Product People

Learn Brennan’s trick for identifying a good market: “find a community, and just keep adding value.” Whether that’s a forum response, blog post, info-product, or SaaS app, learn how choosing an audience and sticking with them can pay off.

Highlights

• “Most of my users don’t care that [Planscope] is project management software; they care about outcomes.” – Brennan Dunn
• “Instead of listing out technical features, which is what [we as developers] want to do, I need to tell a story.” – Brennan Dunn
• How did you get people to care? How did you get people to notice your product?
  • “My entire marketing strategy is marketing through education. I knew the problems my audience was having, so I started blogging about those problems.” – Brennan Dunn
  • “People don’t buy software just to buy software: they buy software to make their lives better somehow. A blog post is equally able to do that (to make their lives better).” – Brennan Dunn
• What kind of traffic did you get on your blog when you started?
  • “I got a few thousand views over the months that I was building Planscope” – Brennan Dunn
  • “Blogging allowed me to get out of the code and answer the question: ‘Why am I doing this?'” – Brennan Dunn
• How did you build your email list?
  • It was a mailing list of 300 people when he launched.
  • Brennan built his list over the 4 months that he was building Planscope.
  • Most of the sign-ups to his email list came from his blog.
  • 1/3 of his mailing list signed up for a trial account (100 people)
  • 25% of his trial users converted to paying accounts (25 people)
• Where does growth come from?
  • Most of Brennan’s customers have come from his blog posts, and his email list
  • Another important source of traffic: his book  Double Your Freelancing Rate.
• How much money has Brennan earned so far? (as of December)
  • Planscope – $29,904 ($6,000 / month)
  • Books – $35,00
  • Classes – $41,000

Show notes

• Planscope.io
• KISSmetrics
• Stripe
• Double Your Freelancing Rate

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How do you make a name for yourself, and your product?

That’s the question we posed to Brennan Dunn.  It seemed like almost overnight he was everywhere: blog posts on Hacker News, popping up in my Twitter stream, and promoting a new product for consultants called Planscope. In this episode we delve into how he made this happen: we asked him how he got his start in products, how he promoted himself, and what Latin has to do with all of this.

Highlights

• “Businesses value [services] more than consumers, because [time lost] is literally costing them money.” – Brennan Dunn
• “Listen to what people, who have a financial interest, are complaining about!” – Brennan Dunn
• It’s clear that Brennan’s real advantage is that he’s passionate about his customers: he honestly wants to make their lives better.
• “People don’t buy software, they buy outcomes” – Brennan Dunn

Show notes

• Planscope
• Build a consultancy workshop
• Book: Double Your Freelancing Rate
• Book: Sell Yourself Online
• 37signals on Apple.com
• Brennan Dunn (@brennandunn) on Twitter

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Have you ever wondered how much personal brand affects software sales? Check out this is great episode with Rob Walling. In our interview he reveals a ton of tactics for outsourcing your development on oDesk, finding a good idea for your business, and marketing your product effectively. If you’ve ever wanted to start and launch your own software products as a solo-founder, this episode is full of practical advice you can use. Rob is the founder of HitTail, and co-founder of Startups for the Rest of Us and the Micropreneur Academy.

