#39 - Corey Haines of Swipe Files
[#39] - Pro-Level SaaS Marketing with Corey Haines
"When people are actively looking for a product like yours, and you're not marketing it, you are actually doing an act of disservice. You are starving them of something that they need, that they could use. By not marketing, you're putting a ceiling on your potential." – Corey Haines.
Are you currently creating or marketing a product in the SaaS space!? If so, you will love and learn so much from this week's episode with SaaS marketing expert Corey Haines. Corey is a marketer, entrepreneur, podcaster, investor, and soon to be author who is on a mission to help people and their products, services, and content get the recognition that they truly deserve.
Corey is the mastermind and creator behind the popular Swipe Files and has consulted with numerous start-ups on growth and marketing, including SavvyCal, Evercast, and Holloway, to name but a few. Throughout this episode, Corey shares his go-to research methods, the importance of live customer experience feedback, and marketing cheat codes, and reveals his three tried and true methods guaranteed to bring your first customers through the door. Key points throughout include:
An introduction to Corey Haines.
Obtaining Swipe Well's first customers and the creation of Swipe Files.
Communicating with potential buyers on social media platforms.
Dripping marketing: striking the right amount of marketing ahead of product launching.
The key to mapping out appropriate marketing methods.
Overcoming the fear of marketing.
How avoiding marketing is an act of disservice.
Methods for understanding your customer's needs.
The power of asking why and the benefit of running polls.
Navigating through career challenges and failures.
Advertising conversion: does it really work?
Corey's business book recommendations.
Lessons to be learned from activating a landing page.
Corey's advice on obtaining your first ten customers.
"You do need marketing. You have to treat it as an investment, something that's going to pay dividends later." - Corey Haines.
COMING SOON! Join the waitlist to get your hands on Corey's forthcoming marketing handbook Founding Marketing HERE. We do not doubt that this book will feature on many guests’ recommended lists in future First 10 podcast episodes.
"Without promotion, something terrible happens. Nothing! – PT Barnum.
Connect with Corey Haines:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-haines/
https://twitter.com/coreyhainesco
https://www.swipefiles.com/foundingmarketing
Connect with First 10 Podcast host Conor McCarthy:
https://www.first10podcast.com
https://twitter.com/TheFirst10Pod
https://www.linkedin.com/in/comccart/
Resources:
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+mom+test
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
https://www.amazon.com/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning-Customers
Check out my podcast partners!
Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1389931
Otter:
https://otter.ai/referrals/ETRNKY16
Calendly:
https://calendly.grsm.io/ilev18qxpn1e
This podcast was produced in partnership with podlad.com
SPEAKERS
Conor McCarthy, Corey Haines
Corey Haines 00:01
I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the most of this, we're gonna get as many users as we can as fast as possible and not just kind of let it be up to the whims of the Twitter gods or to the Google algorithm gods or you know, the word of mouth gods where you are just sort of praying and hoping that people will show up.
Conor McCarthy 00:19
Hello, and welcome to season four of the first 10 podcast. I'm your host, Conor McCarthy, and I help people start and grow their businesses. I do that through joint ventures, collaborations, coaching, and online workshops. In each episode of this podcast, I interview business builders about the early days of starting a business, about how they found their first 10 customers and got off the ground, so that you can learn what works and what doesn't. Please do check out my website at Conormccarthy.me for more details. My guest today is Corey Haines. If you're building or marketing a product in the SaaS space, get ready to take some notes. Corey really does live and breathe SaaS marketing and a quick glance at his profile online really is proof of that. He's probably best known as the creator of the hugely popular swipe files, which is stuffed with marketing ideas to help you grow your SaaS, as well as numerous courses and workshops and marketing has also filled the role of entrepreneur podcaster and investor as well as consulting with dozens of startups that everyone here would recognize. For example, Baremetrics Savvycal, Evercast, Riverside FM, Holloway, Beamer and Timetastic. In this episode, we talk about a lot of things, for example, marketing as you build your product, taking control of your marketing, the three ways to understand your customers, the value and asking why as many times as you need to, to get to an aha moment, getting closer to your customers, and iterating and shipping, your messaging, and so much more. Corey really is a true expert in this field. And I really hope that you enjoy this episode. First of all, Corwy, welcome to the show. And thank you for taking the time to be with us here today.
Corey Haines 02:00
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Conor McCarthy 02:01
Do you want to give us just a quick 60 or 90 second overview of you and your current business?
