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02: Sprints & Features
Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about how they run their sprints and release features in their products.
Helpful links from the episode:
- Whitepark's free Google review link generator tool
- SaaStr Annual conference
- GatherUp GMB integration launch
FULL SHOW NOTES
[music]
00:11 Aaron Weiche: We are back with episode two, Sprints and Features.
00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp, and Darren Shaw of White Spark. Lets go.
[music]
00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, episode two. I'm Aaron.
00:50 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.
00:51 AW: And we are excited to absolutely 100% what we're doing because we're going from one to two episodes, and that’s pretty exciting. I felt good about getting one episode in the books. I don't know how you felt about it.
01:05 DS: Yeah. I think that, okay, one in the books and now we're recording two, that tells me this is a thing. It's happening, we're doing it.
01:12 AW: Everything from here is hockey sticking up, and to the right.
01:17 DS: Yeah, it's amazing. Our growth, from zero to where we've come, has been pretty impressive.
01:22 AW: I've actually had some fun figuring out all these little wrinkles of podcast recording, and getting your feed submitted everywhere, and finding an editor and a voice-over talent, and all that kind of stuff, that was an interesting process to get to learn so much about a new medium. It's been a while since I've had to... It was like learning WordPress all over.
01:44 DS: And you've really done it. I've basically been sitting back and you just tell me when to show up. So, thank you, Aaron, for managing all that stuff.
01:51 AW: Yeah. Well, like I mentioned, that's a personal issue. I need to delegate more and do less, but I love to learn, so it's definitely exciting. But I probably need to hand some of it off to you to get you to feel involved.
02:03 DS: Sometimes you're gonna be busy, and I'll take the reins of organizing everything.
02:08 AW: There you go. So, what have you been up to the last couple of weeks since we talked last?
02:11 DS: Well, we're trying to get this one tool out the door. We've been building this new tool, which we call Review Checker, and we were so confident. After last Friday, we're like, "We're definitely gonna launch this thing." And then on Monday, we start stress testing it and it's like, "Oh, yeah, oh right, there's this problem." That's the trouble, you always think you're done and then you just have a bunch of people poke at it, and you're like, "Wow, there's still so much more that we need to do before this thing is ready for prime time."
That's been taking up all of our time, and I'm really excited about it. I think it's gonna be a great project. I think it's going to be a nice little tool that will bring lead gen into White Spark stuff. We have built that review link generator. Do you know that, on our website?
02:54 AW: Yep.
02:54 DS: That thing gets so many mentions and tweets and links to it. It's a really great tool that drives a lot of attention to Whitespark, and so this will be something kind of similar.
03:05 AW: Now, do you guys have a formalized process as you're getting ready to release a feature or a new little tool like this that you follow very closely, or is it just like every day, see where you're at, see if it's done, next step kind of deal?
03:20 DS: It's the latter. It's like we're always just picking away at it. So, it's Dmitri will finish the last round of edits, a request that I made of how I want it to look, and then I'll take a look at it or Jesse will take a look at it. It's basically been Jesse and I testing the tool out and writing up a list of things that we want different. And then he'll finish that round, and then we do it again and take another pass at it and think about it some more. So, it's been growing like that over the last little while. And then we had a bunch of our team members take a look at it and we found some problems. The biggest problem... First, I'll explain how the tool works. Basically, it just scans your business name. It'll search Google, it'll find any sites that have review schema with little stars that show up in Google search results, and then it will track that and give you a report, saying, "Hey, you have this many reviews on Google, and this is your rating. You have this many on Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, etcetera." So, it just gives you this nice little report of how many reviews you have.
04:23 DS: And so if you were an agency on a budget, or a small business, and you just wanna keep track of this, you could just come back to the tool once a month or once a week, and run it and get a little report back, and you can say, "Okay, this is how our reviews are going." It's this free little once-off, check your reviews tool. In terms of the development, yeah, it's basically just been that we keep plugging away at it. And one of the problems that we're finding is, let's say you put in a really generic name, well, Google returns a whole bunch of stuff that's actually not your business. It's someone else's business, it's some weird business. So, if your name is really generic, you can get a whole bunch of what we are calling false positives in the tool, so we're trying to figure out a way to fix that before we launch it.
05:02 AW: Nice. How far into the results does it go? Is it mostly looking at page directories that would rank page one, or does it go further than that? What does that look like?
05:10 DS: Yeah, we do the first two pages.
05:13 AW: All right. So, you're looking at, what, page one, and then page two, where the SEO joke is. That's the best place to hide a dead body, is page two of Google search results.
05:21 DS: Exactly. And we run about 10 different searches, and then we combine all the results, so we do a whole bunch of variations to try and find everything we could.
05:29 AW: Yeah, awesome. You're looking at this as more of a marketing and lead gen tool, at the same time you're building it out? Are other people on the team taking care of the marketing pieces, and how you're gonna promote it?
05:41 DS: Well, promoting is pretty simple. We don't have a huge promotion plan. Basically it's a free tool, so it's this new little free tool. We're going to tweet about it, obviously, put it on our social stuff, we'll put it in our newsletter, and that will mostly be the extent of it. And we think, generally, my experience is, if you launch a free tool that is cool and useful, the marketing does itself. People will just share it because it's free, it's like, "Oh, this is a great new free tool." And we might do a little poking around people that talk about free tools and have free SEO tools. We'll make sure we get listed on those, so just a little prospecting and outreach fo...
