Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • I didn’t write a blog post but I’ll talk more about that in results

Results:  

  • MME Revenue = Same
    • MME $1988
    • System.ly Revenue – One-time Revenue = $1500
      • MRR: $5188
  • This week was a lot of tasks for existing customers
    • A few projects for MME that we had to take care of that took a fair amount of time as well
  • 2 Launch calls for a new customers
  • 2 sales call
  • Decided i’m most likely going to be hosting an event in San Diego right after Traffic and Conversion with Rick Mulready where we’re going to work with 5-10 people (still haven’t decided) where it’s a 1 or 2 day (most likely 2 day) where people come in with their business and we help them build funnels with the idea that when they leave they’ll have a working funnel in Infusionsoft and they’ll have Facebook ads ready to drive traffic to it. We’re keeping it limited because it’s very hands on and it’s going to be few thousand dollar investment per person.
  • Interviewed about 6 candidates for our junior support and implementation team. I have 1 more interview but I’ve decided I’m most likely hiring 2 for a 1 month trial period and we’ll select the one that does the best job.
  • I’ve continued writing out my emails within ConvertKit which has becoming a nice email series that i’m excited about. I’m sharing some of the lessons i’ve learned since starting my business on the side in 2012 and getting to this point. Wrote about 800-1000 words each of the last two days for those emails which is getting me back into the flow of writing a bit. Having those email concepts already mapped out makes it easier and i’m writing it very casually too as that’s what I want that newsletter to be about. just candid conversations sharing my lessons. so if you’re interested in that you can opt-in at greghickman.me.
  • One of the main things we working on this week was figuring out how to create an easy “weekly status” update for our customers that wouldn’t add too much work. After a bunch of research on ways we could be leveraging zapier, trello and google sheets we figured out a system that will work best which I’m excited about. It’s being implemented as we speak by the team so that’s great that that is off my plate and will be implemented soon
  • I was on the hotseat for the mastermind call this week and it was really powerful for me.
    • I kind of realized why i was having trouble staritng with content for System.ly and a lot of it was fear based of making many of hte same mistakes I made when I wrote for MME.
    • Thankfully Brian Casel came to the rescue with a cool template that he uses for AudienceOps to help his team and his clients identify topics to write about and how they aim to solve their problems which I’m working on.
  • Been reading the book, Traction which has been really good. I love books on systems and procedures and this is very much in line with that about having core documents in place to identify vision and core values etc.
  • Got the round 2 version of the designed homepage for System.ly which I’m pumped about and excited to get the secondary pages going.
  • Listened to an interview with Sam Carpenter who wrote work the system on the Productivity show and he talks about spending 30 mins a day organizing something. I’ve done it about 4 times this week and it’s really an awesome feeling. I
    • Organized my desk
    • desktop
    • closet
    • kitchen

Plans:  

  • About to hop on a plane to head east for my cousin’s wedding and get back Monday Evening, which I just realized I may miss some of the giants game…not happy about that.
  • Get a solid version 1 of the editorial document that I was mentioning that Brian recommended
  • have a few options on pricing to review with my mastermind groups and team
  • Re-write our core values.
    • as I’ve been interviewing there were some people that I felt met my initial criteria and I asked my team if they wanted to be involved in the hiring and they said they trusted my opinion and they like the chemistry we have so I’ve been thinking a lot of about the chemistry and what is working with us that we need new hires to have. so I want to re-establish that. And this is something that is a common thread in the book traction which i’m reading.
  • Send an offer for the trial for the 2 junior support people and hopefully have them start
  • Continue writing my email series in convetkit for greghickman.me

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • No fails for me

Results:

  • $26.8k MRR
  • Had some new deals come through just before the price increase. I really recommend, if you are looking at increasing your prices…do so gradually.
    • Be sure to let all pending prospective customers know in advance (at least two weeks). If you have a decent pipeline, it’s pretty amazing what this does for a sense of urgency.
    • I say do it gradually, so that you have that weapon in your arsenal in the future. If you have a SaaS product and you charge $29, but you decide you want to go to $99 instead…go in $10 increments and space out the increase so you can build in urgency. It works.
  • BIG week from a development standpoint. All new email quality algorithm and basically rewrote everything. We had lots of pieces re-written already…but got everything completely re-done. By the time this airs, it should be live.
  • Purchased Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization. Linked it up in the show notes.
  • Worked on some website things to improve the site like moving about/blog to the footer for example. So the top links are for our software, our service, and then a contact link. This keeps the focus on signing up, versus the potential of getting lost in a blog post.
  • Michael wrote our email onboarding series for software users. We haven’t had anything up to this point, so I’m excited to roll that out. Our free to paid signup conversion was at 3.2% before this. So we desperately needed to roll this out. Still more to do here.
  • Added new pricing packages to Stripe and got the website updated. We then got Drip updated so we have onboarding campaigns based on the package chosen. Sounds straight forward, but there’s tags based on the subscription package chosen which then dictates which onboarding email sequence you get.
  • Had to redo our onboarding forms.
    • We now have a few resellers that have brought multiple campaigns to the table and this causes a different process for how we handle those. The existing onboarding form made it difficult to decipher which was for a reseller and which wasn’t.
    • So I used gravity forms and leveraged conditional logic to only show certain questions if they were a reseller.  If not, a different set of questions is presented. In addition, had to create a different onboarding form for the List Builder only package which doesn’t require all the information of the fully done-for-you service.
  • Finished up a guest blog post for Business.com. Should be featured in a marketing expert round-up that they were doing as well. The guest blog will feature system.ly as well.

Plans:

  • Going to work on a Reseller portal now that we have a few. We are going to have an application process so I need to get that form created and then prepare all the documents that will need to be available to resellers. Typically, they have signed up as a customer first and THEN became a reseller. This is how they know what to say when selling it. That won’t always be the case though and we need to make sure they have everything they need. I see this being a decent revenue channel for us moving forward.
  • Should have event tracking in place for the app, so I want to set up more onboarding emails based on actions taken (or not taken) within the app.
  • Have a clearly defined process for our content marketing efforts.
  • Look into affiliate program options.
  • Map out a piece of sales collateral.

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