Corey Haines 02:06
Sure. So I've worked in last few years in the SaaS marketing world. I can't tell you sort of why and how it excites me but it's one of the hardest jobs in the world, to be honest. But I just love working with really early stage SaaS startups on marketing growth. So I spent a couple years at a local startup here in San Diego, where I'm based, called Cordial and kind of my crash course and marketing where I did anything and everything. I spent a couple years at Baremetrics, as the head of growth, got a really, really interesting kind of inside look into 1000s of SaaS companies and sort of how they operate and work and got to talk to a lot of the founders there. More recently, I've done a lot of investing, advising consulting, sort of the part time Head of Marketing for Savvy Cal, and then always helping members of swipe files, on their businesses as well, in various different, you know, levels and stages. But it's all SaaS marketing so that's what I talk about, dream about. It's always top of mind.
Conor McCarthy 03:05
That's awesome. And, I'll obviously include a link to your website in the show notes, you have so many interesting projects on the go. In just in this field of SaaS marketing, it's incredible to see what you've built. Let's go back in time, a little bit to something very early on, you can go right back to the lemonade stand if you want, but give me something in SaaS marketing, where you had to go out and find your first 10 customers?
Corey Haines 03:30
Yeah, well, I can give a couple of examples. I can talk about Swipe Files, or I can talk about Swipe Well. Maybe I'll talk about Swipe Well, as it's the most the most pertinent and recent project of mine. It's basically a swipe file builder. So with swipe files.com, that's sort of my like brand where I talked about SaaS marketing and teach others how to do it. But also wrapped in that, especially from like the early, the early days of it, it was really just about kind of writing these tear downs and analyses of landing pages and emails and ads, just marketing examples overall, right? So you build a swipe file is just a kind of collection of inspiration for marketing. And so I build this audience through swipe files, and it's monetized through a community membership, and courses and live office hours and sort of just access to me in general. But then I kind of got connected with a co founder. And we thought, hey, what's a what's a really like fun, kind of relevant project that we can ship in the next couple of months? That has, you know, high overlap with something that we're already working on. So we decided on why don't we just kind of productize this whole like swipe file thing? Because there's a lot of general purpose tools out there that do it sort of, well, you know, we have people just grabbing screenshots and putting it in their desktop folder or putting it in Google Drive, or they're sending it maybe to a little bit more sophisticated system like notion or Evernote or their Apple notes. Maybe they're creating like a little label in Gmail for things like that. But then that there's nothing truly built specifically for building a swipe file so, we thought, okay, let's do that. So now we're inviting our first users getting our first customers, we have a waitlist of over 800 people on the list now and we're manually inviting people on the onboarding calls that we can see exactly what they experienced for the first time and get their feedback, live in the moment. And so rewinding to just maybe two months ago, when we were building the waitlist from from scratch and getting our first users, I had the kind of the cheat code, almost the shortcut, just being able to email the swipe files newsletter, which is about 7500 people plus, saying, Hey, I'm building a SaaS tool. It's you know, it's about all the same things I've talked about building a swipe file, it's about collecting marketing examples about learning from other industries and best practices and trying not to reinvent the wheel. If you're interested sign up here. And you know, a few 100 people, just click that link, drop your email into another system. And and then we've been drawing from that list to invite our first users into the platform.
Conor McCarthy 06:03
Very cool. Very warm leads right there.
Corey Haines 06:06
Yeah, very, very warm. They know me, they've heard about me, a lot of them, follow me on Twitter as well. And so it was easy as just kind of clicking send, and being able to kickstart that list from scratch. You know, definitely a cheat code, it's a lot easier that way.
Conor McCarthy 06:21
Yeah, for sure. So when you were building the original, I love the idea of that, by the way, talk about building products that people want and need. That's, it's like swipe wireless. That's a great idea. When you're building swipe files, how did you? How did you go about getting people onboard onto that?
