Breaking The Rules - SaaS User Acquisition & Focused Personas

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all right I'm heading home uh from work sorta we had a little event which is pretty cool we went to go to like a board games thing uh which is like an awesome little team building event sorry I'm just pulling out of this parking lot that's really crappy um no we had uh I mentioned we had some travel in from from out of state which is cool so we're just taking advantage of having the team together to do something fun and I have no idea where I am right now in Redmond and it's like a million degrees in this car let me get things going so I got to turn here apparently I used to live around here is for a little bit the time flies that's uh man what 3 years ago I don't think I know the spot in particular though but it's

like ridiculously warm today for the time of year and I mean like for based on what this morning felt like man definitely uh was not expecting this but yeah we had a little team building event at a like a board game kind of restaurant Cafe place which is fun um I'm terrible at board games and I don't know any of them so I actually had a lot of fun though was saying like and I think some other people are kind of saying this at the board games table but like not like super competitive so playing board games and like people like kind of go being Cutthroat playing board games like I get anxiety with that kind of stuff so it's like not enjoyable it's just like anxiety fuel so it's not how it was just nice um I'm just s I'm sitting at this light

and like it's not changing so uh yeah so that was good we kind of uh we ducked out a little bit early from work to be able to do that so that was really nice that uh we could go put that on and yeah now it's a little bit later than usual so I'm leaving like Redmond Area and it's like 6:20 I'm probably going to get home just before 700 so it's a kind of a late one for work stuff but that means tonight I have to get through some YouTube videos I need to try and record three YouTube videos tonight but also like I have not been home and my wife goes to bed before me so I I need to spend some time with my wife as well so got to make sure I do that so uh when we're when we're hanging

out I might uh just kind of think through some of the scripts and stuff I want to use for my videos and then after she's gone to bed I'll just make sure that I can get through them but uh I got CrossFit in the morning too so this is one of those things where like I think previously what I used to do is when I was stacking too much up on my plate to do I would like I can just stay up late and get it done and for me well historically not not so much over the past year or two but historically I'm very much a night owl so I get creative I work I'm more productive like at night when it's late and so if I had to stay up late to get stuff done it actually works well in my favor um

but not so much uh these days especially like now I'm trying to go to CrossFit in the class is at 6:00 in the morning so like uh if I'm not out of the house by like 5:30 I'm I'm going to be late for it so I just have to be more effective with my time and that means obviously when I get home as long as my as long as my wife's home from work and she should then I'll spend time with her cuz that's important and I I don't want to like I don't know like be gone the whole day and then not even see each other at all so so I'll do that and then uh like I said I'll try to get some filming done tonight now the other thing that's happening I think I mentioned in the previous video but we're we're

moving our whole brand ghost website over to different hosting so the other guys are working on that during the day I think it's done I haven't uh tested it or looked at it yet but the whole um when I say website I don't mean the front end of our application I mean like the landing page where people want to collect information I just realized how like how ridiculously bright it looks and it's that bright like look at this like I can't see anything so uh I haven't seen it yet I don't know if it is finished I think things were going pretty well based on what I heard though and the reason for that if you didn't watch to last video was like we were using bubble I've never personally used bubble but apparently it was convenient to use and get set up but there's

these crazy like latencies out of nowhere I think it's like CDN or cash related and on like when I say crazy I don't mean like oh you had to wait 10 seconds to load the page I mean literally minutes minutes just sitting there and like you get it's not even like it's slowly loading it's just like the page looks like it's hung for for minutes to the point where people were saying hey your sight's down and then we'd go look and be like no it's there and I think it's just because we were hitting you know cdns that were closer or some type of caching going on so anyway we are migrating to webflow and that should be done I don't I should probably try to check that I don't know where I'm driving here this is weird that lane just ends in the the

right out of nowhere so I almost cut someone off it's all right I'm Canadian I just say sorry and it's all right and then I got to get over into this Lane once we're on the highway we're cruising though so yeah I might uh I might not get much done on brand ghost tonight because I like I need to get YouTube videos done technically Tech technically I can film them tomorrow but um doing them tomorrow is pretty risky because it would mean that I have to get them done like like I don't think that's going to work I have a my morning's full so I could could do them in the morning but my morning's full I have CrossFit then I'm going to be meeting with Ryan to talk about our next course and uh if you think about it I'm going to the office

