Episode 657 | Concierge Onboarding, Building a Great Brand, and More Listener Questions

In episode 657, join Rob Walling as he answers more listener questions. Topics range from concierge onboarding to getting higher engagement rates on cold emails. He also covers how to think about balancing product improvements vs. marketing.

Topics we cover:

• 1:00 - Concierge onboarding
• 7:34 - Branding tips for a new business
• 14:42 - Getting higher engagement rates on cold outreach emails
• 21:29 - Prioritizing product improvements vs. funnel-building
• 14:42 - Getting higher engagement rates on cold outreach emails
• 21:29 - Prioritizing product improvements vs. funnel-building

Links from the Show:

• Fascinate, Revised and Updated: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist
• TinySeed 
• MicroConf Youtube Channel

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

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Transcript

Rob Walling: And so that's where it makes sense to invest time into something, and I just mean labor, human hours into something that can build that flywheel. That's what SaaS is, right? It's building a flywheel slowly over time, and if you have high churn, it's hard to do that. If you have low churn, then it's how do we throw everything we can afford at it in order to be able to onboard more people? Welcome back to another episode of The Startups For the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and today I'm answering listener questions. We have a great funnel of listener questions coming into the show. Our first four questions are going to be audio or video, and then if we have time, I will dive into a text question or two to try to get through the backlog. Thanks as always for sending your questions. You can email them questions at startupsfortherestofus.com or head to startupsfortherestofus.com. Click ask a question in the top nav, and if you send an audio or video question, it goes to the top of the stack. My first question comes from Mike all the way from France. Mike : Hey Rob, Mike here, all the way from France. I love your podcast, so thanks a lot. I created a SaaS software company called typedesk, which is a template builder slash text expender for entrepreneurs and small teams. My main challenge right now is that we have a low churn, high stickiness once people actually spend time creating their templates and the feedback we get is usually, "Well, I can't just live another day without typedesk." Which is great to hear, but getting to that point is really challenging because I can provide new users with boilerplate templates. Each company's unique. I mean, everyone has a different needs and also it's quite a technical product, so right now working on making sure that we get to the value as quickly as possible and trying to demonstrate what the product does as quickly as possible in the onboarding, but I was wondering if you had any best practices or recommendations in my case. Thanks a lot. Rob Walling: That's a good question and one that I have given a lot of thought, to be honest. I know of several companies like this where your churn is so low, but that barrier to getting folks to getting value is maybe a little further than an app that is easy to onboard. I think of SaaS apps like SavvyCal and SignWell, which are scheduling link and electronic signature, and those are pretty simple to get value from. You log in, you have a link five minutes later to allow people to schedule you, or if you're in SignWell, you log in and you can send a doc within two, three minutes. There really isn't much to getting onboarded. First is a tool like typedesk like you're talking about, or think about an email service provider where you have the... There's so much set up and importing subscribers and there's just a lot to be done before you get to value. The thing that I would be thinking about in your shoes is how can I handhold as many people as possible? And what I mean by that is manually getting on calls with folks doing weekly group webinars, and whether that's you as the founder or whether it's someone you hire, I don't know where your revenue is yet. I would look at investing in person hours, non-scalable, you can add all the tool tips and the onboarding flow into the app that you want, that will improve it. But to truly get to the point where you are dramatically increasing the number of folks who get onboarded with a tool, that does take some time. This is why customer success exists, right? This is why that term, which what, 15 years ago, I never heard it. I don't think it existed in 2008, 2010. The first time I started hearing about it was probably 2012, 13-ish. And this role exists to get people onboarded and to get them getting value. And I see that your price points are low, but per seat, $5 per seat. So, if you have a hundred people at a company and you're trying to get them on board and it's $500 a month, is it worth having a customer success person get on a one-on-one call with folks? Yeah, it is not all 500, but a group call at that company is what I mean. Or is it worth holding a webinar twice a week to any and all of your customers to help them get onboarded? I do think so. So that's what I'd be looking at. Now, you have to have the annual contract value or the average revenue per account or the lifetime value mean these things are, it's all about price point. You have to have a price point that justifies that. So, in your case, I wouldn't offer concierge onboarding and setup to anyone that has less than make up a number, 10 seats, 20 seats. It's $5,200 and you're going to automate this, right? You're going to automate it in code to basically say, if number of seats is at least 20 or if price point is at least a hundred, then in the app they can click a button to book immediately, use your SavvyCal link and they can get on your customer success person's calendar. Or your email onboarding sequence is letting them know, "Hey, we can help you get set