Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • Application process is still not setup
  • Revamp my Webinar Funnel Blueprint opt-in

Results:

  • System.ly Revenue –
    • MRR: $23,000
    • November One-Time Revenue: $4500
  • I went to a weekend mastermind Sat-Monday mid day down in CO springs which was hosted by Pete Vargas of Advance Your Reach and it was up on top of Cheyenne Mountain at this awesome lodge resort and myself and 30 people had it all to ourselves as after we left they would close for the season. It was a great experience with some high level folks like Ryan Deiss, Nicholas Kusmich, Chandler Bolt and more. I feel like I walked away with some new relationships that I’m excited about and some things to think about going into 2017.
  • In order to finalize our website we have these three opt-ins on the home page that were not ready to go, meaning they needed lead boxes, follow up sequences etc. So I tackled that this week knocking out all three which are now built in Infusionsoft, setup with LeadBoxes in LeadPages, Clickfunnels pages for opt-ins for direct opt-in as well as thank you pages.
  • I’m going to be trying to host an event for a small group of people here in Denver, CO and it’s going to be a funnel building workshop and I’ll be posting about it on FB today and emailing about it today as well. So for that I had to setup order forms, confirmation emails, reserve the venue, put together a quick video and application, landing page and thank you page. Got all that done for today.
  • Overall, being back in the office was good this week but had some good conversations with my team and excited for our Monday meeting.
  • We’re dealing with some challenges right now that I’m still trying to articulate to be honest and it has me a little uneasy.
    • I’m not going to go into all the details now but the general gist is I want to go into 2017 with even more focus and I feel like we’re a bit unfocused. That starts with our offering and avatar. Which has led to some systems/process challenges and then even staff challenges.
    • I know I need to figure these things out and really spending some time over the next week working with assistant, mentors and lead team member, Lisa to really get down to the real problems so we can resolve them to address out our annual team meeting quickly approaching in December.
  • Additionally, this will be my last 30 days with my coach as that business relationship didn’t feel like it was going to be serving me at this moment until some of the things I just mentioned really got ironed out.
  • My photoshoot is all dialed in and going to be taking place tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon.
  • On a personal note, I’m currently reading a book called Boundaries and it’s really good. It’s all about when to say yes, how to say no in order to take control.

Plans:

  • Finally have designer push lastest changes live now that the opt-ins are ready.
  • Finish this damn Application page / funnel discovery session page/campaign.
  • I’ve got a few sales calls lined up
  • Starting next week I have a weekly 1-on-1 meeting with Lisa now and we’re doing an all hands team stand-up for 15 mins Tues-Friday. Up until this point it’s just been me and my assistant.
  • Wednesday I’m headed to Moncton canada for a couple day workshop with Dan Martell which I’m excited about (it’s a part of the program I did earlier this year) and 30 folks are going through what he calls his Boardroom experience and we’ll be diving into our financials a bit, I know that but I’m looking forward to that as well so one last trip for the year so going to keep my plans a bit light.
  • Also, Sunday watching my G-Men hopefully pull out a W against the Eagles, a must needed win.

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • Start development on version 2.5! This should be 90% of our focus going forward.
  • I want to try and SOP more of the 2017 marketing plan. I’ll have our VA help out with the non-outreach related items. I’ll be taking on the outreach responsibility until we have our marketing person in place at some point next year.
    • Current product issues and finalizing our upcoming major feature release took up most of my week. Since this wasn’t an immediate priority, I will push this off to next week.

