Bootstrapped Web | For Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping Web Startups | Interviews & Business Case Studies

Hello there! We are back at Bootstrapped Web after a month long hiatus. Brian spent some time overseas with his family. Jordan did the same state side. On today’s episode we talk about what is going on with our respective companies and how those developments are going to change the podcast. We also discuss the status of the Audience Op’s calendar and other projects in the pipeline. I think transparency in general is great. It’s great for the community and helping us all grow and learn together. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here are today’s conversation points: Brian’s family visit. The challenges of working abroad. What Jordan was up to during the hiatus. Working to improve Carthook’s Shopify checkout. The problem with transparency. How Bootstrapped Web is going to move away from transparency. Josh Pigford’s recent blog post. Getting ready for Big Snow Tiny Conf. An update about Audience Op’s Calendar. Brian’s plans for webinars. The problem with webinars. How video can help a demo. How webinars and demos have changed. Jordan’s Starve Ups experience. “It is becoming a little bit more dangerous for me to talk about a lot of things transparently.” — Jordan Powered By the

Well, 2016 is coming to an end. Today we’ll compare our goal lists from last year and reflect back on what went wrong  and what went right.   Carthook and Audience Ops have both grown and changed so let’s sit down and take a look at our 2016 results. We will also discuss our goals for 2017 and how we plan to make them happen. This will be our last episode for 2016, and we’ll pick up next year. I think another way to think bigger is to think long term and not short term. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here’s today’s conversation points: Why Jordan wasn’t able to bring Carthook into profitability. Brian’s goal for Audience Ops and finding organic leads. How to think bigger. The problems Jordan had pivoting away from cart abandonment. Audience Ops is diversifying its product line. Beta users will be getting the Audience Ops Calendar. Wanting 2017 to be a breakout year. Why Brian went back to sales. When to raise prices? Working with kids in the house. Working with teams during the holidays. Jordan’s 2017 goals. Brian’s 2017 goals. When to give yourself a raise. Have a Happy Holidays everybody and we’ll see you next year! My goal is to have a more balanced 2017. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Today’s Bootstrapped Web is going  to be an up-date episode. We both have a lot to talk  about with what we’re working at the moment. Audience Ops and Carthook have new products and we discuss what is working for our sales respectively. We talk about transparency and some resources that will help you improve your sales game.  So tune in for the latest developments in Carthook and Audience Ops and what you can expect in the coming months. Force the demo and you will get fewer sign-ups, but you will get into a lot of conversations. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here are today’s conversation points: Why we don’t see the point to total transparency. When to ask for the credit card during a sign-up. Brian’s plans to redesign the Audience Ops website. Getting ideas from Ruben Gamez from Bidsketch. Jordan’s lessons from demos. Tweaking Audience Ops for a Resource Hub pivot. Brian’s plan for launching Calendar for beta testers. I feel like I can’t launch anything else, until I have the new site up and running. –  Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Resources Mentioned Today:

Hey we’ve got a party episode with Rob and Sherry Walling from the podcast ZenFounder. We are going to discuss how to balance life with kids and entrepreneurship. We explore the common problems with living  with kids and keeping a business going. We also discuss how entrepreneurship affects marriage. Rob and Sherry share how they are able to keep their communication open. We also discuss how we ourselves cope with the struggles of keeping family and entrepreneurship in a fair balance. Working for a boss was not even a possibility when you see that & you know entrepreneurship as the default. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here are today’s conversation points: The issues we have the public school systems. How to encourage entrepreneurship with your kids. How entrepreneurship affects marriage.   How to leave work behind at the end of the day. Why spouses aren’t necessarily the best person to vent to or use as a soundboard. How kids change your goals and motivations. How to deal with burnout. How to make the shift from work time to family time. How to plan your week beforehand. The importance of giving your spouse non-kid time. I find a lot more value in having Mastermind groups and friends and advisors to talk about real issues. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Welcome back to Bootstrapped Web. Our guest today is Ruben Gamez, the founder of Bidsketch.com. We are talking to Ruben today because Bidsketch is getting ready to launch a new product. Since we both are launching new products we thought it would be good to compare notes. Bidsketch’s main product has been a proposal tool. Now they want to add a signature app to their brand. Today we discuss how to research for a new product and how to handle expanding when there are competitors. We compare notes about our own product lines and how to get the customers to notice. I think there are plenty, well established competing companies who just have feature bloat. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here are today’s topics: How to find positioning and distribution for a new product. Why begin a separate product line. Finding the “why” when people don’t use your product. How to focus on two product lines. Creating a good elevator pitch. Finding your hook. Asking the right questions of new customers. How to reach people outside of your network. Ruben’s timeline. How to find the gaps in your competitor’s products. Why you shouldn’t copy just to copy a competitor. If you are interested in Bidsketch and their new product, you can go to bidsketch.com or find Ruben on Twitter. There is all this lead up that goes into it [switching apps] that you don’t see it beneath the surf. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Today’s episode is an update episode. Jordan tells us about finding his customer base for the funnel tool. Brian discusses how he is working with his developers on a new training product he is planning. We discuss when to allow custom jobs and when to say no. We also discuss what challenges a young bootstrapped company needs to expect. Building your company is so much harder, than it sounds. If you are just starting out as a bootstrapped business, then maybe this episode will help you get an idea of what you’re getting into and the other challenges. We need to shift into a more diversified product line with software and training. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here are today’s conversation points: Our reactions to the Presidential election. Jordan’s new custom job, and how he’s preparing for it. How to fill gaps in your business. Brian’s new training program. Building a good foundation ladder. The challenges of bootstrapping. Jordan’s time at Tanner Larson’s Mastermind. Brian’s planning discussions with his developers. Advice about pricing and how to decide it. We are not giving up on short-term stuff but it is nice to start thinking in terms of the next few weeks. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