up." "Hey, we can help you get set up and here's a seminar, here's a webinar." And maybe what you do is for folks who are on the five, 10, $20 plans, they only have a few seats, maybe those folks who do push towards a group webinar that again, is once a week, twice a week, whatever makes sense based on your customer volume. But the accounts where whether it's 20 seats or 40 seats, I mean, there's some number where it makes sense for you to invest the time, especially if your churn is super low. This is something we hardly encourage with TinySeed companies. It's something we did at Drip. My first hire that was not a developer was a customer success manager, and she dramatically improved the number of people who not only converted to customers but who got onboarded and stuck around because the price points were worth it. We were charging hundreds of dollars a month, most months we had net negative churn. Talk about low churn. I'm guessing you might have the same thing with expansion revenue and all that. And so that's where it makes sense to invest time into something and I just mean labor, human hours into something that can build that flywheel. That's what SaaS is, right? It's building a flywheel slowly over time. And if you have high churn, it's hard to do that. If you have low churn, then it's how do we throw everything we can afford at it in order to be able to onboard more people? And this is such an interesting use case. Again, I don't know where your business is at, but this is a point where if money is a limiting factor of like, "Well, I can't do it," or, "I can't afford to hire a customer success person." If you have an engine that's working and over time you can put a dollar in and get two, three, $4 out over the next year or two, this is where funding is the ideal solution, that's really what funding should be used for. I hate it when people raise VC on an idea. I hate it when they raise $5 million when they're at 20K a month and they still don't have product market fit and they're just going to burn through the money. Versus if you have a repeatable business model where you can insert a dollar and get three, four, $5 out over time, but you're constrained on the front end with cash, then that is an interesting time to think about raising an angel round, raising through a syndicate like our TinySeed syndicate. Or if you have friends and family who can invest, that's where you... Or even frankly, depending on where you are, you can take out revenue-based financing, you can take out a striped capital loan or go to one of the RBF providers and you take that cash out, allows you to scale the business faster and then you pay it out over time. So, thanks for that question, Mike. I hope that was helpful. My next question is from Kyle about branding and new business. Kyle: Hey Rob, my name is Kyle. I'm a software product owner on an agile team on a large company. Just want to say, first off, thank you for all the content. I'm a long-time listener, first time caller, as they say, I'm trying to break into the sass world, and I think I finally have an idea with some real potential. I'm creating a product for tattoo artists and tattoo shops that has a few features that pretty significantly differentiated, I think from the products that are already out there on the market, which are mostly just products for barbershops or hair salons that are re-skinned for the tattoo industry, validated the idea with a few artists. So, I think there's really something there, building it on low-code and no-code solutions right now, and I'm trying to start thinking about branding and marketing to really get something out into the world, into the public to try to get some other feedback and potential signups. So, what I'm wondering is, well, I'm doing, so I'm not really finding any standout search terms or search keywords that I can use to incorporate into my branding or my company name or URL. So, what I'm wondering is should I care about that, or should I just let my H1s landing pages and ad campaigns do that that work for me and focus right now on building a brand that stands out and is unique, easy to remember and might resonate with my target on the audience for another reason. So again, that's basically my question. Love to hear what you think about that. Thanks again. I'll be tuning into the next episode of course, and I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks a lot, Rob. Rob Walling: It's a good question, Kyle. It's interesting. Certain industries or verticals care a lot about aesthetic and care a lot about branding. And when you sell to designers, UX/UI professionals, tattoo artists, people who are into visual things, the aesthetic means a lot and brand is part of that. In a perfect world, you could have a cool name for the product with great design, logo, colors, fonts, and have some type of searchability. But the thing is, you don't need keywords embedded in your company name or product name. Go to tinyseed.com/portfolio and assume that most of these companies are successful doing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Obviously, ones that are more recent or a little earlier. But in general, a lot of the companies that are successful and look at the brand names, look at the company names, they are not keyword stuffed. And yet there are still companies on that list. Many that are doing SEO and content are getting incredible amounts of search traffic. They're not doing it on their product name, but they're doing it on peripheral terms. So instead of trying to rank for it, I'm not emailserviceprovider.com, yeah you call it Drip. And then you have your blog, and you have your videos, and you have whatever that is covering topics and questions people are asking about. So, obviously in a perfect world you could have a mix of those two, but I really think those days, those days are more difficult now because there's so many names and domain names are taken. But also, if you're going into a space like