again tomorrow so when I come back I'm not going to be able to do that like fit it in so um it would be so unfair to my Editor to be like hi it's 1 p.m. like please edit these videos for to go live at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow like uh even if he edited them for later in the day which would be fine I'm going to be at the office so I can't do much about that so um I got to get him done tonight it's how it goes and I'm uh like last week I didn't get much done for recording like like zero done during the week and only one video over the weekend so I got to make the time for it so we do that but otherwise the uh I'm trying to think of like what a good topic is to focus

on so I'm not just rambling at you but I thinking like maybe something in interesting is like next wave of users for brand ghost right I don't want to focus so much on like when I talk about brand ghost I'm not trying to talk about it to Market it to you I'm trying to talk about it in a way that sees or lets you see how I'm thinking about a SAS that I'm building so um we have let me back up so this like today we were talking about pricing um so getting some questions about like starting to feel a little bit more of our audience and we're targeting like either content creators that are selling digital products and things like that so you're actively trying to share content out you might have paywalled content courses different resources that kind of stuff or small businesses

where you need to be creating content to help Drive traffic to your website or your store and you don't want to be consumed with like just trying to keep up with social media like let it be a little bit more automatic for you um still need to create the content but you don't have to worry about the posting and all that so um we are realizing that there are still other groups of people that are like interested but the capabilities and stuff they need looks different so um I don't think it's a hyper Focus for us that I want to have but I think it's also an easy an easy Act position and if we can sort of delight that customer group then they'll want to stick around and basically that's the group of people that creates content but it's not like a it's not

business livelihood for them so if they see our price they like well that doesn't make sense why would I pay that much money because like I'm posting content I want it to go everywhere but I'm not I'm not monetizing anything right I don't I don't have income from this that's like I rely on this or even it was supplementary you're like I just I'm sharing content for other reasons not to uh basically if I'm not getting Revenue to pay for a service like why would I be doing it I kind of equate it to like why would you go run ads for something online if like it's not going to convert so you might be like hey I wanted to write this cool blog post and you're really happy about it that's awesome maybe write a bunch of them that's awesome and then you say

okay I'm going to go run ads and pay you know 500 bucks a a month and have people go to my site but there's nothing to buy and like I'm basically just paying money to have people show up in my site I feel like that's what our tool would look like to those individuals that aren't trying to monetize a group of people I am paying money for like no return basically but um the reality is they don't need all of the same capabilities they need like a subset and a smaller scale so there's uh we might be kind of talking about this separate kind of a not a separate offering just like a dialed back offering that can still appeal to people and like I was saying I think there's an interesting upgrade path here cuz I don't want us to like try to focus

on too many niches like I would this sounds like I don't want it to sound terrible but like probably does I wouldn't focus on that group of people because I would rather focus on how do we how do we get the attention of the people that are willing to pay more money like as a business I think that's what makes sense but I think this one is an easy ad and I also think that it is a path to to growth man this entrance is to the freeway is ridiculous I can't see where it is but we're doing it let's go okay that was weird the entrance is like three lanes wide so I turned into one and I got lucky I guess this guy beside me on the rights in the carpool lane that just goes into like the worst spot ever so that's

neat this is a this is a real bad spot I've been complaining every day making these videos about this highway and let me tell you this is the worst spot I've seen so far good thing I don't do this drive every day so to explain there are three Lanes on this ramp that go into one all at the same time and then our one lane is merging onto the highway fortunately it's short into a wall of traffic and I need to get over three more Lanes after that to get into the fast lane so that I'm not parked on this highway for days so we're going to try that so for the user acquisition um the reason I think this is an interesting opportunity is because if those people continue to use our product and service and they're going this stuff rocks it's working for

me and eventually they're growing their content business and they say hey now now I'm at a point where I can monetize my audience or I want to try then they can use like an upgraded tier of our offering and and like by that point it's not us trying to like you know we're not trying to smooze them into it it's really like they see the value right they're going I want to upgrade because I I will get more value out of it so I think that's why that uh that group of people that might be like a lower price point could be very interesting and I think that's worth entertaining that's my personal take on it otherwise if it was like there's no there's no upgrade path that feels natural like sure we could onboard them and then we' be like now we really got

