought, Okay, this is this is steady, we'll just keep this going and gradually increase it. But then there was, I think it was seven months of nothing, not a single new customer. And I was asking myself if I made a big mistake if I throw my money away. And occasionally, I'd go through the signup flow and the payment, subscription flow, just to make sure that everything still worked, because I couldn't work out what's wrong, like we haven't changed the product. If anything, we've made our website a lot better and more informative. So why are people not buying? And then eventually, the 10th month, we had four people come become paying customers all in that month. And then I was a sigh of relief. But again, I was thinking like, this could just be like an anomaly. You know, you can't judge too much by one month. But then the following month, we did that, again, another three customers. And I feel like with flight, we've pushed through to a to a new level, a new norm, from which we want to build upon. And we've actually gone past that. So Did that answer the question? It was?
Conor McCarthy 22:53
Yeah, it does. It's interesting. Now I'm kind of curious to see, you know, someone signed up. And then for seven months, no one signed up? Did you do something in those seven months, that in the 10th and 11th. month, you got four and three respectively.
Steve McLeod 23:06
And we did a lot of things. And this is part of the problem is with such a small number of people coming to the website and signing up. It's really hard to test things. If anything happens, like you just don't know if it's random noise or if it's the result of work from months ago, or whatever. So I have some theories. But I don't have concrete answers. One theory is that SEO just takes a long time, I thought because this product had been around for a few years, that any changes we did to the website, Google will pick up very quickly, apparently, Google search results reward. Age. So I've heard if you've got a site that's been around for a long time, and Google thinks this is genuine and authoritative. So I figured the changes we made to the site would very quickly start ranking in Google. But you know, we put up a new page about one month after we took over the company. And it took six months for Google to even start acknowledging that page and send anyone there. We're now doing well from that page. And that could be the answer to the question. It could be that this page is now ranking in the top one, two or three positions for the keyword retargeting. But, so perhaps it was something like that. But then it's this SEO stuff is slow.
Conor McCarthy 24:19
Yeah, I've heard that from a few places, there's probably a, an image in the marketing world of like, just start doing SEO, and then you'll immediately hit the top of the Google rank, and then the sales will fly in. But yeah, it's, you're you're building a foundation of content, so or not even not necessarily content, but you're building a foundation of a strategy. And I think that should take time. You know, I think you should be around for quite a while. So it means that the people who get bored after three months, and maybe weren't there to provide the value that you're providing leave and it's your data for all the right reasons.
Steve McLeod 24:57
I think that's too easy to do as well as you try I SEO and after two or three months, you've seen no results. And you just think I'm doing this wrong. I quit. I'm gonna go and try something else. Yeah. And yeah, it's a strategy that only rewards persistence. Unfortunately, until it starts working, you can't tell? Is it going to work eventually? Or is am I doing it wrong? Or see just no audience for the content? I'm writing?
Conor McCarthy 25:21
its face to face marketing.
Steve McLeod 25:22
Sorry, if I keep praying to whoever, yeah, ever greater power that they'll reward by Seo? I'll have to try that approach.
Conor McCarthy 25:34
Yeah. Pray to the algorithm. To go
Steve McLeod 25:36
back to your question, though, what did I do different that may have resulted in there is something else we did. And I think in December, I think it was December, I put in a proper email onboarding sequence. So it used to be you signed up, you got an email saying, Hey, thanks for signing up. Here's a link to your account. And then, you know, a few days later, I'd say halfway through trial, and so your trial is almost over. If you don't do something, if you don't pay, it's going to be cancelled. But it's not much more than that. And with the advice of somebody who specialises in onboarding emails, I put together a sequence of emails where each they get sent at each stage in your trial. It's a 10 day trial. And each email emphasises a different part of our app, or of our product, just one thing per email. Try to make it short and pithy. Maybe I will need to put in the hands of a copywriter sooner or later. And perhaps just perhaps that was the magic thing? No, maybe maybe it's a combination of things. The SEO started kicking in the and the onboarding emails happened? I don't know.
Conor McCarthy 26:45
Yeah, it's it sounds like it can't go wrong, though. I mean, the email onboarding sequence, I think, that will always have value. I mean, because that's very customer focused. That's you kind of going well, what if I was a customer and I was in their shoes? What would I like? What would make my life easier in using this product? So I think that was probably a good idea, and time well spent to help them understand what you do better. Hmm. So you were telling me things that you did change in those seven months where there weren't any sales coming in. But was there anything that you didn't change in that time?