tattoos, where again, it's a real nod towards strong brands and aesthetics, for those who don't know, my entire left arm is tattoo sleeve. It took me years to get it done. Many tattoos that weave together. So, I've been in tattoo parlors, and you'll just notice that everything they have from the needle to the thing that they wrap around your arm to... I don't know, all these different things, a lot of them do have unique names or unique brands and brands is not just about colors and fonts in name, it's more than that. But in this case, if you're doing it from scratch, then you do have to start with the name does say something about it. So, all that to say, if I were in your shoes, I would go more towards a unique name that draws attention. You think of Monster Energy drink, Red Bull. These are things that where you hear and you're like, "Wait, what? Why is it called that?" It was very different than saying hype it up, energy drink, although that's actually not a bad name either, but it's something that's a generic version of that coolenergydrink.com or whatever. It's like, "Yeah, nobody cares. That's not a great brand name, even though that may be an SEO keyword that people search for." So, I would go with something that stands out, is easy to remember, and I think that will... It's going to make it memorable and that's going to be helpful in a space like this where word of mouth plays such a big part. The tattoo folks, they talk to one another in the same city, they all know each other, and that's what I'd be looking to do here, right? It's like while SEO can be a play and is something that I've used in pretty much every business I've ever done, that's just going to be one kind of one leg of your stool in this. And I think being in the Facebook groups or wherever tattoo folks hang out online, I think is going to be a piece of that. And just embedding yourself in that community. I call it hangouts, and this can be Quora or Reddit, /r/tattoo. And I'm sure there's like tattoo parlor owners, it gets so defined versus people that are into tattoos versus people that actually own tattoo shops. Tattoo parlors are a business. So, that typical B2B SaaS marketing approaches can work. And these are things I would think about. I call them my big five. It's content, SEO, cold outreach, integrations and partnerships. And that's going to be with either other people making tattoo software or anybody that's selling anything to a tattoo shop, how can you try to get some type of co-promotion going with them? And then of course, advertising. This is the instance where people say, "Should I advertise on Instagram, or should I start a TikTok channel or advertise on TikTok?" And for hardcore B2B, If I was an email service provider. I'm like, "Nah, usually not." Usually it's Facebook, Google AdWords, LinkedIn, those are the three. And LinkedIn's tough to get to work, but in this case, since all the tattoo people I know are on Instagram, I imagine there might be room here on Pinterest since it's such a visual medium and you probably know this already. And then TikTok, which is so kind of a question mark to me, I'm not really on it, but I would imagine that that is another avenue. So anyways, you didn't ask for my list of marketing approaches. I would try with this software, but that is where my head goes. And none of those really require, and aside from true Google SEO, which I think you should obviously target the terms you need to target. Aside from that, none of them require you to have keywords in your product name itself. And I think the memorability and the intrigue of your name is going to go much further than that. If you haven't read the book Fascinate by Sally Hogshead, I'd recommend it when thinking about naming because she goes through these, I think there's seven different factors that you can have. It's like trustworthiness or intrigue or kind of sensuality. I forget exactly what they're called, but there are different facets that a brand can have, and I think you'll want to figure out what it is and then base the name on that. So, it's a great question. Thanks for asking and I hope that was helpful. Speaker 5: Hi Rob, love the show. Appreciate all that you do for the SaaS community. So, thank you so much. My question today is around cold outreach. I'm currently running through the 5:00 PM framework for a tool I'd like to build for speech language pathologist. This has already proven extremely helpful for me as I'm on my third iteration of the idea as my first idea was really providing a vitamin. And I think now I'm getting... I have an aspirin that I'd like to build. One of the challenges I have during cold outreach is A, either getting responses back from people. My question is how do I introduce myself to up the likelihood that someone is willing to engage with me? And then furthermore, if they do decide to engage with me, it seems that I can only hold on to them for about one or two exchanges. If you have any techniques on how I can better engage with those who are responding and how I can better get higher engagement with my cold outreach, I would love to hear those techniques. Thank you. Rob Walling: When I read this subject line to this question, it says cold outreach and engagement. And I thought it meant, "Hey, I have a product and I'm trying to sell things." But this is actually kind of doing validation. And the cool part about doing validation in this way is you're not just validating. Is there a need for what I want to build? You're validating, "Can I find customers?" Because marketing risk is real. It's way more of a risk than this software aspect to this. We know you can build what you need to build or pay someone to build it, but do we know that you can find enough people fast enough that you don't lose interest and plateau at $200 a month after a year of working on it? No, we don't. So that's a big deal. I want to start off by saying if anyone listening is in this situation, they're like, I just can't get anyone