Corey Haines 06:40
Yeah, so swipe files, the original idea was, I was just going to basically create like a, a newsletter, it'd be like a free and a paid tier, where I would just write these tear downs and analyses of the best market examples that I could find, because basically, the whole kind of thing starts when I was at Baremetrics. And I was spinning up our affiliate program to test out and, you know, it came time to, you know, go all the like technical bits figured out about how do we implement this, and set up a stripe and cetera, et cetera, payout terms, whatever. And then it was time to actually launch it, I thought we should probably create like a landing page that explains how it works. And you kind of have to treat it as like a funnel, right of how do we find the right affiliates? Who will then go and get activated and actually share your metrics with other people? What the heck goes on a landing page for an affiliate program for a b2b SaaS tool, like, I don't really know, right? Like I'm in the game, but like, I've only ever experienced it as an affiliate for a couple other projects. So that's exactly what I did. I went around, tried to find the best examples that I could try to find really successful affiliate programs, because there has to be something that they're doing right with their landing page, right? And then I was like, Man, this is a lot like, it's, it took me a couple of days, to really collect all the examples. You know, do the analysis, talk to people about, you know, what worked, what didn't work, why they structured it this way, to actually, you know, write and figure out what's the best kind of combination of ingredients that we want to put in our landing page. So I basically wanted to do that, across anything, you wanted to do a welcome email, a trial, upgrade, email, a Dunning email, etc, etc, etc. And so it started really just as a newsletter, I think I just put it up on ConvertKit. And then I just started promoting it on Twitter and then because I have you know, kind of a part of the SaaS marketing and the bootstrap founder community on Twitter. A lot of people are interested in those same things, making marketing friends, I have a pretty good network. And so I got maybe my first 1000 subscribers that way, just by every week, publishing a new teardown and then marketing it on Twitter, just saying, hey, here's my new thing, you can read it here and subscribe for the next one.
Conor McCarthy 08:49
Cool, I love that. It's super, super practical, but also demonstrates an enormous amount of value. Like I'm nodding my head kind of going, I need I need to see more of those teardowns. Because they are so, when it's someone who knows what they're talking about, there's often so many aha moments to be learned, in a tear down or in a swipe file or whatever. Yeah, that's very cool. So when it, when it comes to people building a SaaS of any size there's always, I always feel there's a tension between let's build a thing and let's just keep building and we'll do the marketing later. Or the as well as the lesser seen version is no no wait, we should build a market in some, you know, not 50/50 but, we should get some kind of balance. How do you approach that particular conversation?
Corey Haines 09:36
Yeah, we're going through this right now in Swipe Well, because obviously I'm a marketer, and I've been through this before and my co founder is strictly working on the product, I'm completely handicap on the product side of things I have, you know, opinions and maybe good tastes about what works what doesn't work, but I'm a marketer right and so I'm not gonna be in there. So I'm not just gonna like rest on my laurels and wait for him to be done quote unquote with a product before I start doing anything, I want to be marketing it well ahead of the product. But I also don't want to be over marketing it and hyping something up that we can't capitalize on in a timely matter. Because I think that there's a delicate balance between, I think of marketing as like, especially for early stage products, we don't have something really to show for or use yet, where it doesn't, you're starting from scratch and trying to catch up to all the things that a user might need. And then a certain point comes where you've checked all the boxes, you reached feature parity with competitors and now you're working on the really new innovative stuff. But starting from scratch is is really difficult. So you don't want to be marketing something that actually doesn't live up to the expectations that you've set. However, you want to be building up all this kind of potential energy that you can transfer into kinetic energy one day where you're kind of like, you're charging the battery to be used later, right. So that's why we build the waitlist. I'm sort of cross promoting across swipe files, I'm talking about on Twitter, everything that Conor builds, I'm tweeting about or we're trying to sort of build some anticipation for just to show people what it is that we're working on. But we're not running ads, we're really not focused on SEO yet. We haven't invited any affiliates yet. I'm also not aggressively marketing it or cross promoting it to the swipe files audience quite yet. I'm sort of just like dripping it out. And then, you know, once we sort of, we literally mapped out like we have, okay, before we market it this way, we want to have X, Y, and Z things done. Before we market it in this other way, we want to have these other things done. Before we go on prototype, we want to have these things done. But when you're just going cold people, and especially when you're trying to get a lot of other people on board to market it for you, then you don't have that kind of personal relationship to draw from, they're going to be a lot more harsh and judgmental, and they're gonna have higher expectations. And so, you know, we don't want to do the opposite of that was just to again, like, go into stealth mode or for me to just rest on my laurels and like wait for some magical day to happen when the product is done. It's never done. Right. But we're trying to map out. Okay, what is the appropriate amount of marketing for the stage of the product at its at today? And there's always some marketing to be done at each stage.
Conor McCarthy 12:46
Yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah, one of the things on your website is, you know, if you say something like, If you build it, they probably won't come, which is basically the tagline of this podcast as well. There is that sense of like we'll just build it and have a notion version and people love it. But marketing itself is such a loaded term isn't it? it's like, I think it kind of scares a lot of people away. Weirdly enough, is there, kind of an odd question, but how would you talk to someone who is a little bit marketing, marketing, adverse or marketing afraid? Let's say? How would you how would you have a conversation with them about about marketing without using the N word?