Highlights

• How to outsource your work: techniques for oDesk:
  • Browse the listings: look how boring most of the tasks are!
  • Post an interesting job description
  • Build relationships, and treat the people you hire well
• What makes a good idea, in terms of building a business?
  • Build something people want, solves a problem (problem-solution fit). Rob recommends Steve Blank’s customer development approach: contact people, tell them what your product does, how much you’ll charge, and ask them if they’ll pay for it. Rob
  • And you can find that market fairly easily: if you can’t communicate to them easily, you don’t have a business
• What is the actual genesis of a good idea?
  • You can solve your own problem: but make sure you validate it with 10 other people. Also, think about how you’re going to market it to “people like yourself”. “Scratching your own issue isn’t enough”, says Rob, “you have to solve a problem and have a market.”
  • You can also find a market that you find interesting, and where you have some sort of traction in. Then you can look for problems to solve. With Drip, Rob chose it because he really likes working with the entrepreneur market.
• What are the characteristics of a good market? (and a bad market)
  • “There are no bad markets,” says Robs, “some markets are just harder to communicate to than others.”
  • Rob likes markets that are online, that talk to each other (virality), and open to trying new things. (For example: Realtors and lawyers are  not   as  open to trying new things)
  • Ability and willingness to pay: don’t create an app for college students or school teachers! There’s a lack of an ability to pay.
• Which is better: B2B or B2C?
  • “I prefer B2B because businesses purchase based on value”, says Rob, “if you can save them money or make them money, you can justify your price. Consumers don’t value their time as much.”
  • Should you go after hobby markets? Rob thinks they can work for info-products and mobile apps, but not SaaS apps.
  • “Consumers are harder to support” – Rob
• How to market your product:
  • Personal brand: “Personal brand has very little to do with B2B sales,” comments Rob, “in terms of HitTail’s growth, most of it has come from other channels.” He says that books, conferences, and training courses can benefit from a strong personal brand. You have to have an interesting perspective: this is often formed by what you’ve achieved (personally). What projects and products have you launched? “The earlier you can be laser focused on a certain audience, the faster you’ll build a following. Rob started focusing on solo-founders, who were bootstrapping.
  • Content marketing: this is building info graphics, writing viral blog posts that get shared: it’s socially driven. It can be really effective: The problem with this approach is that it’s time-intensive and can be expensive. Look for long-tail search terms: these are low competition phrases, that can still attract a significant amount of traffic. This is why Rob bought HitTail: it surfaces those long-tail keywords for you. Rob currently has his Product Manager do a lot of writing for him, he outsources other things (like the infographic). Rob outsources as much as possible. “Be sure to measure”, says Rob, put out a lot of content and then look at the ROI for each.
  • SEO: this is finding keywords, and writing good content that matches those keywords. “This isn’t just ranking in Google; it includes ranking in Amazon, in YouTube, in the iPhone app store, ranking in WordPress theme directory. It’s really hard to contract out SEO. “What has always worked is writing good content,” says Rob, “start with keywords that people are going to be searching for, blog about it, and then get links to those posts. It is a lot of work.” There’s not as much opportunity to game Google.
  • Advertising: It’s hard to get right, but it can really grow your customer base. “You really want to have a customer lifetime value over $150 to even look at advertising”, says Rob. Click advertising has gotten really expensive (especially on Google Adwords). New opportunities: Facebook ads, depending on your market BuySellAds, Reddit ads, LinkedIn (you need a higher lifetime value for it), and StumbleUpon ads. Rob manages all of his advertising campaigns in Google Analytics – use the Google URL Builder to identify which campaign you’re running.

Show notes

• oDesk.com
• Software by Rob
• GetDrip.com
• 13 pre-launch marketing strategies
• Google URL Builder
• HitTail
• justinjackson.ca
• Startups for the Rest of Us

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Rob Walling is the man behind products like HitTail, DotNetInvoice, and Drip. But he also helped start a movement of micropreneurs: solo-founders, who launch their own products. These small startups don’t take venture funding and don’t hire employees. In this part 1 of our interview you’ll hear how he went from consulting, to building products full-time. Learn how you can acquire a product (instead of building it yourself) and why the code is less valuable than the product marketing.

“Building something people want is not enough”, says Rob “you have to be able to market it at a cost less than what the customer will pay you back over time.”

He also talks about how to launch products if you’ve already started a family (wife, kids, and a mortgage).

Rob and Mike Taber host podcast that you’ll want to check out: Startups For the Rest of Us.

Show notes

• Software by Rob blog
• HitTail
• Drip
• DotNetInvoice
• CMSthemer.com
• justbeachtowels.com

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This is part 2 of our interview with Sacha Greif. In this episode we talked with him about how to find a partner, and the pain involved in building up a product income.

Sacha is a designer and coder from Paris, France, but he’s now living in Osaka, Japan. He’s worked with companies like Hipmunk, but he’s best known for his cool side-projects. His most recent, called Telescope, is an open source platform for creating your own Hacker News.

Highlights

• When searching for co-founders, Sacha says: “If you try to find [partners] motivated by money it’s a lot different than finding people who are interested in the project itself”
• He said that his “internet popularity” didn’t help him find a partner to build Telescope with him; what worked was getting involved in the Meteor community.
• Sacha talks about the importance of side-projects: “The cool thing about the web is that anyone can create a hit. But it helps a lot if you already have a network, and an audience. When I launched Folyo I didn’t really have that audience. I think getting people to pay attention to what you do is the hardest thing on the internet.”
• “If you think about it, there are two sides to the equation: having people pay attention, and the other side is having people pay money. Step 1 is doing something popular [where they pay attention]. Step 2 is getting people to pay for products.” – Sacha Greif
• “The biggest problem people make is they think too big with their side-projects. They instantly jump to: ‘I’m going to build a social network.’ My advice is to bottle it down to the Minimum Viable Side Project. It should be something you can build in 10 hours. ” – Sacha Greif
• “My inspiration for  Sidebar.io is  Daring Fireball; but a multi-user Daring Fireball.” – Sacha Greif
• Building a product income is hard! Sacha was really transparent about how he’s not earning a lot of money right now as he attempts to bootstrap his current projects: Sidebar.io and a book on Meteor.
• At the end of the interview, Sacha shared this: we don’t hear about the failures of product people; we only hear about the wins. This makes people think that everyone is winning, when that’s not reality.