to engage. The question I always have is then how are you going to get them to engage? Once you have something to sell, it's even harder. So, this is a good learning I think to have upfront. I like the cold outreach because you're in control. The other things I'd be thinking about and things that I've done to validate ideas when in conjunction with cold outreach, I'm also, or warm outreach, to be honest. I am also putting up a landing page and then referring people to that page to try to get interested emails. I have run ads on Facebook and Google and I'm trying to think of what else. I mean these days I would consider Instagram if your folks are there and you send them to a page with a value proposition that says, "Are you trying to solve this problem? I'm building software to do it, please enter your email and I'll be in touch." So, there you have outbound with your cold email and inbound through your pay-per-click. In addition, you can start doing SEO, you can... There's a number of ways every marketing approach that you can do, once the product is live, you can do now, it's just a matter of time. And we know that SEO's going to take time to go. And the reason I say pay-per-click is nice is because it's so fast to get going, and even if you're spending money, you're not trying to make money on this campaign. All you're trying to do is get input and feedback at this point. So, if you have budget, those are usually the two things I do is the cold and warm outreach plus some type of paid acquisition in a sense, sending to a landing page. And I'm not just looking at how many people enter their email, but then I'm reaching out to those people like, "Hey, I saw you opted in, so you're curious about this. I'd love to get your input on XYZ." Okay, so that kind of level sets how I would think about this. Next thing I would say is, if at all possible, try to get warm intros. Work your network. If you're on whatever social media network, Facebook, Insta, TikTok, whatever you are on, just try to get warm intros because that's going to make it so much easier. The next thing is when you do outreach, you say, "I'm a founder. I have nothing to sell you. I'm thinking about starting a company to solve this problem. Do you have it?" That's what you do. I have nothing to sell you. I'm not a salesperson. That can help make it easier. The next thing to think about is how can you make it the most efficient for them? So, you can say, "I'd like some feedback. I have a few questions. Here are the questions. If it's quickest for you to just respond, please do. Or you can click this link and fill out this survey with multiple choice options or I'd be happy to jump on a 10-minute call if that's easier. Here's my SavvyCal link to book that." So, you give them options. One, it can be a paradox of choice to be honest, but I think if I got an email like that, to be honest, I might just crank up a loom. I love recording just videos because it's quick and you can do exit and I can just talk, and it's done. I might go through your questions in a loom and then just send you a link to that. So, it's like none of the options you offered, but it's the way that I often like to communicate, especially when it's more nuanced or when it's more complex, a complex subject matter. But I think what you'll find is some people will click through into your survey and other people will just respond to the email. I think if people are dropping off after a couple, then that tells me they feel like it's not a good use of their time or maybe they don't believe that you're going to build something that will help them. And that's a problem is they'll donate their "time" for one round, but to get them to go two, three, four and to really invest, it almost feels like you really need to be solving an aspirin problem for them. And if you find that you're telling them the problem you're going to solve and they lose interest, that's not a great sign. It doesn't mean it won't work, but it's definitely not a burning take my money problem if people stop responding to your emails. Last thing I'll say is you might be asking for too much. I haven't seen your emails, but I've certainly received emails where someone will say, "Hey, can I ask you a quick question?" I say, "Sure." And then I get a wall of text back and it's like several questions and hundreds of words of context and I'm like, "Yeah, I just don't have time for this." And so, I'm sure you're thinking about that already, but to be as succinct as possible and really only ask the critical things, I think is pretty important. Bottom line is getting someone on a call is going to be the highest fidelity and the most valuable. It's just a big ask for busy people. And so, I have often done a lot of my warm slash cold outreach slash customer development purely via email where I send an email, people respond, and I go from there. But I usually haven't had a lot of back and forth. If you're going to need to do a lot of back and forth because you're still so early. Honestly, I think you might need to think about doing calls instead of focusing on email. I know that Jason Cohen, when he was vetting WP Engine, he would actually pay consultants or agencies, or he would offer to pay. He's like, "I know your rate is a hundred dollars an hour and I'll pay you for a half hour or for a full hour of your consulting rate. I just want to pick your brain." Now, I obviously don't know if you're in the position to be able to do that. That takes budget, but it is another option. So, thanks for the question. Hope that was helpful. My next question is from Spencer on prioritizing product improvements versus funnel building. It's the inevitable question. It's features versus marketing. It's product versus sales. Spencer: Hey Rob, my name's Spencer Henry and I just acquired a micro-SaaS for art museums. Very small. We have 15 active customers. Some of them have been there for years though, and so it really solves a problem for those select few. One