Corey Haines 13:28
Yeah, no, I talked about this all the time because the main kind of person that I work with through swipe files is kind of that founder, developer kind of persona, where it's someone who's an amazing product builder, who has a vision, a dream and the chops to build something great. But they don't like the self promotion. They don't like the even like the work involved with trying to build hype, and it just feels disingenuous, and maybe a little bit manipulative. But going back to something you just said earlier, I just saw this amazing quote from a guy named PT Barnum, he says, Without marketing, something terrible happens, nothing. And that really is the problem. It's true. You know, I wish that marketing didn't have to really exist, it would be amazing if users just showed up magically, and people just found you. And if word of mouth could just take you from zero to millions of dollars and there are people just out of the goodness of their heart, you know, being real evangelist for you and going out there and really spreading the word about what your product does and who it can help. But that's just not the reality. You You really have to put in the work you have to invest in it. And you kind of have to bite the bullet about the necessary evil of promoting it to a certain degree. Of course, again, I think that people kind of conflate marketing with advertising a lot of times. Those are two very separate things, you know, advertising There's just one lane of marketing. But people also conflate marketing with manipulation or with, you know, lying or with, you know, pulling people strings. And using all these psychological hacks to make people do and buy things they don't need. I think that's largely a overreaction to a lot of consumer marketing, where we see these big brands, you know, in companies that are marketing things like tobacco, or, or, you know, high fructose corn syrup, sugar filled sodas, right, or all these kind of materialistic things that people don't actually need. I think the benefit of SaaS and software, the reason why I love it in the first place, is because it really brings a lot of value to a person into a business, it gives someone literal superpowers where they can do things they weren't able to do before. And they will gladly pay you, as long as that thing provides value for them. It's not this, you don't have to trick people into buying your software. In fact, if you do, they will quickly cancel, and you can easily refund them, that's not really a big deal. So I think a lot of what people have to get over is kind of removing a lot of the conflation, they will make with a lot of the negative aspects of what they've personally experienced in marketing. But then to just understanding that you do need marketing, you have to treat it as an investment, something that's going to pay dividends later, and that they can't get away with just hoping that people are going to show up, or really putting the burden and the onus on the users to spread the word for them. It just it doesn't happen. Or at least it doesn't happen as quickly as they want to. Even if you have the companies like zoom and Dropbox, and these companies that seemingly have kind of just taken off out of nowhere, and maybe you haven't seen their marketing directly, but it just seems like oh, yeah, they didn't really do a lot of direct marketing or advertising. Yeah, a lot of people did marketing for them. Right? They sort of got lucky, they're the outliers a little bit, but even then, who really wants to put the fate of their startup into the hands of, of luck, right of just sort of happenstance. Right? Yeah, I really wanna inspire people to take control of their destiny and, and be able to accelerate things, right, pour gasoline on a fire, really say, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the most of this, we're gonna get as many users as we can as as fast as possible. And we're going to make something out of this and not, and not just kind of let it be, you know, up to the whims of, of the Twitter gods or to the Google algorithm gods, or, you know, the word of mouth Gods where you're just sort of praying and hoping that people will show up.
Conor McCarthy 17:34
I love that there's a lot of this, there's a lot of gold and what you just said. And yeah, I mean, one of the things that struck me there is that marketing works, this is a thing. And yes, there is unethical marketing out there. But pretty much everything. And I mean this to the listeners of the podcast, like if you look around you now and I think you know what love has been marketed to you. Like there's been a connection between that piece of software, that physical product or whatever, between your needs, and that item, and it works, and you happily hand it over, you probably handed over money for it, but you feel like you got more value than the money you paid, obviously, or else you wouldn't buy it. So I just think trying to kind of reverse that and kind of go Oh, yeah, it is marketing, there is a certain amount of service in marketing, I always think, where you are like a good a good software product can be such a relief for in the right hands. And you've seen tons of, I mean, swipe files alone, you must see people, I've seen people on Twitter kind of going, a sigh of relief, I found Swipe Files like this, it just, it just solves such a big problem for them, or helps them get some more or achieve something.
