The Exchanges

Q I have, I have Google Analytics as this anonymous Analytics, right, and aggregated. I have Mixpanel, or there's obviously, you know, those types of competitors for, like, individual funnels and people walking through. And then, of course, I have Facebook Pixels and Google Pixels and other things for, kind of, conversions and dollar amounts, and I, I think Mixpanel does that too, but where does Segmetrics fit into that mix?

A So the idea is kind of similar to Mixpanel in a way, which is we want to be able to see everything that anyone does in a customer journey, from what ad they landed on, to how many times they viewed a page, to if they attended a webinar, to be able to understand who are the most valuable people who are going through your marketing fund. Now the problem with Mixpanel is that it has no native integrations and it has no, Idea of revenue out of the box. So it has a garbage in garbage out problem where unless you are really diligent about what data you're sending into Mixpanel, you are not going to get anything valuable out of it, right? And so what segmetrics does is we took that idea of like, okay, we want to see every event in an entire customer journey, but marketers are never going to be able to hook this up. So what we need to do is integrate directly with all these tools to Pull the data of Google Analytics out of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, your ESP, your CRM, your Stripe, your payment gateways, everything, and create an individual persona that we can then say, this is this person from all these different sources brought together, and this is their full customer journey. Because then what we're able to do is say, all right, we know that Facebook Ads, we're getting, let's say, our lead value is 50 dollars for each Lead we bring in from Facebook. But within that, do we have actio…

AI assessment note: “what segmetrics does is we took that idea of like, okay, we want to see every event”

Q am curious, you know, what have you done differently? We obviously, you know, at Tiny Seed, one of the early things we talk about is pricing. A lot of folks have You know, a lot of us SaaS founders just don't have pricing dialed in, whether the value metric's off or whether it's too low. You tweaked with your pricing. I'm curious if that had an impact or what else?

A So I think that there were two main events in segmetrics five-year life that moved the needle. One was focusing on it full-time, and there's a big jump in revenue starting when I decided to focus on it. The second one was tiny seed, and the jump from tiny seed is much bigger than the first one, but the way we changed pricing, I think had a, had a lot to do with it because what we had originally with our pricing model was essentially large buckets. So you were in the Uh, starter bucket until you hit 50,000 contacts. As soon as you had 50,001, you had to pay a hundred dollars extra. And it was difficult because people tried to keep their, their contacts low and people tried to, people would always email us and it's like, Hey, I'm only one over. Can I have a, have it cheaper for now? And it's like, yeah, sure. Fine. It's just one. And people, the upgrade process with manual and there's always stress around it. It's this whole thing. The pricing is actually pretty similar. I think for the majority of people, they're paying around the same amount. But what we changed was that pricing is now increasing based on the number of contacts you have, but only five dollars at a time. So the big difference is now not that you are going to hit a wall and suddenly be paying twice as much. You're going, it's like boiling a frog, right? You're slowly going up as you get more profitable and as you…

AI assessment note: “the way we changed pricing, I think had a, had a lot to do with it”

Q a month or more, and are trying to attribute stuff, know the limitations of having to build a custom. So, we may have already answered my first question then, because the, First question is why build, why build a SaaS company for running this seven figure agency? But it's, it's obvious that over and over and over you probably had to cobble this together with duct tape and bailing wire.

A Yeah, essentially we were working with a, uh, analytics agency or agency, a friend who did a lot of our analytics. We had a lot of our analytics done in-house and we just spent so much time on it. We were spending probably 20, 30% of our week Just pulling the numbers. That doesn't even mean the analysis of what they're doing, but just pulling these numbers, because you figure, let's say we're looking at, okay, we have this webinar. What is the lead value of someone who attends the webinar? Okay, we pull all that data from whatever system we have, then we pull it from all the tags, and then we pull the revenue, and then we match them together, blah, blah, blah. Awesome. And then we, we write up the report, the PDF, the everything. We, we take it to the client, and they're like, Well, what about people who came from organic versus paid? What's that breakdown look like? It's like, give us five more hours because we gotta go do that whole thing all over again with these new things. And the analytics guy that we're talking to and the guy on my team, we were talking about this and it's like, it's just a database. It's just a spreadsheet. Why can we not just slurp this data in and do this automatically? And so that's where it kind of started. It's like, okay, could we do this? Could we scratch our own itch? And yeah, and that's where it kind of started from.