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $30.8k MRR.
    • Our biggest customer downgraded his plan significantly to just have one person handle it all. He also had quite a bit of turnover in his sales team it sounds like. We’ll see what we can do to help, but definitely contributed to the churn this week in addition to some product issues that have lingered. Which is just deflating. We’re so close to putting a couple of the major issues behind us, but it can’t come soon enough. It’s killing our growth at the moment as all cancellations have been for the same couple of reasons for the past month really.
  • Spent all day Monday breaking down the 50 page tech specs document I created a couple weeks ago into an Epic inside of Github. I only got about a third of the way done. I had to find time here and there the rest of the week, but didn’t get this completely finished. It’s enough to get started, but I want to devote some more time to this next week.
    • I think it will be worth it though because it forced me to flesh things out even more and should help ensure less confusion for the dev team.
  • Our new developer got started this past week and dove right in on our biggest issue right now which is the email results. This is effecting churn in a big way right now. Seems to always be something. I’ll be so glad when version 2.5 is out and we remove our dependencies on third parties, but we need to fix things in the current app first.
    • Decided to pass on the third developer. He needs a little more experience and I want to be conservative from here on out with our funds just so we’re a little more protected.
  • On the 1st of each month I always run through our Google Analytics, Stripe, and Intercom account to run numbers and compare how we’re progressing over time. The main thing I’m concerned about is Trial signups at the moment. We had been getting 380 to 430 per month since around May aside from when the AppSumo deal went live in August. September we hit 556, I thought it was over 600, but we had some spam signups that I needed to remove. This past month we dipped down a little bit to 523, but still over 500 which is great. We’ll see how the next two months go with the holidays and all.
  • Sent the investor email update. Even though there wasn’t as much progress as you’d hope for, it’s actually right in line with what I told them would be the case. So having those expectations set upfront is helpful. Now that we have our dev team in place though, going forward we should have some better results to share.
  • Finished another guest post which highlights several tools companies can use to grow their startup. I’ll share the link once I find a home for it.
  • Went to the office space and walked through it with two different contractors. I want to make sure we’re on the same page as the original contractor bids were all over the place and were provided by the owner. This way I can be sure we discuss options and are having an open and transparent conversation about what we need done.
  • Spent some time this week mapping out an overhaul to our current extension. We need to make an update to it in order to improve how it works. Even though this will be changing dramatically again in a couple of months, we need this to be working better for current users so we had to dedicate quite a bit of time this week to it.
  • Part of my content strategy for 2017 is forming a little group of awesome content creators together so that we can help share and promote each other’s content. I reached out to a couple of people I’ve talked with in the past that are great content creators and they were both interested. Key is that we all not only produce great content, but have similar target audiences for the content as well. So I’ll spend some more time the rest of the year building this little group, but I think it will be helpful for everyone.
  • Speaking of content, I went through our Google Webmaster Tools console and went to the Search Analytics portion.
    • I selected all the view options (so Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position) and then exported all those keywords.
    • From here, I sorted by Position with lowest rank at the top. Then scrolled down the list looking for keywords that have high impressions, even though we have a low ranking.
    • This is going to help shape our content strategy so that we can work on improving the rankings for those keywords.
    • We rank already, which means Google at least finds us somewhat relevant to begin with and since I’m looking for keywords with decent impression value even though it might be page 7 or 8, I know that as improve those rankings we’ll have a lot more impressions and click throughs.   
  • I was interviewed for the Hack the Process podcast which should be airing in a couple of weeks. I actually shared some details on my past that I hadn’t shared before. In particular, how I got started and the story of a business venture that failed.

Plans:

  • SOP more of our content promotion process for 2017.
  • Send out a product update email to our list outlining some of the improvements we’ve made, which have impacted users across the board. This email is a major relief to be able to send. Also tease the upcoming major feature release, but don’t want to give away too much just yet.
  • Hope to hear back from Contractors with bids for the office build out.
  • Finalize the AWS server move as well as the database migration from MS SQL to Postgres.
  • Help the dev team get rolling on version 2.5!
    • Finish putting the 2.5 issues into Github.
  • Was asked to coach someone, a listener actually, so we’re going to have an initial call just to see what he needs and if it’s something I can help him with to see if it makes sense or not.
    • I haven’t really thought about doing coaching and not sure if it’s something I want to do, but we’ll see how the call goes.
  • I was asked to do two more interviews as well.
    • One is about radical transparency and will eventually be featured on a site that highlights other Founders of transparent companies.
    • Another is for our friend Brian Casel who is putting together a training program for content marketing and this interview is for him to use for that.

Resources Mentioned:

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