Corey Haines 18:46
Seth Godin has a great quote, I'm gonna butcher it, I can't remember exactly what he says. But he basically says that, if you if you think of marketing, as delivering something that people need at that they're looking for, then marketing is actually doing a service for people. It's an act of service. And I love that framing. Because again, you're not just like shoving your product down someone's throat and saying, like, this is the best product and look at this, and please use it. When people are actively looking for a product like yours, and you're not marketing it, you are actually doing an act of disservice, you are starving them of something that they need that they could use. And so by not marketing, you know, you're you're capping, you're putting a ceiling on your potential, and you're not allowing all these people that could use your products to be stuck in their old ways. We stuck with their old systems and to use subpar products. And one of the other things that reminds me of is that I think especially for the kind of technical founder developer persona, they're usually very, very, very thorough in their product evaluation and their research and how they think about what to buy. Not everyone is like that though. Well, I think that it's very easy to kind of assume that people are these very rational buyers, and that everyone's going to do a lot of thorough research. And they're going to compare all the different alternatives. And, you know, Google go through the 10th page of Google for all the different things they could possibly use to solve that problem. Unfortunately, that's just not the case. Again, I wish that it was, but it's just not. And so you have to give people that shortcut of saying, Hey, we exist. Also, if you have this problem, we solve that problem. We know that there are a lot of other people that saw this problem, here's the ways that we saw the problem differently, or better. Also, we're running a deal right now, or we are making a special offer to make your life easier to get started. Also, now that you're in, here's, you know, 101 ways that you can use our product for all these other things, and how we can expand into organization and make the lives of your colleagues easier, right? You're basically just doing the work for them. Right. So I think that people just assume sometimes, especially that type of a buyer, that they're going to do all this research and think of marketing as you doing that research for them and just packaging it up for them and saying, Okay, here's all the information, we're going to be in your feed, we're going to show up on Google, we're going to be on Reddit, we're going to be in all these places. So we're going to be seemingly everywhere with all the information that you need to make your purchase. Because we don't again, we don't want to put the burden on you to go and do all the research to go and test out the product each one of them and, and make your own deductions about how you're better than our competitors. Do the work for them. Do the research for them package it up for them.
Conor McCarthy 21:36
I love that there's such a strong empathy, sense in there of Kanagawa? Well, if I was that person, and as much as possible, should we talk to your customers, obviously, but just in the first instance, like what would be what would I want just at the most basic level, what is the baseline product or service, and then what's better than that. And what's better than that, again. I hope you're enjoying this episode, and that there's some actionable and insightful advice that you can take out to your business, 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 10 customers and grow your business, check out first10podcast.com, that's 10 one, zero, or find me on Twitter at @thefirst10 pod. Now, you probably hear what I'm about to say on every podcast you listen to and it makes a really big difference to the show. If you find this podcast in any way useful or enjoyable, I'd be so grateful if you left me a review on iTunes, it really does make a big difference in terms of other people discovering the podcast. Also, if you leave a review, you will get to see your name and the review in lights. What I'll do is I'll design your words and post them online, tagging you on your project along with it. I know it's a pretty sweet deal. Okay, let's get on with the show. Actually, speaking of empathy, how do you go about understanding your customers better or helping your clients understand their customers better?
Corey Haines 23:08
Hmm. Three methods that I normally go back and go about, and in order one from like, easiest to kind of most time consuming, or, or most most challenging circumstances. But the first way, you can just do a lot of online sleuthing and kind of detective work, where you're going through review sites, and you're looking at reviews of not only yourself, but also of competitors alternatives, what people liked about them, what do they not like about them? What are the patterns between what they're saying, you can go through Twitter and use like their advanced search and see how people are talking about certain brands or products, or even just problems that they're experiencing. You can go through tools like Reddit, and you can search for common questions or even tools like Quora and you can look for keywords like how to, you know, plug in any keyword that your product solves for or just, you know, plug in the keyword itself and then see what questions people ask about those things or those experiences. So there's a lot of different methods, right between doing Google searches, going through forums, even listening to podcasts, reading blogs, just trying to find the patterns between review sites, that that you can draw a lot of insights from, without ever actually talking to someone. Now if you're open to talking to someone, but kind of like at a distance surveys are a great way, especially if you have an existing user base already. Even if it's just a couple 100 people doesn't really matter the size, of course, you're gonna get a smaller sample size draw from in your survey, but still, especially in the early days, you'll find that those people are probably gonna be more engaged. And so it's not like you're gonna get a 1% response rate, you might get a 10 to 30% response rate in that case. And you can ask really simple questions like, Hey, how'd you hear about us? Why'd you decide to sign up? What were you hoping to do and achieve by using our product? Was there anything that almost prevented you from sticking with our products, how do you think we should make this product? You know better? What are the challenges or experiences that were negative that you've had with our product or service? You know, really, really basic questions like that we can make a list of five, six, no, you