to convince you and like put all our energy into upselling you I'm like I don't know if it would be worth spending any attention on that right now at all so that came up today which is an interesting conversation I think we're all roughly on the same page for that and uh yeah we're trying to get the site into a a spot that we feel good about and we basically had to do the site rehaul uh overhaul not rehaul what's rehaul I have to do the site overhaul to get uh the latency down and consistently down uh so that when we go to do this big email blast to like 50,000 people that we don't have a majority of them that do click through going like what the hell I can't uh I can't see anything here by the way I'm not in the fast

lane yet because of this this law where I can't pass these double lines to go into the fast lane so I'm crawling where all these Fast Lanes beside me get to fly by so soon it will open up and it won't be so sad you coming over buddy there you go come on get in here so yeah I think for us it'll be interesting cuz I think that conversation today opens up a bit more Spectrum for like possible clients we might be willing to entertain and if we go to blast out to that 50,000 user list now there's probably more people at least that would be interested whereas before there might be a bunch of people that were like that price Point's just too high like it seems interesting but I can't justify paying that because because I don't I don't make that much money

off of my content every month now I'm in a unique position like I and I want to acknowledge this because I because of my job and everything I feel like I'm in a position that I can afford to go fast no uh to to ramp up my my content and like have it as an expense as it's growing so the difference is for people that maybe if they're if they're not employed or they're they're not maybe a great spot financially if they're trying to get into content creation like you're not going to go spending money on stuff if it's like just an extra cost that you can't afford so like I I've been in a position very fortunately that I have been able to say I can hire a video editor and lose money on my YouTube videos like repeatedly over and over because I'm

willing to invest into building my brand up other people don't have that luxury and uh I'm not I'm not here to like to brag about it or anything I'm just saying that I need to acknowledge that that's not necessarily the common scenario I have to think more about for people that don't see that as like hey let me just go lose money every month to build a brand they're probably in a spot where they're like I want to build my brand but I can't go under on this and they might even be trying to rely on on their content creation and stuff for some income so we have to be cognizant of that so we have to make sure that our value proposition is such that they realize the amount of money that you're going to be putting into our service is going to enable

you to make or get higher return pardon me um so when we blast out to this email this I'm I'm curious to see kind of like first of all like what kind of conversion rate is that to even get people to to click through and then this user journey of like okay they click through to the site do most of them just fall off or do we get like a good chunk that are interested in the offering do we start seeing a people clicking uh click on the different price point options and we all sorts of really need analytics that come from that and uh and then we can try to steer right so I've talked about this in previous videos but we're very interested in analytics right we try to be very data driven about everything and that's why our our previous efforts have

been challenging because when when you don't have people to collect data from it's hard to like to Pivot so that should be gone I'm tired still trying to figure out if I was sick or I'm sick like I still feel a little bit in my throat so I don't know but we'll see I'm more nervous about going to CrossFit in the morning I'm like I'm already tired and I don't know how I feel about that so that is what it is I'm trying to think if there's like oh maybe there's a couple interesting like technical things coming up in brand ghost that I can kind of chat through um I want to build something that essentially looks at feeds of data so like and and I should clarify I don't mean like social media feeds that's a whole other uh topic for us in brand

ghost like a an aggregate prioritized social feed but what I'm talking about is more like RSS feeds and um I think I mentioned this in the previous video but uh I want to maybe kind of talk through this together even though it's just me blabbing at you but um to give you an example right now in brand ghost if you want to add content you go into brand ghost you're either importing content from somewhere or you're adding it by hand and that works for a lot of content like I would say a majority of it but I know for myself I have content that uh for example I post a long form YouTube video right like a programming tutorial post something about C here's a tutorial the the place that I send it from is YouTube Studio like that's where it goes that's the entry