Steve McLeod 27:17
That's a very good question, Connor. Yeah, we were very intentional about, I figured like, there was nothing wrong with the product. So we're not going to change the product. In fact, the product seemed really solid. So we weren't going to go trying to add new features or redesign or anything. That stuff I think, is I'm a coder at heart. It's my background. And as coders get addicted to product improvements and coding, and we think that that's the solution to everything. So I told myself, don't go down that path, because it's clearly not what's wrong, until we start getting decent amount of traffic to the website. And decent number of people making trial signups and a decent number of people converting to paid customers, any time spent on product development is a waste of time. Well, it's not a waste of time, but it's the wrong focus. I tried to keep a very intent focus on what the real problem was with the product, which was the marketing.
Conor McCarthy 28:10
Yeah, that's a really interesting point in time, because it would be easy to kind of go as the product is broken, as opposed to what you were doing to market and sell it. So yeah, that's, like, I like that. I think I think you did the right thing. And and how would you say it's doing now how do you feel about the systems you put in place back then,
Steve McLeod 28:31
yeah, I can really see an uptick. So I'm pretty much addicted to Google Analytics and AI, one of the first things I did was polish up our use of Google Analytics and the products and there was like, the docs are on a different domain. And the blog was on a different domain, I think an image joined to one and started tracking this stuff, and making nice graphs every month. And that, I can see the idea as to steady growth. From a point in which the website traffic was just like, at a tiny level, complete a level get there would never work for a b2b business, SAS business at that is, and I'm watching that slowly steadily creep up. And it's now at about three times the level of what it was when I acquired the product. And hopefully, I can keep that going up for another another year, maybe we can double or triple it. Again, I think at that point, we'll have a sustainable product if the other metrics continue to improve as well.
Conor McCarthy 29:27
metrics are an interesting one. I think that's another place that people can kind of almost get lost when they're looking or looking at the house. And in the early days, the figures aren't great for anything. So is there a point at which you say, start paying attention to the figures more,
Steve McLeod 29:44
I would actually say pay attention to some metrics from the beginning. And particularly in Google Analytics, look at your website traffic each month, not per day, not per week, but each month because good article or one good improvement on your search engine rankings. Or really move the needle in the early days, if you only have 100 visitors per month, and you managed to get an extra 50 per month, like that's a 50% increase, like, once you really established you're never going to get that type of growth. But in the early days, it can be really real. For the for the motivation and the morale to see that. Well, I've just gone up by 50%, even though it was only like 50 more visits a month. Yeah. So it's a lot of things I wouldn't measure. But that, for me was the starting point was to check how much traffic we're getting every month and really concentrate on doing what we can to get that going up.
Conor McCarthy 30:38
Okay, right. Yeah, that's, that's good advice. And just because we're talking about marketing so much, is there any marketing books that you'd recommend people read, especially for the for the b2b space.
Steve McLeod 30:49
So one that's really great for anybody who has just made a product and does not know how on earth they get customers this traction by Gabriel Weinberg, he's the founder of DuckDuckGo. You probably familiar with this book, I found that very helpful with feature upvotes on the product that actually pays the bills. Even even though I had had experience with business, I still when I created that I was just staring into a void of no web traffic, no visit is. So I asked somebody who knew what they were doing, how I can get my first 10 customers? That was my very question, actually, I wrote to him said, What tips do you have for getting my first 10 customers, and he recommended this book, and I bought it and I read it twice. And it's awesome. It outlines 17, I think it's 17 different potential channels you can use and the pros and cons of each and which ones right. But then it also recommends that instead of trying them, or you just try one or two, and you do it hard for six months, you really like proving your hypothesis, my hypothesis is that this traction, this channel is going to work for me put everything you can into it, focus and then assess after six months, whether it's work was starting to work, if so, double down is the same goes. And if not, then move on to another channel.