don't want to make it too long. We just send that out to your list. Again, put it into a spreadsheet or to a Google Sheet. Find the patterns, right? Make the highlights, look for keywords, drop it into a word cloud and see what are the most common adjectives and nouns and words the people are using to describe. Each of their problems are just different answers. And then if you really want to go the extra mile, you can do interviews, just like we're talking right now on a zoom call. You can ask people either from the survey, to hop on a call for to ask some additional questions or to kind of dig in deeper to some of their answers. Or you can invite people you find through online sleuthing and just through you know, okay, this person tweeted this one. So this person on Reddit said this one thing once you can DM them say, Hey, I saw that you said X, Y & Z, I would really love to dig into that, could I make a donation to your favorite charity, or pay an hour's you know, time at your hourly rate, just to pick your brain about this problem that I'm hoping to solve? Amazing, now you're gonna hop on a call. And you can ask why 1000 times, right. So instead of just asking, Hey, how do we make our product better? Or tell me about this experience? Once they say something, you say, Oh, I'm interesting. Tell me more about that. Tell me more of that. Why is that? Did you try anything else? I think it's especially interesting when you're really trying to dig into kind of the job to be done of what people are actually trying to achieve at the end of the day. Whereas instead of kind of saying, surface level on online smoothing, and these surveys, man, you can really dig in deep, you can go beneath the surface of the iceberg and really dig into the meat of what they're trying to get at and you'll find some really interesting things about different buying behaviors and dynamics of the approval process, the research process, why this thing matters in the first place? What are the tools that they use, right, you're really just trying to dig in, like trying to get as much information as you possibly can to arm yourself with all the context you need in order to build the best product for that person and market it in a way that is congruent and aligned with the way that they're used to searching for and evaluating new products. Everyone has their own habits, every industry, every job type, every seniority level, is kind of used to or is accustomed to buying things in a certain way. And so I always use interviews as a way to kind of test are we marketing the way that that we should, based on the behavior that our target customers are already exhibiting, you might find that is completely different. You know, I remember, especially in my first startup job, we wanted to run a lot of Facebook ads. And we ended up finding that basically, everyone's on LinkedIn, running LinkedIn ads, much, much better results. It's very expensive, obviously. But we were sort of trying to, there are a lot of experiments we wanted to run, that seemed like really good ideas on paper. But then as it turns out, people in that industry only buy things a couple of different ways. Either they meet someone at an event, they get kind of a referral from another executive, or they get a LinkedIn sort of post or ad or content, or recommendation even on LinkedIn. So let's just double down on those three things, right, and just forget everything else, right, let's just, again, those are shortcuts to marketing the way that customers want to be marketed to. So anyways, yeah.
Conor McCarthy 28:40
That's yeah, love that market to the customer the way they want to be marketed to I don't know, who said, Whoever gets closest to the customer wins. Yeah, I've heard that somewhere, or someone famous. And it's true, because I think like you can read, there's so many great articles about how Uber or Stripe or whatever got got off the ground marketing wise. And that's great. But obviously, they're not to be copied and pasted into your marketing plan. And I think those conversations are, it's funny, because I know people can feel awkward even asking for the conversation. But they yield so much. It's just incredible. And And often what I say to people is that your superpower when you're going at building anything is that people do want to help. People really want to help, they might they may lie to you, if you ask them the wrong questions. So the question process is obviously important, but people really do want to help. And if you send out a genuine request saying, look, I'm building this tool to help alleviate this problem. You, I think you'd be you know, I think you'd have some really interesting or valuable information, would you mind? In my experience, people are like, Absolutely. People want people want to help out.
Corey Haines 29:55
I'll give you a really tangible example of just how it translates into marketing in particular, not even just the product that you build. But for swipe Well, I started doing a lot of these kind of same processes when we were first evaluating the product. And I was trying to figure out, what do we put on our landing page, right? What's just like a really simple message that we can stick on there. And so, I was doing a lot of online sleuthing, of course, I was asking friends just DMing them and emailing them what they thought or how if they had a swipe file, if they did, or if they didn't, how much they use it, how they use it, what they use it for. The things that annoy them right about the process. You know, I've done a couple of calls. It was actually an interesting, I ran a, I ran a twitter poll. And I asked people, if they had a swipe file, how often they use it. And basically ever everyone said, almost never, I was like, oh, yeah, I have a google drive somewhere. And so then I reached out to a lot of people, and I said, Hey, here's what I'm building. And I said, this will be a tool that you will actually use, because it does x y&z and fits your workflow through a Chrome extension, and it's easily accessible. And you can find things through tags, and etc, etc. And so ended up sort of making the headline, build a swipe file that you'll actually use, because that seemed to be like, the really big kind of crux is like everyone wants to have a swipe file. But people are skeptical of a solution that will just kind of like be in the background, and they'll just forget about it. But if I can market it in a way that says, hey, hello. So I felt that you'll actually use, then people are like, Oh, interesting, because I've never used my swipe file before. And now they're kind of intrigued. Well, why is it that I would use this one? What are the differences? It's sort of sparks that conversation that gets people to all the right, aha moments to get interested and get on board with the idea of the product.