point into the internet now what happens is like I don't even have a topic stream in brand ghost that posts my long form YouTube videos and the reason I don't is because the way that it would need to work right now is that I would need to wait for that to get published then once it's published I would have to go by hand add it into brand ghost as content they could post in the future so it's never been added but I have been using brand GES back and infrastructure to B like combined with something else uh I use that system to be able to identify when YouTube has a new video I think this is watching an RSS feed when it acknowledges that it will go post out using brand ghost the difference is that that's a one-time post through brand ghost it's not

adding it to my content stream to repost for the future so I need to make that system more like a first class thing in brand ghost where I can hook up to feeds of data so like an RSS feed or I don't know if there's other types of feeds but uh maybe some of them are just apis like with web hooks but anyway um like that might be the other answer right is like maybe I need to use a web hook for this but I'm I think in my head I have a way to write this that I'm like I know I can make this work for my content but I don't think I've come up with a way that I feel scales very well so for example if I'm one user and let's pretend brand ghost is just a system for Nick okay then

I can go make sure that I on server start I can go listen to an RSS feed and uh depending on what tools and libraries I'm using maybe I have to write like a courts job that will periodically pull the RSS feed um there might be some other libraries that kind of turn that into like an event driven style where you're just listening and then you uh polling somewhere is getting a change there might be uh web hooks that I can subscribe to and I feel like when I think about these as Solutions I'm like okay if I had that working it would be not so hard because once I have the event coming in or notice the change from the RSS feed great I could for my own content I could write a parser for how I want to take say the YouTube video

descript destion and turn that into a post and then add it to my content to be able to be regularly posted it's like it's not conceptually that difficult and that's cool but I'm really nervous that like that as an approach is completely unscalable so for example and maybe maybe it's not maybe I'm just like inventing this but maybe on some of these apis that I can work with I can provide the web hook and maybe this is the answer right um if the apis that I'm working with so let's let's use YouTube as an example if YouTube allows me to go register a web hook then I could register one and then the route that I have in asp.net could basically parse any of the parameters and I don't I'm assuming they have parameters on the web hook I don't know um and if they

don't if it's in the body or something then I can parse it and say great okay like we hooked we had this web hook and I need to see like for which user and which content and stuff it is but even with that I guess like the The Meta Point here is I don't know how scalable these types of things are and I might just be getting ahead of myself like we don't have a scalability issue right now so who cares like go make it work but part of me is like U if you're a software engineer you probably relate to this I'm like yeah but what if like what if we get tons of users and then all of a sudden none of the RSS feed stuff is working um or none of the web hook stuff is working because it's not scaling so

these things are on my mind right now um but I think oh there's a cop there I think uh for me I need to I need to try it out I need to like like prototype something I think get it working for my own stuff and then and then make it extensible and I believe in that pattern that's how we got to where we are make it work for me refine it make it extensible and I'm sure I'll I'll be able to start measuring the the impact of that um whether I'm like doing RSS feed polling or um I I I really kind of feel like the web hook thing has got to be the way I just don't know if there's enough um I don't know if enough platforms offer that is like hey like you know uh give us a web hook and

we'll notify you when there's a change if they do great that's cool but I don't know if it's a thing so I will be checking that out um for context what that will enable me to do is right now I do have a podcast topic stream and every time I post something to Spotify I also open up brand ghost by hand and I I basically copy a part of the Spotify post into brand ghost by hand and that doesn't scale right I'm not going to be doing that by hand forever and I obviously can't do that for other people so I'm proving that I really like having those topic streams I added like so I I shared out my Scott Hanselman podcast on LinkedIn from my business page and it went from like just under 400 followers to like 800 in a couple weeks or

less than 2 weeks maybe over one week but uh like that's that's huge that's a lot of growth for for one post right and it's obviously cuz he reposted it but like there is a lot of value in me sharing that topic stream out so I know that there's value now I need to say how do I make sure I'm not spending more time on it I really think that the same idea will work for my YouTube videos because right now I'm posting short form videos and I post short form videos every single day but what I've not done and it feels kind of embarrassing to say this is like I have not been reposting my YouTube videos and I have hundreds of them I should post links to those and that way people that didn't even know the video exists now it's getting exposure

on social media so my options are that I could by hand now start doing this which doesn't scale but um I think I'm proving it already with the podcast that I should just go ahead and do this for for YouTube videos as well so I think before before I do the YouTube video one I I want to prove the concept with code that I can make it happen automatically because I can't take that on is like one more thing to try and keep up with even though it's not that difficult like I don't want to be bothered to do it I uh you know things for me start to fall apart once I go over my threshold and unfortunately I'm constantly riding that threshold so we're almost home here woo yeah so I think that's going to be a super helpful feature for brand ghost

