Greg Update

Fails:

  • I’m not as 100% sure on my hiring decision as I’d like to be

Results:  

  • MME $3488 New Biz: $2294 (7/10 – 7/23)  ($5782 combined)
  • Vacation
  • Re-energized with family.
  • Nyle handled MME tasks which was awesome
  • We worked out everyday but 1
  • Put a lot of thought into my next steps and whom I want to hire of the candidates I’m considering
    • I think i’ve got my game plan

Plans:

  • Send offer to employee candidate
  • Train and identify how we’ll start working together
  • 2 Sales Calls
  • 4 Launch Calls for new business
  • 1 Potential Partnership call
  • 1 Podcast interview – Chris Ducker’s show
  • 1 MME Strategy Launch Call
  • Insiders Call
  • Finish indoctrination campaign for MME
    • Affiliate opportunities
    • Mini Mobit course
    • Mini Mobile Primer
      • All need to take no more than 5-10 days to complete

Takeaways

  1. I needed to step back and unwind
  2. Getting more systems and my team into place is imperative so I can take future vacations

Justin Update

Fails:

  • Put in almost 60 hours this week. Definitely stressful with the launch of the new tool and the new website. I think it was even more stressful because we are working in public with this podcast also. Working in the open definitely has some added stress.
  • Had my contractor developer quit on me on Monday. At this point the software was not functioning because of some changes we made to the email fetching process.
    • We are just going to stick with Dominic, our CTO, as the main developer for now.
    • I don’t plan on bringing on another developer contractor and instead am going to wait until we can hire one.
      • Contractors ultimately have other projects and just do not have the same care or passion for your startup as you or your team does.

Results:

  • Still at 23k MRR
    • Added one new customer and lost a customer that is going to be using the software to do his own prospecting instead. He felt they were too early to really take advantage of the leads we were sending them and needed to figure some things out first.
  • Had a staycation last weekend here in Scottsdale, AZ. However, with the launch on Tuesday and us making some last minute changes it meant I was doing a lot of testing and communicating with Dominic.
  • Did a soft launch on Tuesday evening to our premium Zero to Scale group and got some important bug reports for out of country users. This was fixed Wednesday morning and then we launched.
  • Hiten Shah was kind enough to post it to Product Hunt. We managed to stay in the top 10, which kept us above the fold all day. It drove around 230-250 users.
  • Unfortunately, it wasn’t until we had 200 users that we realized our live stripe key wasn’t in place and so we couldn’t process anything.
  • We realized our demo video wasn’t necessarily going to be watched by everyone and we had several users who had not done any prospecting, so we put together a welcome email with a nice animated gif and some screenshots of using the product.
  • 11 sales calls to go along with the launch
    • Most of which were people coming from ProductHunt to check out the tool, but then were interested in a done-for-you service.
  • Didn’t have pricing for the tool on the home page, and so some people thought our done-for-you service was the pricing. Going to add that to the home page to hopefully make it more clear.
  • Installed Picreel – which presents a nice pop-up offer of a cold email example with a walkthrough of why it works. Michael put together the lead magnet. It has converted at about 9% and has led to an additional 130 email subscribers.
    • It doesn’t integrate directly with Drip yet, but it does integrate with several other email platforms. I made the recommendation so we’ll see.

Plans:

  • VentureBeat is going to be covering us this week. I used Publicize.co to get this press release written and covered.
    • Going to be interesting to see if VC’s come knocking. I have had a couple in recent weeks. That’s a topic for another episode.
  • Put together a full onboarding sequence based on usage from within Intercom.
  • Prepare help templates for some of the common questions so I can have my team handle more of the support requests.
    • At one point I had a sales call, a Skype chat, a Slack chat, and two website chats happening simultaneously. It was insane…so definitely need the team to take over the live chat.
  • We have a current LeadFuze customer who is reorganizing his business and in the mean time wants to sell LeadFuze on a commission only basis. He really feels every company should be using us, so I am going to be taking him up on it.
    • I think it will be a good learning experience in bringing someone else on for sales. Just need to start identifying how we can get a system working for the two of us.
  • I have a monster task list of marketing activities that we are going to get started.
  • Write the LeadFuze monthly revenue report
  • Have two blog posts go live on the new site.
    • Want this to be a norm going forward.
  • Get the forum ready for our private Zero to Scale membership so we can re-open the doors again.

Takeaway:

  • It was an insane week with the launch and having so many conversations around the product, while simultaneously having all the other responsibilities of managing the product, doing sales, training the team, and managing everything.
  • I think knowing that we do this podcast really added some stress to ensure the launch went well and that we didn’t delay it, but the accountability is worth it. I think I would have delayed the launch another week if it weren’t for this podcast quite honestly.

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