Conor McCarthy 31:50
I love that that's really valuable. It's such an interesting response to the poll. Oh, no, I don't use them at all. So Wow. Okay, let's start there.
Corey Haines 31:57
Yeah, we'll plant our flag there and really market that. Yeah.
Conor McCarthy 32:01
So valuable. Are there any failures in your career history that you can talk about and why things didn't go as planned?
Corey Haines 32:10
Well, I'll tell you about going back to sort of the impetus of swipe files was that Baremetrics affiliate program, I don't know what it's doing today but when I was there, it was really a grind trying to get people to actually sign up as affiliates. Basically, my idea was, there a lot of agencies and consultants who work with SaaS founders, and, or at least, you know, consult on growth or marketing like myself, who be happy to have an extra stream of revenue. And especially, we were sort of in this commoditized market of SaaS Analytics between profitwell and Baremetrics. And chart mogul and stripe is building their own solution. There are a bunch of other things, you know, tools like pipe and cap chase and founder path are building analytics in house too. And so we thought, if there was anything that might give us an edge, it might just be the financial incentive of, you know, recommending the tool that has a affiliate program over the ones that don't, right? As it turns out, one, I think that the the price point is too low to really be financially rewarding, enough to incentivize people to push it that much. But it's also just a really, really small world. And there aren't enough people with a big enough audience for it to move the needle. So sure, we got conversions. Sure, we got traffic from it. Sure, it sort of looked positive from all things when I when I was there. But at the end of the day, people just there wasn't enough volume for it to really make sense as a viable channel in that market. I can take any, you know, a lot of other markets like the podcasting industry, affiliate programs are huge, because you have a lot of creators and bloggers and people talking about how to create a podcast. There isn't really that same thing in SaaS of how to build a SaaS product, or how to, you know, analyze your SaaS metrics, or all the nuances that involve Baremetrics directly. And so it just never really took off. We never really had anything that that really stuck there. Another one I can mention is was savvycal. When we were very early on trying to get our first, you know, just a free first few 100 customers, we had some initial traction when I came on board, then we're kind of testing out, okay, we got a new landing page, we got to this, we're launching that and launch our prototype. Let's test out Twitter ads. Because Twitter was like one of the main places that both Derek and I had had both gotten customers for various projects. But it's also kind of a grind and sort of very swinging when you're just working with organic Twitter, you're just having to like tweet a lot, create a lot of content, and it's something that I couldn't do for Derek to create these, you know, viral threads or who knows that that would really even move the needle for savvy Cal directly without Batavia or The Twitter has an amazing targeting system where we can find Okay, everyone who follows xy and z v C's, startup programs, brand accounts, you know, b2b SaaS influencers or just marketing influencers? Or we can, Twitter actually has really, really great targeting. Why don't we run ads? I probably spent a few $1,000, over a couple of months, had some conversions. But really, Twitter just does not convert well. Yeah, at least for us. Yeah. Again, I think that it's one of those things where just people aren't used to converting from a Twitter Ad into a customer. A lot of the Twitter ads are, you know, they're these big brand accounts like Lego and Apple and Samsung, and I don't know, like, there's just the all the ginormous brand accounts on there. Yeah. And even though it sort of looks like a native post, it also doesn't. And economics just did not make sense for savvy Cal at that price point to be marketing on Twitter. Again, with the amount of there was we're getting amazing impressions, amazing engagement, just the conversions were not there. Because who knows people don't want to Yeah, biped that way.
Conor McCarthy 36:17
It's so interesting. It was a good experiment. Overall, they were both good experiments show metrics on the thing that it's they're really they're almost not intuitive answers, you would take that, yeah, Twitter, you've had successes in the past, not that you're doing exactly the same thing. But so interesting, just the way people perceive it. When you were saying it, I could see myself kind of going oh, yeah, that might not stand out to me.
Corey Haines 36:40
And again, the hard part is that you never know until you try it. Yeah. And for someone else, it can be a completely opposite. Yeah, it just all depends on the product and the customer at the end of the day. And sometimes there's a mismatch with one or the other, or both on any given platform. And you almost never know, unless you try it. And even then, you know, there's 1,000,001 other factors that could be in the way but you just have to do your best.