customer said, if I were to raise the prices, he can't really do anything about it because they just can't go back to not using the software. So, it was built by a non-technical, like a museum employee with an offshore dev team, and there's a lot of product issues. There's a lot of small wins and there's a lot of larger things that I could fix. But I'll just give one example. If you want to import data instead of entering it from scratch from a CSV, there is no example CSV for you to download or no way for you to know what the column should be titled. So, things like that where it would make the onboarding really rough. I started working on fixing the landing page and setting up the drip email campaign. But when I ran into these issues as I was setting up guides and such, I'm not sure how to prioritize these product fixes versus marketing. My idea was to come in, get some new customers, and then start working on the product once I could show that I could get new customers. But I'm worried about really high churn with this rough onboarding experience. Thanks for any advice. Rob Walling: And Spencer comes through with a unique twist on this. It's not just about marketing versus product, but he acquired a product, and it has issues in it. I actually had this exact situation when I bought HitTail in 2011. Product was a mess. It was actually crashing constantly. So, I spent think a month or two doing no marketing because I didn't want anyone to come into that product while it was going down. Basically, every several months, it would have a day outage, two days outage. So, I stabilized it, moved it to new servers, and I fixed a bunch of bugs. There was just a bunch of craft in there. I did nothing visual, and I spent about two months fixing all of that before I then had a designer come back, redesigned stuff. I put a new coat of paint on it and shrink the signup form, which was like 10 or 12 fields down to two or three, and then started marketing it. Okay, so that's what I did. Now, was it the right choice? Yes, but it was only the right choice because I knew I would be able to find more customers. It was an SEO keyword tool. I knew the space well. A lot of people need it relatively easy to find traffic and send it and convert. It was low price point, et cetera, et cetera. So, I didn't really have that fear that if I went out and marketed it that no one would show up. I knew that I could get some people to the website through all the methods, right? SEO and pay-per-click advertising and press and partnerships and integrations and all that stuff, and that is in essence what I did. And I did a nice talk about that at MicroConf a few years ago. Actually, I think it's one of my better talks of my career because it was just a really nice story that also had a bunch of actionable takeaways. But here's the difference in your story. You don't know if you can find new customers, that's a challenge. For me, I would have a tough time bringing new customers in and setting them loose in a product that has bugs that I know about that are pretty clearing. So, there's a couple options here. Number one, go try to find new customers through marketing, through sales, whatever, and manually onboard them, and that might be the best way to do it. It de-risks this idea of can I find new customers? But it also means that if you manually onboard them, then you don't need to fix the CSV thing because you will know how it works and you can just help them do it. This is something that doesn't scale and it's not going to make sense to do long-term, but that doesn't matter. All you're doing now is trying to learn. So that might be the way I would think about it is start marketing. Actually, you know what I would do? I would start marketing and start doing sales, and I'd probably make it demo only and concierge onboarding for free and all that, even if the economics don't make sense for now. And if I had any downtime or any time when I was say burned out on marketing for this day, I would fix one or two of the higher priority things or one or two of the smaller things. Get a list of everything that's broken, get an hour estimate for each of them, and then probably a severity level for each of them, and then kind of weigh that and start knocking off one of those a week, two of those a week, whatever it is your schedule allows. So, I would do kind of a mix of it, but with an emphasis on that sales and marketing. Now, if you start getting so many people interested that it's like, "Well, I can't afford to spend the time to do the concierge onboarding anymore. You're in a great position. That's a great problem to have. Then it's like, "All right, I'm working this weekend to fix all this stuff and then I'm going to open the floodgates." I don't think that'll happen immediately, but that's kind of how I would be thinking about is it's not an either-or. It's do both, but prioritize the marketing and sales and just do everything manually to work around the bugs that you currently have while in the back of your mind thinking, "I'm going to knock these out one by one." Alternatively, you could do what I did with HitTail, and you could spend a month right now fixing all the bugs or two months or whatever, and there's risk. The risk there is that you can't find new customers and you're wasted all your time. And that's where this does come down to risk tolerance. If you feel like as a founder, as a CEO of this company, you need for all that to be fixed. That's okay, it's your prerogative, right? You're in control. You're a mostly bootstrapped or bootstrap company I presume, and you can do that, but I think to de-risk it a bit, I would take the first approach that I mentioned. That was a fun question, Spencer, thanks for sending it in. I hope that was helpful. And those are all the questions we have time for today. Thanks again for joining me this week and every week. It's amazing to be here with you. As always, this is Rob Walling signing off from episode 657.