Conor McCarthy 32:05
That's really, really good advice. A couple of people have recommended the book. But I like that you've gone a step further to recommend how to actually get value out of out of the book. And I think setting yourself some hypotheses and testing them is a really valuable thing to do. And actually, you seem like the kind of person who is comfortable with sticking with a process, let's say even even when that process is not returning results, as you talked about a moment ago? And is that is that something that's unique to your personality? Or do you have? Do you have a way to stick with the things that you set out to do?
Steve McLeod 32:40
If I had a superpower, it would be persistence, that I'm able to just turn up every day, the same time and do the same thing. Even when I'm beginning to despair, and I'd rather be out like outside on my bike or I live just 10 minutes walk from the from the Mediterranean, so I'd rather go to the beach or something. No, it's my superpower. And it's, it can probably be developed and people who don't have that as a natural ability. But I think it's it's a prerequisite, you have to learn how to do that. You have to stick it at doing the same thing. If you're just like flitting around from time from marketing attempt to marketing attempt, or you know, just doing it for two months and then not doing it for a while I think you're just gonna frustrate yourself and waste your time. So I don't have any any tips on how to do that. Like it's like you're trying to turn a language or to exercise or quit smoking or something like any of these things like it's easy enough to say just do it but I don't know the the answer.
Conor McCarthy 33:46
No, I think that that's that's really useful to hear. And would you do would you buy another company again? Would you do what you what you're doing right now?
Steve McLeod 33:55
If I was sensible, no, I would just concentrate on the two that I've got perhaps even eventually sell one and concentrate on one because it's nothing like focus but I know myself and I'm probably going to go down this path again. I also get bored easily I said I like I'm able to stick it stuff but also I do need some variety in what I'm doing and that was one of the motivations to for buying Sabre feedback is it was just a new challenge and something different to do so that I wasn't just doing always to make it easier to stick it what I was doing with my other product was to have this other thing going on in the background. Okay,
Conor McCarthy 34:31
that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, you have a nice balance of the of the certainty uncertainty you know, you you know you're working on which are also kind of curious to get to find out about new things or to get involved in new things is important, but my advice would be just stick at one thing at a time. It's so much easier. Given all your universal principle.
Conor McCarthy 34:53
I think do one thing really well don't have as much.
Steve McLeod 34:56
You do as I do not as I do.
Conor McCarthy 35:00
Just as a wrap up question I always ask what would you what practical advice would you give to someone just starting out to find their first 10 customers?
Steve McLeod 35:07
Talk to them. So I'm going to assume you're at this point where people are at least coming to your website or trying your product, talk to them, talk to each one of them. And, you know, even if this just one or two people talk to them, in fact, I think this first couple of people will respond, because it's going to be very obvious when you're just starting out that you are just starting out, we think we've put on a very professional facade. But it's obvious when a when a product is new, and a site new and somebody is new about writing these emails, talk to anyone you can if if you don't have anyone to talk to who's signing up for your product, find people who are in your target market and talk to them. For example, in a non pandemic world, you can go to meetups, where people who are in your target market go and just tell them what you're doing and ask if they'd be willing to try it out and give you feedback. The more you can do that, the better.
Conor McCarthy 35:58
I think that's really great advice to wrap up this episode. And is there anything else you want to want to tell us about? I'll obviously include all your contact details in the show notes. And I do recommend people check out your businesses. But is there anything else you want to you want to tell? Before we wrap up?
Steve McLeod 36:14
I'd be happy to hear from anybody who wants to know more about what we've talked about. You can contact me on Twitter, at Steve off MacLeod or write to me at Steve at battery software.com I'm always happy to give some advice or or hear what you're doing. Cool.
Conor McCarthy 36:30
Thanks for that. Yeah, you were very, you're very generous on Twitter. I see you there all the time helping out. And thank you very, very much for taking the time to speak with me today. There's tonnes in there, I know that my audience will love. So yes, thank you for your time and your smarts.
Steve McLeod 36:43
Thanks, Connor. It's been a pleasure.
Conor McCarthy 36:46
That's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that there was something in there that was actionable and insightful for your business. Do check out the show notes for more information on what we discussed, as well as ways to contact my guest. And it would really make by year if you could help me grow the podcast by leaving a rating or even a review. Helping you identify and create those first 10 customers is what I do. So if you like what you hear on this podcast and want more information, including a bunch of free resources on how to find your first customers and grow your business, do check out www.first10podcast.com, or find me on Twitter @TheFirst10Pod.