AI assessment note: “Why can we not just slurp this data in and do this automatically?”

Q working on this five years ago, back in 2015, and you told me that you built it in two weeks, two to three weeks, and that you had a customer the first week of launch. That sounds amazing. That A, that is crazy, crazy fast to build a tool that fast, and second, to get your first customer first week of launch. Both of those things. How did those happen?

A So this is actually the second SaaS I've built. So the first one was Summit Evergreen, which was a, a membership site platform for, again, for marketers, for info marketers. And we had made some mistakes that time that we took, we thought we knew what the customers wanted based on the consulting we had done. We built a very large, very complicated app that had a lot of features that it turned out that no one actually needed. It took us many months to get the market. Once we got to market, it was a slog to get people. It was very difficult. So with this, we built it to scratch our own itch, but at the same time, we were like, this is something that everyone needs, but we're not going to make the same mistake. So what we did was we did a very hands-on iterative process with our customers, and we picked two or three customer clients that we were working with, and we said, hey, we're building this thing. Here's the numbers that we're looking to get. Is this valuable? Yes, no. They would respond. We'd say, awesome. We did a raw dump of their data. We plugged it into the engine. There's no UI. There's no nothing at this point. There's just me doing some math in a PHP file on the back end based off of a CSV, right? And we get that in and we spit that out and we show it to the clients and we say, hey, for this webinar you just ran last week, this is the lead value. And they're like, oh…

AI assessment note: “we picked two or three customer clients that we were working with”

Q would almost be a mix, because you have to let these folks go. You've been working with them. At the same time, once that's done, you were then full-time on Segmentrix, focused, right? By January of, of 19, so just a month or two later, you were essentially, for the first time since you had launched it, you were all in on it. And that had to have felt good.

A It felt good. It felt very good. It did come with some challenges though, because there's this thing when there's other people around, there's blame to go around, right? I, I see this a lot with the, with my family as well. It's like, oh, it's noisy in here. I can't concentrate or the kids kept me up last night. I can't get my work done. And then when it's just you, all those excuses go out the window and you're like, well, crap, the reason I'm not being productive, the reason I'm not Focusing on what I should be doing is not some external force on me. It's because I'm an F up, right? I need to get my, I need to get in gear and get my mental state in sync so that I can do my work and focus on the things that are important.

AI assessment note: “It felt good. It felt very good. It did come with some challenges though”

Q You remember every minute of that 15 months, don't you?

A So what happened was that I had a day job. Right? And not a day job like I was working for someone else, but we had the agency. And the agency is pulling in, like you said, a million plus a year. And it's really hard to take the team off of client work and put them on something that's making a thousand dollars. Like we, we didn't have any customers that, or any clients that would pay us a thousand dollars, like just a thousand dollars. It was, that was inconceivable, right? I think our lowest contract was 10 K a month, so it was very difficult for us to put the time into it, and I think we languished there, I'm looking at the graph, until 2000, mid-two 1018, and wow, you can actually see the spike. Ok, so mid-two 1018, I had decided that we were going to focus on psychmetrics, and this came from, we'd always said, hey, you know, we're always the bridesmaid, never the bride, we're helping our Clients run these million dollar launches, multi-million dollar launches. We're making good money, but we want something that we control and our product and our stuff. And we had always thought this and we had segmetrics there, but we had never put any love and any energy into it. And so that summer, I remember I spent some time. We rewrote the UI and I said, we're going to focus on this. Over the next six months, we're going to transition out of consulting work. Out of the agency work, and…

AI assessment note: “So what happened was that I had a day job. Right?”