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By Aaron Weiche
5
1010 ratings
Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about how they run their sprints and release features in their products.
Helpful links from the episode:
- Whitepark's free Google review link generator tool
- SaaStr Annual conference
- GatherUp GMB integration launch
FULL SHOW NOTES
[music]
00:11 Aaron Weiche: We are back with episode two, Sprints and Features.
00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp, and Darren Shaw of White Spark. Lets go.
[music]
00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, episode two. I'm Aaron.
00:50 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.
00:51 AW: And we are excited to absolutely 100% what we're doing because we're going from one to two episodes, and that’s pretty exciting. I felt good about getting one episode in the books. I don't know how you felt about it.
01:05 DS: Yeah. I think that, okay, one in the books and now we're recording two, that tells me this is a thing. It's happening, we're doing it.
01:12 AW: Everything from here is hockey sticking up, and to the right.
01:17 DS: Yeah, it's amazing. Our growth, from zero to where we've come, has been pretty impressive.
01:22 AW: I've actually had some fun figuring out all these little wrinkles of podcast recording, and getting your feed submitted everywhere, and finding an editor and a voice-over talent, and all that kind of stuff, that was an interesting process to get to learn so much about a new medium. It's been a while since I've had to... It was like learning WordPress all over.
01:44 DS: And you've really done it. I've basically been sitting back and you just tell me when to show up. So, thank you, Aaron, for managing all that stuff.
01:51 AW: Yeah. Well, like I mentioned, that's a personal issue. I need to delegate more and do less, but I love to learn, so it's definitely exciting. But I probably need to hand some of it off to you to get you to feel involved.
02:03 DS: Sometimes you're gonna be busy, and I'll take the reins of organizing everything.
02:08 AW: There you go. So, what have you been up to the last couple of weeks since we talked last?
02:11 DS: Well, we're trying to get this one tool out the door. We've been building this new tool, which we call Review Checker, and we were so confident. After last Friday, we're like, "We're definitely gonna launch this thing." And then on Monday, we start stress testing it and it's like, "Oh, yeah, oh right, there's this problem." That's the trouble, you always think you're done and then you just have a bunch of people poke at it, and you're like, "Wow, there's still so much more that we need to do before this thing is ready for prime time."
That's been taking up all of our time, and I'm really excited about it. I think it's gonna be a great project. I think it's going to be a nice little tool that will bring lead gen into White Spark stuff. We have built that review link generator. Do you know that, on our website?
02:54 AW: Yep.
02:54 DS: That thing gets so many mentions and tweets and links to it. It's a really great tool that drives a lot of attention to Whitespark, and so this will be something kind of similar.
03:05 AW: Now, do you guys have a formalized process as you're getting ready to release a feature or a new little tool like this that you follow very closely, or is it just like every day, see where you're at, see if it's done, next step kind of deal?
03:20 DS: It's the latter. It's like we're always just picking away at it. So, it's Dmitri will finish the last round of edits, a request that I made of how I want it to look, and then I'll take a look at it or Jesse will take a look at it. It's basically been Jesse and I testing the tool out and writing up a list of things that we want different. And then he'll finish that round, and then we do it again and take another pass at it and think about it some more. So, it's been growing like that over the last little while. And then we had a bunch of our team members take a look at it and we found some problems. The biggest problem... First, I'll explain how the tool works. Basically, it just scans your business name. It'll search Google, it'll find any sites that have review schema with little stars that show up in Google search results, and then it will track that and give you a report, saying, "Hey, you have this many reviews on Google, and this is your rating. You have this many on Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, etcetera." So, it just gives you this nice little report of how many reviews you have.
04:23 DS: And so if you were an agency on a budget, or a small business, and you just wanna keep track of this, you could just come back to the tool once a month or once a week, and run it and get a little report back, and you can say, "Okay, this is how our reviews are going." It's this free little once-off, check your reviews tool. In terms of the development, yeah, it's basically just been that we keep plugging away at it. And one of the problems that we're finding is, let's say you put in a really generic name, well, Google returns a whole bunch of stuff that's actually not your business. It's someone else's business, it's some weird business. So, if your name is really generic, you can get a whole bunch of what we are calling false positives in the tool, so we're trying to figure out a way to fix that before we launch it.
05:02 AW: Nice. How far into the results does it go? Is it mostly looking at page directories that would rank page one, or does it go further than that? What does that look like?
05:10 DS: Yeah, we do the first two pages.
05:13 AW: All right. So, you're looking at, what, page one, and then page two, where the SEO joke is. That's the best place to hide a dead body, is page two of Google search results.
05:21 DS: Exactly. And we run about 10 different searches, and then we combine all the results, so we do a whole bunch of variations to try and find everything we could.
05:29 AW: Yeah, awesome. You're looking at this as more of a marketing and lead gen tool, at the same time you're building it out? Are other people on the team taking care of the marketing pieces, and how you're gonna promote it?
05:41 DS: Well, promoting is pretty simple. We don't have a huge promotion plan. Basically it's a free tool, so it's this new little free tool. We're going to tweet about it, obviously, put it on our social stuff, we'll put it in our newsletter, and that will mostly be the extent of it. And we think, generally, my experience is, if you launch a free tool that is cool and useful, the marketing does itself. People will just share it because it's free, it's like, "Oh, this is a great new free tool." And we might do a little poking around people that talk about free tools and have free SEO tools. We'll make sure we get listed on those, so just a little prospecting and outreach fo...