Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • Posting a job posting for Account Coordinator position

Results:

  • System.ly Month to Date Revenue –
    • EMRR: $18,344
    • April Revenue:  
  • I got another blog post written
  • 3 strategy call with a client
  • 2 sales call
  • I narrowed my search down to 7 for my Exec assistant Position and just finalized an offer to someone I’m excited about, just waiting for them to accept.
    • Just had our Exec Assistant accept the role!
  • Start a job posting for Account Coordinator position with Infusionsoft experience.
  • Thinking a lot about our growth / scale challenges and have been in deep thought this week.
    • I have been speaking with other agency/client service owners that have scaled to $1mm to $10mm businesses to discuss scalability and just learn.
      • Learned a lot and had some great conversations thus far.Going to be working on our pricing plans and updating some language in those to be a bit more specific.
      • It really has me thinking about how to scale because even if we keep getting more clients it’s only a matter of time before we just need more people.
      • So i’m starting to think of ways to extend our offering in more scalable ways but not breaking our model. More to come on that

Plans:

  • 1 more blog post
  • Onboard exec assistant
  • Post part time coordinator position (TBD on our game plan)
  • I want to make some updates to our website to be less “help desky”
    • Put a request into our designer/developer to make some tweaks

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • Knock out sales calls for Buzznami – have not had a chance to focus on this yet. Today, cold email campaigns will be running so hopefully I can do this next week
  • Didn’t get a chance to focus on the demo process. More demo videos will be coming this week.
  • We did not end up going to the horse races as they weren’t running live races that day after all.

 

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $12.8k MRR.
  • MicroConf was as good as I expected and that’s hard when you have high expectations. Some of my personal key takeaways were:
    • Des Traynor CoFounder of Intercom when he said the only thing every user is guaranteed to do inside of your app is sign up. Really was a great way of signifying the importance of onboarding. Onboarding really was a theme throughout the conference that spoke to me.
    • Peter Coppinger of Teamwork just nailed his talk. I tweeted this as well, but it might have been one of the best I’ve ever seen. It was just hilarious, without even trying. He shared the story of how they purchased Teamwork.com. A massive gamble that worked out for them. But like so many of us, just did so many things wrong – yet just kept going and now they have like 370k users and are over the $10M ARR mark.
    • Had a great talk with Anthony Franco who has been a listener for awhile and he gave us some great feedback for positioning. Essentially he asked how we compared to EmailHunter and Clearbit and I told him those are a couple of our data providers. So he said, “you don’t compete with those guys?” I said “no not really, we actually take their data and verify it.” He said, “oh wow ok, so you’re like a layer on top of all of those types of tools?” I said, “exactly!” So we’re going to look at how we can best add this to the website for people who use those tools currently and might be thinking the same thing.
    • On the topic of onboarding, another statement that was interesting was from Ben Overstein who basically said people are more anxious when they have to create something versus when they can just edit something. So I started thinking about how we need to move the roadmap up a little bit for the email templates we plan on having in the app. Also trying to figure out how we can simplify or pre-populate things for the prospecting function within LeadFuze since that’s what gets used the most currently.
    • Lars Lofgren really gave me affirmation for my decision last week to focus on onboarding versus new user acquisition. He talks about needing to focus on churn prevention first, then upsells to existing accounts next, THEN focus on acquisition. I think as a startup though, you need to focus on acquisition out of the gate so that you have actual numbers to even measure. He mentions a 10% or higher churn rate as your business being on fire. Ours is at 13% currently. That said, we have a lot of users that are NOT in our target market so that makes it tough as well. I think once we get churn down to about 5 to 6% I am going to focus on acquisition of our primary market so that we can truly gauge product market fit.
    • Met with several other listeners, or scalers if you will, like Melanie Richards as well, she’s been a fan for awhile. Hung out with the crew I met up with last year for dinner most of the nights.  It’s cool to just see what progress everyone has made since last year.
    • My entire SaaS mastermind crew was there which was fun.
    • I stayed all day Wednesday as well just to kind of take in the takeaways I had and kind of use it as a mini Founder’s Retreat. It’s hard for me to pull off a weekend get away by myself for a retreat as that doesn’t go over well with the wife, but by extending the conference trip an extra day before and day after it helped. For anyone interested in learning more about Founder Retreats, Sherry Walling (Rob Walling’s wife) has a book out on the topic.
    • Kai Davis did an amazing job of note taking which you can find at MicroConfRecap.com
  • I mapped out three roles that I think will be our next hires. That’s for our customer success manager role, a head of growth role, and a sales manager role. Basically, I’ll be doing each of the roles myself and creating a defined workflow for each. Then, look to fire myself from that responsibility by hiring someone to take over.
  • Thursday was a catch up day and it is looking like I’ll be doing that through the weekend.
  • We rolled out a ton of bug fixes this past week which has me feeling good. Most of the major bugs have been ironed out now.
  • I completed our monthly statistics that I do at the beginning of each month to compare to the previous month and there were some interesting stats that I’ll share:
    • New Users down from 4634 to 1680. This is because the new website caused a shift in our rankings so our organic traffic plummeted by about the same numbers.
    • That said, new users to trials was 390. So this was a 23% conversion. Up from 6% from the previous month. The 390 trial signups was the most we’ve had, beating January’s 292 and February’s 283.
    • We had 46 paid signups for an 11.79% conversion there which is the third highest month we’ve had. I think we can get this to 20% though with a more proactive approach to onboarding.
    • I’m excited for our search rankings to come back, as it should mean an even bigger increase.
  • The software revenue is going in the right direction, but I am moving all focus to the software now. Our done-for-you revenue is going down because of this and that revenue are bigger chunks at a time. This means we’re actually running negative right now which is a little stressful. Especially because we need to bring on a Customer Success Manager.

Plans:

  • Major focus on onboarding. I am re-prioritizing the roadmap to focus on this right now.  
  • Continue to make bug fixes and improvements to the app while not focusing yet on new features.
  • I want to knock out a couple sales calls for Buzznami so that my partner can take over and has some good examples to follow.
  • I want to start focusing on our demo process with LeadFuze. I have a webinar being created, but also want to get into a good rhythm here.
  • I want to see about catching a Diamondbacks game with the wife. Not a great start to the season for us, but I’m not too concerned yet.

Resources Mentioned:

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