I think um it's not going to be something that's very obvious for a lot of people so that makes it tricky like I know I need it I don't think it'll be very useful for small businesses cuz they'll say like that sounds too technical like what what what would I use that for but I think there's some content creators especially the ones with YouTube videos especially with a podcast like don't you want to reshare this content out you work so hard on it what it's going to get you know a big bang for reviews once and then you're relying on on Search terms like wouldn't it be nice to refresh everyone's mind periodically about all the awesome stuff you do I think the answer is yes and I think for me I don't know how many must have over 200 YouTube videos like I could

post a new video every day and you're like you're basically never going to see the same video so um not for a long time but I think it's uh I think it's totally worth doing so I'll have to see cuz that's like for my personal perspective and this is where it gets tricky right from my personal perspective I think that's a good thing to work on next I I should go build that out I think that'll uh try like be beneficial for me but I have to balance that with like especially if we're going to blast out to 50,000 people like cool like what what's the feedback that they're giving now because once we start having more and more users your time is more and more occupied with that so but that will be a good problem to have I'm just double checking oh I

saw a message from my wife but she sent me a meme I just wanted to make sure she wasn't asking where I was because it's uh like I should be home by now normally and I called it it's almost 7 just before we'll get this put up so I can see what's going on but yeah overall I think pretty good day I'm happy with it um I don't think uh like full transparency I don't feel like I was very as productive as I wanted to be at work but I think that there was a lot of value um in being there and I like today for example like getting to be with the team and stuff like for that offsite event like uh that was I think critical um got to see uh one of the other managers has been on mat Le for a

little bit so so she came which is awesome um just the way the timing was I haven't been able to work with her much so it was really cool to see her um and like a you know big chunk of the team that's uh that's local at least a lot of people were there it was really nice so that's the kind of thing like yeah I don't like commuting Ryan was uh given me heck a little bit earlier he said hey I see the road rage coming out but it's worth it it's worth it I get to go see my team I like the people I work with I think that makes a big difference I uh I don't think I would last anywhere if I didn't like the people I work with and I've been very fortunate about that in my career like where

I used to work um some of my best friends are are at Magnet actually funny story on my on my main channel on dev leader um someone left a comment and they said they were you know I was reading the comment they're like hey I've been binge watching your videos and I'm thinking awesome like that's great it's it's it's awesome to hear that someone gets hooked on the content they're like cool I like this person style of teaching or the topics or both and they said but it really stood out to me that you used to work at Magnet so magnet forensics and they said because that's where I'm currently interning so sir if you are watching this cool stuff that's awesome but I thought it was awesome to hear cuz like I don't know it's uh it's been years but some of the some

of my very best friends for my like for Life uh still work there so I think it's uh I there's a lot of factors but like yeah really good people right makes a huge difference for getting work done I think some people are around others that they don't really like or maybe maybe I think for a lot of people they they don't like their manager and then they're like well I don't like going to work at all I don't feel motivated to go to work or maybe I think for a lot of Juniors might be in positions where they have people on the team that are like what do they call them like I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on YouTube so I try not to but like an intelligent jerk I'll use that word jerk and then they don't feel like they

have a safe place at work to like discuss things and debate things because they're always going to get shut down and like no one likes that so I've been very fortunate and I think I'm kind of at the point in my career where like if that changed I would either be trying to make a change regarding it or I would be gone like I just I can't put up with that I think now that I've seen I've seen it a few times and or at least helped other people go through it and stuff and navigate that I've definitely experienced it but um like I don't got time for that not a chance my wife is home okay she's going to say Where Have You Been andless say I was playing games I was playing board games that's what I'll say and she'll say that's weird

and I'll say it's for work and she'll say that's even weirder cool folks well thanks for tuning in appreciate you being here and and uh I will see you tomorrow cuz I'm going to the office again see you