Show notes

• Tom Coleman
• Telescope
•  Sidebar.io
•  Sacha’s website and blog
•  The side-project project
•  Sacha’s ebook: Step by Step UI Design
•  Medium
•  Amy Hoy – 30×500
•  Twistori
•  Getting Real by 37signals
•  Branch
•  Startup Chile
• (Photo: Sacha Greif on Instagram)

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What are some good strategies for creating, pricing and selling an ebook? In Part 1 of our interview with Sacha we discuss what he learned launching his first book, and what he plans on doing next time. We also take a look at Meteor, “an open-source platform for building web apps” using pure JavaScript.

Highlights

• Sacha kick-started his product career by selling themes on Themeforest. “I was doing products before I knew I was doing products.”
• His first real solo product was his ebook: Step by Step UI Design. He recommends starting small: “I didn’t set out to write a 200 page book. I set out to write a 40 page book.”
• Sacha based the price of his book on what iOS apps were selling for ($2-$5): “It turns out, that’s a bad way to do pricing.” For his next book, he’s going to employ a higher price strategy ( similar to what Nathan Barry did for his ebook).
• People on Hacker News balked at Nathan’s high ebook prices. Sacha thinks: “People don’t understand how segmentation works. If you want to buy a car, you could buy a Ferrari or a Honda. You know those two cars are for different audiences. No one complains about the price of Ferraris; people understand that they are expensive. It’s the same with ebooks; just like you can buy a cheap car or expensive car, you can buy a cheap [ebook] package or expensive package. If you think the expensive package is too expensive, it just means you are not the target audience.”
• Sacha on segmentation: “People think it’s crazy that Nathan Barry is charging $200 for his ebook package; but they’re not the target audience. He doesn’t want you [the individual] to pay that; but rather the office manager at the big company (who isn’t spending his own money) to purchase it.”
• How Sacha plans on promoting his next book: “I’ve started setting up a mailing list on the Telescope site. There’s a small sign-up form for the book’s mailing list on there. I’ll be sending sample chapters to these people and asking them for feedback.”
• “ Meteor is a step above [other frameworks]. I think it’s the future,” says Sacha.
• “I wanted to build a Hacker News for designers; because I think that’s missing right now”, comments Sacha. This project became Sidebar.io.

Show notes

• Telescope
•  Sidebar.io
•  Sacha’s website and blog
•  “You don’t have to be local” (Derek Sivers)
•  Themeforest
•  Sacha’s ebook: Step by Step UI Design
•  More money from fewer ebook sales
•  Nathan Barry’s new ebook: Designing Web Apps
•  Meteor

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Want to build a software product that actually earns income?

In this (Part 2) episode Patrick McKenzie (Patio11) shares specific tactics for researching a market and finding a problem to solve. Listen now.

Highlights

• Don’t think up a cool product idea, go and spend months developing it, and then try to find customers. It won’t work.
• Instead, go out and talk to people and see if you can find 5 people who will buy it.
• Trick for interviewing people in potential markets: tell them you’ll pay them their normal rate, but instead of getting their service, you get to ask them questions about their industry (Patio11 interviewed massage therapists and stylists this way)
• Be relentlessly curious: ask people about their business problems.
• “Businesses have a lot more money. The people who are responsible for making a purchasing decision in the business aren’t spending their own money; the office manager at a business is very not reluctant to spend 200 dollars a month of that business’ money.”
• Avoid the education and hobbyist markets: Patrick loves Dungeons and Dragons, but doesn’t think you can make much income by building software products for D&D players.
• “There’s different types of pain: you want to be solving a problem where people know they have the problem and are actively looking for solutions, rather than something that the pain is bearable, or is just considered so endemic to the condition that they are not actively trying to get better at that.”
• Have the humility to talk to people and find out what they really want.

Show notes

• Patrick’s blog: www.kalzumeus.com/blog
•  Patrick’s training site: training.kalzumeus.com
• Bingo Card Creator
• Appointment Reminder
•  Email Patrick: [email protected]

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Part 1 of our interview with Patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) where you’ll hear how he actually learned to program with graph paper, and how he built his first product business with $60.

Show notes:

• Patrick’s blog: www.kalzumeus.com/blog
•  Patrick’s training site: training.kalzumeus.com
• Bingo Card Creator
•  Email Patrick: [email protected]

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Are you a developer who wants to cut down the amount of time it takes to build a prototype? Are you a product person who can’t code? Do you have a product idea that you want to validate quickly?

This is Part 2 of our interview with Daelan Wood on building an MVP using WordPress.

Daelan is a talented web developer from Edmonton who runs his own company called NorthRepublic. You can follow him on Twitter here: @daelan.

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Are you a developer who wants to cut down the amount of time it takes to build a prototype? Are you a product person who can’t code? Do you have a product idea that you want to validate quickly?

If any of those describe you, you’re going to love this 2-part interview we had with Daelan Wood on building an MVP using WordPress.

Daelan is a talented web developer from Edmonton who runs his own company called NorthRepublic. You can follow him on Twitter here: @daelan.

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