Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob and Mike discuss 6 reasons it is hard to ship a product. Mike talks through the roadblocks he has faced with AuditShark.

Rob and Mike share what they have learned in the past two month with listeners.

Rob and Mike announce details for MicroConf 2012.

Show Notes HitTail AuditShark Transcript [00:00] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 64. [00:03] [Music] [00:12] Rob: Welcome to startups for the rest of us the podcast to help developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you have built your first product or you are just thinking about it, I am Rob. [00:21] Mike: And I am Mike. [00:23] Rob: And we are here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. If you stick around to the end of the episode we are going to be discussing hiring and managing remote developers in depth. What’s going on this week Mike? [00:35] Mike: The last week I remember you would you had mentioned that Google Adwords issue where if you go in you browse and you search for different things there was a little newsletter popup for somebody to signup directly through the Google Adwords. And I did some research on that and unfortunately it’s in beta but it’s basically just an Adwords extension that they have added on it. I mean they have added a couple of different Adwords extensions over the years and this is just one that is currently in beta. So I couldn’t get much info on it and you know there is a little bit of speculation here and there but it seems to be rather new its only been out there for maybe a moth or so. [01:10] Rob: Yeah I have never actually seen it in the wild you are the one that stumbled upon it when we were having kind of an offline conversation. Explain to the… we didn’t talk about it at all on the podcast last week, explain to the listeners what it is. [01:20] Mike: So when you go to Google and you do a search for something that Google does is in addition to showing the page search results right underneath well actually its embedded in line with some of the search results that are paid for you will have a just a text field that says ‘subscribe’. And there is a button off to the side I don’t know whether you can customize the ‘subscribe’ button or not and you basically it will fill in your email address if you are already logged into Google services. And I will assume that it goes through and you know signs you up for whatever mailing list that they have. [01:55] Now if I remember correctly it also directly sends your email address to them. I don’t know if there is any sort of double opt in or anything like that but it looked interesting. The one thing I question is whether or not people are going to actively hand out their email address through something on that unless you explicitly say in the text of the Ad that you are giving something away for free and they can only get it if they sign up. [02:20] Rob:    Yeah it’s got to be a big you are basically selling to them in like what you have 50 characters or something. I mean that’s like ten words tops you know. So you really have to convince someone to give their email quickly. It’s not like you have even a sidebar with a little photo or anything like that its just very very tight. So we will see how it goes I think it’s an interesting experiment obviously but it’d be curious to try it out at some point. And its Adwords only I mean you know its kind of a bummer they don’t allow it in the search results. But I am sure they are going to they are not going to allow people to do that they want you to pay for it. Well hey my update the new Hit Tail design is up, it’s live. [02:56] Mike: Really? [02:57] Rob:    Yeah, yeas I launched it yesterday. So everyone rush out to hittail.com and check it out, it’s a lot of work. Try to think I didn’t have nearly as many issues as I thought it would once I rolled it live. Because I have I did it kind of a commando launch you know I did not have the massive QA team doing all kinds of monitoring and all of that stuff. I just kind of I knew it worked pretty well and I tested the major functions. I put it up yesterday, I emailed everybody all the active users and said come check out and… [03:24] Mike: Cool. [03:25] [...]

Rob and Mike answer more listener questions covering generic product names, offline marketing techniques, and more...

Rob and Mike answer more listener questions, ranging from landing page specifics to questions to ask a web designer before you hire one, and more...

Rob and Mike answer listener questions.

Rob and Mike talk about Mike's progress on AuditShark.

Rob and Mike talk with Dan Andrews of the Lifestyle Business Podcast about why you should hire an intern, as well as insights into hiring employees and contractors.

Rob and Mike discuss the progress they're making with their new apps: HitTail and AuditShark.

Rob and Mike speak with Jason Roberts and Justin Vincent of the TechZing podcast.

Rob and Mike update the status of their products; HitTail and AuditShark.

Rob and Mike talk about the Business of Software of Conference 2011.

Rob and Mike discuss how Rob left salaried employment.

Rob and Mike discuss how Mike left salaried employment.