On today’s episode, we welcome Craig Hewitt and Justin Jackson to the podcast. Jordan is having some time away. On today’s episode Craig, Justin, and Brian all discuss how to build and keep a company on track. We discuss what drives us and what we’re working on at the moment. If you want to know how to plan a product or just try to set a trajectory for your business, this is the episode for you! Craig is the CEO of Podcast Motor, a podcast editing and production service. Justin is the host of his own podcast Mega Maker 3000 and a teacher of marketing for developers. We all have great insights to growing a company and how we’ve been able to stay on track. I just really want to have a comfortable lifestyle, but also build valuable assets. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here are today’s conversation points: Justin relaunch of Marketing for Developers. Brian’s update on Audience Ops. Craig’s update on Podcast Motor. The lessons we’ve learned from starting and maintaining our businesses. Our long term goals. The disadvantages of working solo. Why businesses choose to keep their companies small. Justin belief in doing something uncomfortable for growth. How you can over-plan. Why you need to look at the bigger picture. The importance of visibility and building relationships. How to use evergreen content. How we use automation in our businesses. What keeps our ambition going? You can never retreat too much in working because you have to maintai

We welcome Rob Walling from Drip to the podcast today. Today we discuss how to navigate and manage the development process of a SaaS product. We all share our experiences with the excitement and frustrations of working with developers. Launching a new product is hard enough, but when you factor in the time, energy, and troubleshooting that goes into a project, then the level of stress can be crushing. We discuss these stresses and how we dealt with them. Or in some cases how we’re currently dealing with them. As the non-developer founder, you have to somehow stay positive throughout the whole thing. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Today’s conversation points: Audience Ops Calendar update. Jordan’s update on Carthook. How to manage expectations and deadlines with a SaaS project. How to build a solid foundation for a product. The importance of communication in a development team. Having a back-up plan for features. The process of from concept to developer. Why you need a good user experience. Why you need a good user interface. How to cope with time constraints and milestones. How to resolve disagreements. When to pull the CEO card. How to change developers or on-board new developers. Speed is the top priority, at the same time going into this I want to build  this with a strong foundation. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This

We’ve got a party episode today. We welcome Rob Williams of Workshop and Folyo. Allan Branch joins us later on in the episode when we discuss his time with Less Accounting. There are pros and cons to both the service and the software side of things. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Today’s topic was primarily pricing. How to price effectively, why to price at a certain level, and what pricing can do for your business. This episode was a great discussion on how value to the customer is reflected in the pricing of a service or product. We had some great insights today and maybe we’ll help you decide how to price your own service or product. Here are today’s topics: Rob’s service Workshop. What is it? Why Rob has recently changed the pricing of the service. The art of pricing. How pricing attracts the “right” clientele. What is Folyo? To do or not to do a Free Trial. What is Audience Ops Calendar? How to offer value to a customer. Catching up with Allan Branch. Why you are always beholden to somebody. Why Allan and his team sold Less Accounting. If you want to tie pricing to value isn’t that [revenue] the ultimate value? But no one does it! – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

We find ourselves discussing competition and when you should copy a competitor’s model and when you should innovate a model. Many people get excited about a category, but are soon discouraged when they see the competition.  On today’s episode we discuss why competition can be a good thing. What most people do is they copy pieces and then they innovate. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This We also discuss Big Snow Tiny Conf coming up on February 6-9 in both Vermont and Colorado. There are 2 slots left in those events so check out the link below for more information. The rest of this episode is just stream of consciousness, so hang with us for this conversation. Today’s points: Big Snow Tiny Conf. Facebook culture vs. Twitter culture Jordan’s Twitter conversation with Justin Jackson. Who is true competition? Why competition is good. How competition pushes your business. How to deal with competition. Innovation vs. Copying Brian’s observations of Basecamp. Joe Rogan’s podcast with Dan Bilzerian. If there is one or two other people doing the same thing as you, that’s a sign of some sort of market there. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This

