Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • Nobody new into pilot program, but that’s what webinar is for

Results:

  • System.ly Month to Date Revenue –
    • MRR: $28,041 (upgraded one client)
  • Started to live my new schedule (starting with 2 days a week) no calls before 1pm and going in heavy into content ( I felt the power of it when creating the webinar slides and was offline for most of the day)
  • 2 blog posts written this week, 1 published
  • New facebook ads are running and I worked on some ad copy, creative and landing page copy.
  • Met with the team to share my ideas on productizing our service more and they all loved it. Even shared it with some mentors and they liked it to so we’re moving forward on putting these new packages together.
  • Updated all of our legal docs including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use for programs, Client Services Agreement and Subcontractor AGreement so feel good that that is all taken care of.
  • Interviewed a potential next hire for Infusionsoft needs if we need it as well as someone who is more systems and ops that got referred to me that may help with a project that is related to the productization.
  • 2 client strategy calls
  • We’re ending the relationship with one client next month but he is going to roll into our membership program in July which is cool
  • Setup the private FB group for the charter members of the program
  • The big news is i’m going to be working with a new coach for the next 3 months
    • Full day visit
    • 2 calls a month
    • His focus is on creating systems and funnels to sell products on webinars and then turn those leads into sales for our main offers/services.
    • He’s worked with one of our clients and a good friend and excited to get started.

Plans:

  • Revamp my webinar slides based on feedback from a few people and a call I’ll be having with my coach
  • Get another 2 blog posts written
  • We have our quarterly team meeting on Monday which I’m excited about
  • I got a couple strategy sessions with existing customers
  • Obviously we have the webinar and I’m going to be doing a Q&A call with the first few Charter members to start picking their brain
  • Work with the team on getting the first 2 new packages organized so we can start offering those.
  • Finish setting up the members area with 17 recorded video tutorials we have
  • Motorcycle ride, bday party

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • In-app onboarding updates
  • New prospecting updates not yet live
  • Finish webinar

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $26.5k MRR.
  • Had our first enterprise level potential deal. I gave him a demo and they wanted a proposal for 25 licenses. They wanted more than our Rainmaker plan for each of them. We offer 3,000 verified contacts on the Rainmaker plan and they wanted 10,000. In addition, they wanted to be able to send 2,000 emails per day and not 500. So I used PandaDoc to put together a custom proposal. Supposed to hear back by the end of the week. I followed up yesterday though to ask what they were comparing us against and what they were looking for, and never heard back. So that doesn’t look good, but it was a good experience nonetheless.
    • Enterprise deals are always difficult for a startup SaaS because they require different payment structures. We can’t just bill them through the app, they would open a purchase order and then we’re going to have to get them to pay upfront for a year or quarter perhaps.
    • Good to have gone through it though, especially now with Damian coming on and us starting to see larger potential deals coming through.
  • I setup Tractionboard.io to prepare for a paid ad campaign. It lets us track progress across different marketing channels. This was the type of startup I planned to launch if I didn’t launch LeadFuze, so I’m looking forward to diving into the numbers as we get rolling.
  • Although I didn’t yet finish the webinar, I did make some good progress. I severely underestimated how much time this was going to take. Mainly all the research. Gathering case studies, statistics, providing examples, etc.
    • Came up with the offer as well as how I’m going to map out each element of the sales funnel (drip emails before and after).
    • However, I have not yet finished the actual webinar. I am hoping to do this today though. It’s going to end up being about 100 slides.
    • Spent several hours though finding images to use throughout. I’m incorporating a lot of memes to bring humor, but it also helps tell the story.
  • Although we haven’t yet gone live with the new update to our email finding and validation, it is in testing. I’m excited to get this rolled out and should be by the time this episode goes live.
  • I put together the training agenda for Damian for this upcoming week and blocked out the calendar.
    • However, Damian was ready to roll and so we actually did a few different training sessions this past week. Really worked out well because it won’t require complete days of training next week now, which is always less stressful on me.
  • In preparing for Damian we’ve met to nail down a few things.
    • 1 – we will be sponsoring Microconf Europe. This was something he was going to be doing with his old business, but now that he’s shutting that down and coming on with us – makes sense for us to do handle this.
    • In preparation, he wanted to get some business cards put together so we have that pending in the design stage right now. I will never carry business cards with me, because people find out I’m the owner and then want to sell me stuff. With him heading up sales though it’s different.
    • In addition to Microconf, he had already lined up a speaking gig at Inbound as well in September. That’s for Hubspot’s conference. Given that agencies are a target market for LeadFuze, this is a great fit.
    • To prepare for the business card, we wanted to come up with a better unique value proposition. Something that talked about consolidating the tools you use and speaking to the fact that we’re an aggregator. Damian, Michael, and I came up with “Minimize the tools you use, maximize the leads you generate.” So that’s going to be on the business card. We’re keeping it simple with just name and email and then we’re going to include a special url like /bonus or something to entice people to check it out – which will lead to a booking of a demo.
  • I had a demo call with a prospective customer this week that was interesting. Basically, they have 10 users and are ready to spend $4k/mo right now. However, they need a feature built-in that’s going to take 2 to 3 days to build. So trying to work through this, but the plan is to get a commitment from them and then start building it out. The potential revenue on that deal could double by the end of the year as well, so its worth it to us. They are trying to do a combination of different tools which aren’t as effective individually as our all-in-one solution so they were like, “Justin… please… take our money. We just need this and we’re in.”
  • Really feeling like we need another engineer. Two honestly. We’re a long ways off from being able to afford one though at this point as we’re still running negative.
    • In addition, had the ex-head designer at a competitor reach out to us looking to do some work for us. Super nice portfolio, knows the space, led a team of designers… has all the qualities you look for. Again though, just not at a point where we could bring him on.
    • It’s times like this that make you feel like the VC route to have the funds in the bank would be nice. Just not a fan of the traditional VC approach with multiple rounds, controlling board seats, etc. We’ll be fine obviously, but frustrating when we’re at this point.
    • Even doubling the business and we still wouldn’t be at a point where we start bringing these people on as that is all money that’s spoken for at this point between raise escalators, paid ads, etc. I can see how Nathan Barry got to $120k in MRR and had $120k in expenses.
  • Lastly, I just want to give a big shout out to Rob Walling and the team at Drip. They recently were acquired by LeadPages. Rob has been an inspiration to many, myself included, and has done some amazing things for the bootstrapped community and to have been along for the ride to watch him grow this from nothing and sell it within a few years is truly remarkable. We don’t know the terms or anything like that, but I know it’s life changing money and couldn’t be happier for him and his family.

Plans:

  • Onboard Damian
  • Finalize webinar
  • Make updates to the website from a messaging standpoint as well as start to test some things from a conversion standpoint

Resources Mentioned:

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