Conor McCarthy 37:07
That's it, just keep keep running experiments. Just two more questions. When it comes to books, any books you can recommend, any ones you've loved or any classics of your genre?
Corey Haines 37:18
Yeah, the two I probably recommend the most are the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, which is about how to talk to your customers when they're probably lying to you. So back to that whole research method and just the right framing in the right way to approach talking to customers that doesn't introduce bias, and so that you will actually learn from it. And then the other one is Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. It's all about positioning and messaging, and essentially, how to create a value proposition for your startup. In these really kind of messy, crowded categories, you know, there's like the, the martec, 10,000, these days, right? We're just like, there's 1001 tools for any given problem, seemingly. But again, that really gets I mean, it's one, it's an amazing book, just in the way that it's written. It's very simple and short, and it's walks you through the whole process, step by step, I think through six different steps in general. But it's a really, really core piece of marketing. That's hard to nail and that no one really teaches you, you know, it's more than just like clever copywriting. It's very strategic about what does our product do? And who is this for? And really, at the end of the day, ultimately, how is this better than any other product for this given customer. And so you can really, really nail it down and distill it into a couple of pieces of this kind of like strategic narrative that you can weave that would be compelling to people. What we used to at Savvycal, when I first came on board, had a decent landing page, those converting fairly well went through the opposite awesome framework for positioning really nailed down; okay, why do people love Savvycal right now, even though it's half baked products, even though it's doesn't check all the boxes, we don't have feature parity with Calendly, or anything else like that? How do we create a wedge for ourselves, and the way that we communicate it, and we were able to triple the conversion rate from the landing page. And it's evolved even since then we've I think we're now on like, our third iteration of the landing page. So it changes and evolves and we've gone through the process twice now. But each time it yields better results, because you're really getting to what are the things that that clicked for people?
Conor McCarthy 39:33
Which is, which, I love how a book like this, I've so many of my guests recommend great books, but actually have the book, like to bring it in and use it and go through the process. Yeah, again, like 3x returns is fantastic. And what you said there at the end is also interesting the versions of let's say landing pages, because, again, they're there. There's sometimes a fear that I hear people are it's like this Landing Page has to be it. Whatever I write, it's set in stone and it's almost never.
Corey Haines 40:07
No, no, no. Yeah, even even a swipe well, you know, I talked about how it came to the process of that landing page and or the that headline and that sub header. I know it's not perfect, but I literally wrote it in like 10 minutes. You know, people really overthink the copywriting and the positioning. And I think you have to get out of your head, it's sort of that you can't see the forest through the trees. We have just like really mulling something forever. Just just skip it. Just write something down, run with it, learn from it, iterate on it later, right? But just just ship it.
Conor McCarthy 40:39
Yeah, just ship it, I love it. Okay, and the very last question, what would you say to someone who's going out today to find their first 10 customers?
Corey Haines 40:48
Man, I mean, really treat it like a science, reverse engineer, how your customers who you think will be our customers are accustomed to buying products like yours. Use the research methods that we talked about, get to know them try to learn everything you possibly can about them, try to take some shortcuts about, you know how similar products in your category grew, or what you think are some promising marketing channels. But especially for the you know, for the first 10 where your talking about, even if you're bootstrapped or, or VC backed, there's usually a couple of kind of tried and trued methods. I found on the on the spectrum of like, which channels work for the most amount of people, their channels like LinkedIn, and Quora, you know, niche conferences that like, that's really, really specific, you have to have like this magic combination ingredients. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are channels like sales, partnerships, and SEO, that pretty much work for everyone all the time, no matter what. So honestly, if I just had to distill it down to like, your three ways that you could get your first 100 customers, no matter what tried and true. Just one of these is bound to work. It's got to be sales, partnerships, or SEO, just try one of those three.
Conor McCarthy 42:07
I love that. Thank you very, very much for your time and sharing so much. There's, there were so many points in that, where like I could go really deep on this, but I obviously want to respect your time. But I'll, as I said before, I'll include links to all your fantastic projects in the show notes and I do encourage everyone to check out your website, because there's tons of interesting stuff there. But yes, thank you very, very much for being here with us today.
Corey Haines 42:33
Yeah, thanks so much. Feel free to follow me on Twitter as well. It's mainly the way to kind of interact and I tweet a lot of things but it's also a swipefile.com Swipewell.app. I am working on a book. I'll give a little teaser right now, It's called founding marketing, foundingmarketing.com If you want to join the waitlist and hopefully that'll be one of the recommended books in the future for guests.
Conor McCarthy 42:55
Cool. Cool. Thank you so much, Corey.
Corey Haines 42:58
All right. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
