The Exchanges

Q Okay, 20, so yeah, mid 2019. And I mean, what was the sort of, how'd you build the conviction to say, you know what, I'm gonna launch another company. It's gonna take three to five years, the rest of my life to do this. What gave you the conviction?

A Well, one, I think I'm a glutton for punishment. Uh, but I think, I think putting that aside for a second, you know, I love building, you know, products that help people. Uh, with, with Grapevine, it was all about, you know, those creators have very limited options for monetizing their audience. And so we gave them kind of, especially when, when we started, we gave them a new way to really unlock value from their audience. Um, towards the end of that though, you know, I wanted to start thinking about serving a constituency that I really identified and cared about, and that's entrepreneurs, founders, and marketers to a large extent, who are kind of like the unsung heroes of a lot of these organizations. Um, I've built a ton of websites on a ton of different platforms. I've built full marketing stacks, you know, soup to nuts, um, and, and scaled up some pretty, pretty big, you know, digital presences. Um, and the consistency I found, whether it was for me or for any sort of entrepreneur out there is like, you start putting together a bunch of tools, inevitably, like you get stuck, like things kind of evolved to be like a Frankenstein sort of system. And then you're pulling in like contractors and consultants who are like touch and go. We've all kind of, you know, been in that situation before. So I kind of set out to be like, Hey, I really love this persona, you know, the founder…

AI assessment note: “I wanted to start thinking about serving a constituency that I really identified and cared about”

Q Oh yeah. Got it. Let me just read, let me just tell people how successful this was real quick. So yeah, three, 300 upvotes. You got 16,000 unique website views and you got 1600 new signups. And a nice bump in MRR. What was the bump? Like a couple thousand in MRR?

A Yeah, that's about right, actually. Uh, the interesting thing about product, yeah, so all that's true. We also got, uh, I don't know if I mentioned this in the article, it was like a lot of stuff, like a sub overwhelming amount of, uh, inbound VC interest from that. So if that's something that you're exploring as a founder, like, We weren't expecting that at all. Um, so that was one thing. We also got a few different, uh, like PR write-ups from it as well. And like another competitor in the space wrote like a huge article, like, uh, you know, about us and comparing us. So there was some nice like overflow from some of that as well.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, that's about right, actually.”

Q And so are you cool with that? I mean, is that sort of, you're comfortable with that for a while?

A Yeah, I mean, I think, like, when you take some money in, uh, outside capital, and, like, it's an interesting balance of, like, well, how fast do I spend it? And I think when you do that, you tend to get a little bit of pressure, like, hey, you should be spending that fairly aggressive to, like, get to conclusions or, like, you know, learn things. Um, On the flip side, I've been in other companies where we raise money and then we, we threw money at problems without really understanding, like, the root drivers of those problems. So people will throw cash at it, you know, to buy customers when they're not ready. They'll throw money at, at headcount when they're not ready or don't know the real problem they're solving. So I think it's, it's finding that balance. I think for us, like, forty-k a month is like a pretty lean, uh, pretty lean and mean sort of operation.

AI assessment note: “I think for us, like, forty-k a month is like a pretty lean”

Q Talk to me about churn. What's gross churn look like monthly?

A Yeah. So again, I think like overall, uh, I probably say like three to four percent monthly right now on, on the gross side. Uh, and I think we have some things to figure out there. Like one of the things in our business that we're trying to figure out is what that What that sort of retention and like expansion strategy looks like for users, because where you start certainly isn't where you finish, right? Like, you know, six months down the line, most of our customers are, will double their traffic, double their leads every, every, you know, five or six months, right? And so like, we're trying to figure out how to, how to grow with them, um, and offset, you know, some of that gross churn. Um, I think the other thing too, we're looking at is like, how do we improve our pricing model? You know, like we, for example, today we're very much a, like just free and then like, Three tiers.

AI assessment note: “I probably say like three to four percent monthly right now on, on the gross”

Q And then going back to your, their strategy that you mentioned early on content marketing, you're starting to gain serious steam with, with terms like best SAS websites or beta page or SAS websites, things like that. You're moving up in the ranking, which are driving you sort of new clicks per month. Do you, I mean, is this intentional or is it sort of accidental?

A Well, I mean, we're using our own platform to dog food, growing our own SAS business, right? So we're very much like in it with our customers who are also doing the same thing. Um, And so, you know, for us, we're just practicing what we preach, you know, focusing on smart content. You know, we, we look at content twofold, like, especially now, you know, it's all about educating, you know, our audience, you know, building trust with them, but then also the long tail that, you know, starting to rank for the terms that our customers are, you know, out searching for. Um, so obviously we're in a space where there's, you know, there's a lot of competition on certain keywords. We try to be smart about where we start and, and kind of Increase our ambition, you know, over the longterm for, for higher volume, higher comp, uh, competition keywords.

AI assessment note: “We try to be smart about where we start and kind of Increase our ambition”

Q some other sort of great sort of hacky smart things, right? Since, you know, over the past 15 months on in July of 2020, you launched on product touch. You got 3900 or 3300 upvotes. That is not easy. I'd say that's top of one percent easily on product time. How did you, I mean, that doesn't happen by accident. So how did you sort of strategically plan that launch?

A So we actually had a, uh, I wrote up kind of a brain dump of everything that we learned and did and everyone we talked to and feedback we got. Um, you know, I think even at one point, you know, Ryan Hoover gave me some direct feedback, like, Hey, this is too markety. Like you need to kind of like taper it back. And so we, we tried to be really considerate, uh, from, from all those conversations and, We put a lot of work into it. Um, so you can get all of that on our, on our site, you know, all the tools and tips. I think a couple of things that like really worked well for us.

AI assessment note: “Ryan Hoover gave me some direct feedback, like, Hey, this is too markety”