Today’s episode is basically a therapy session for us both. We lay out our current issues and talk each other though the options. Jordan is dealing with customers and their personal expectations for the products. Brian is looking for balance in his development stage on the calendar product. We try our best to see our situations from all angles and possibilities. The first step is deciding which things are the right things to pursue. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This So join us for our conversation today, you might learn some things about the futures of Carthook and Audience Ops. Here are today’s topics: Carthook’s customer response to the checkout product. Dealing with customer requests. When it is time to expand a company. Approaching service based business models. Approaching product based business models. The alternative answer to consulting services. How to standardize operations. The 2 approaches to launches. Finding the balance of life and product development. An Audience Ops podcast. Audience Ops webinars. What’s the higher level goal for the company? And that’s not just revenue and profit. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Today is a basic update episode, but we have a special guest as well. Justin McGill is the co-founder of LeadFuze and co-host of the podcast Zero to Scale. He joins us on the update train today and gives us an idea of what the future holds for LeadFuze. Jordan tells us how his team meetup is going and Brian fills us in on what is going on with Audience Ops. Finding talent is so hard & to limit to just my zipcode is… I don’t see how that would have worked. – Brian Casel Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This We cover a lot of topics today. Our main discussion boils down to the pros and cons of remote teams. A lot of founders find remote works well for them, but today we discuss the virtues of a brick and mortar office space. Here are today’s topics: Jordan’s meetup progress. The pressures of being the boss and having a life. Jordan’s product development troubles. Jordan’s new website and onboarding process for the check-out product. Brian’s 50k milestone. Brian’s search for a good writer. Brian’s return to sale calls. Justin’s LeadFuze issues. The stress of going from remote team to office space. The importance of office culture to a business. How to decompress while working at home. Slack vs. e-Mail What’s going on with Audience Ops’ software.

We’re are having a “party” episode with some special guests today. We’ve got Dave Rodenbaugh, Craig Hewitt, and later on Brad Touesnard joining us. We are all involved with Big Snow Tiny Conf. Brian is head of the Vermont event, Dave is head of the West event (Colorado.) Craig is taking care of our European event in France. Today we talk about the conference and why we love it. It’s [Big Snow Tiny Conf] half retreat, half mastermind. –  Dave Rodenbaugh Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This We also discuss living abroad and working remote and with remote teams. The startup world is going global and we want Big Snow Tiny Conf to reflect that. Here are today’s topics: What is Big Snow Tiny Conf Big Snow Tiny Conf East Big Snow Tiny Conf West Big Snow Tiny Conf Europe Why the events are awesome! Jordan’s meetup with his team Why traveling is a perk to the Bootstrapped lifestyle If you have an interest in Big Snow Tiny Conf tickets go on sale Oct. 10th. Remember these events are meant to be small so space is limited. Big Snow Tiny Confs East and West (Vermont and Colorado)  are scheduled for Feb. 6-9.  Big Snow Tiny Conf Europe (France) is scheduled for Jan. 16-19. I think travel specifically is one of the big drivers of why I do this for a living. – Brian Casel Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Today on Bootstrapped Web we talk about a new product from Audience Ops. Brian has developed a software product called Audience Ops Calendar. He has offered it to 12 clients and based his approach on a pre-sale model. During today’s episode Brian tell us how he has developed the product. He answers why he chose  to develop a calendar, how to use his software, and how he plans to market it. If you’ve ever been curious about a SAAS development this episode will tell you the right way to go about it. Getting people into your software product to pay a monthly fee is not the only way to sell your software product. – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This Here are today’s conversation points: Why Brian decided to launch this idea. The problems the project has had. The 3 ideal customers for Brian’s product. The features of the product. Brian’s process to develop the product. Why having a beta group is a good idea. Brian’s team building process. Reach certain milestones that you are able to invite 5 paying customers. Then another 5, then another 5. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This

We welcome Rob Walling and Ben Fisher to the podcast today. We are going to discuss the topic of co-founders. Rob is the original founder of Drip, but has found a co-founder named Derek. Ben is Jordan’s co-founder in Carthook. Brian however is the solo founder prospective in today’s conversation. Brian has had co-founders, but Audience Ops is all him. On today’s episode Jordan and Ben talk about how they began their partnership and Rob discusses his partnership with Derek. In recent news Rob’s company Drip has been acquired by Leadpages. He tells us about that change and how it has affected his partnership. In the early stage it’s easy to overlook how difficult will it be to make it [SAAS] a viable business. – Brian Powered By the Tweet This Plugin Tweet This The topics we covered are: How Leadpages’ acquisition has changed Drip. Why you are always reinvesting into your business. Jordan’s original intentions for Carthook. Why Jordan needed to work with Ben. The issues for a solo founder. How Ben found Jordan. How Rob found his business partner. The 2 factors of finding the right business partner. How to divide up decision making. The pros and cons of partnerships. How to respect your partner. Agreeing to a shared goal with your business partner. Is there a such thing as a final decision or is everything a collaboration? – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin