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Yesu Kristo wa Nazarethi ni mtu mashuhuri zaidi kuliko wote kuwahi kukanyaga ardhi ya dunia hii. Alikufa majira ya saa 9 kamili za mchana, siku ya Jumatano, katika kipindi cha demani cha AD 31. Saa chache baadaye, jua lilipokuwa likizama, alilazwa katika kaburi jipya la Yusufu wa Arimathaya. Katika siku ya kawaida ya Sabato, Jumamosi, siku tatu kamili baada ya mazishi yake, Mungu Baba alimfufua Mtoto Wake kwa ajili ya uzima wa milele.

Avoid pricing yourself out of business In 2013, I charged just $29 and $49 per month for my product. There was no activation fee or annual commitment. I failed to gain money quickly enough to survive. I added a $199 activation fee in 2014 and held my breath. What if I no longer get subscribers? Luckily, I was able to charge more. Everyone paid the fee! Not only did I get more money, but I also received more subscribers. I find that customers believe your software is better if you charge more. Furthermore, you can offer better support with a higher price.

Whatever profits are left over are added to your personal income. Your accountant should ask you to pay estimated tax quarterly, based on last year’s profits. Your accountant will send you invoices with an amount for state and federal tax, which you pay electronically.

Salesforce and QuickBooks integration: the wrong audience I built many integrations for Connex, and Salesforce was one of my first. Intuit built one on their app store, but they later discontinued it. Here is why mine failed: Connex syncs ecommerce solutions. Amazon was one of our best sellers. Salesforce.com is a CRM, and this was a bad product fit for us. I had no understanding of the target audience. What features did they require? How much would they pay? Salesforce is geared towards medium and enterprise-level companies. We focused primarily on small businesses. The integration was difficult to build. Salesforce could hold orders, but users often added or removed fields. Our software had no logic to handle dynamically mapping fields. Each user’s Salesforce was different. Almost every user required a great deal of hand-holding. This is bad for a SaaS company. There were many technical issues. Users wanted features that I could not build. I built the integration because Salesforce has a large following, but my audience was just a subset of that group. How big your audience is, is anyone’s guess. We had a listing on Salesforce’s app store, but the listing failed to gather any traffic. I was unsure how many QuickBooks users required a Salesforce integration. There was a limited audience for this tool. The tool became a distraction because other products were selling much better. I had to raise the price of the integration because it took longer to set it up. This idea made my pricing more complicated, while my company is all about simplicity.

Why did Connex for QuickBooks Online succeed? Here are the reasons: I received free app store listings on Intuit’s website. My app was even on the first page of their store briefly. This drove large amounts of traffic to my site. I received free listings on many other sites before they started asking for a commission. I later pulled those listings, since the cost to advertise exceeded the revenue they brought to the company. These stores failed to show how many installs and conversions they generated. I had many positive and real reviews on my app store listings. I noticed competitors had hundreds of five-star reviews that mostly looked fake. QuickBooks Online had few integrations at the time. I was one of the first companies to get listed. For QuickBooks Canada and QuickBooks U.K., my app was one of the first system integrators. I had almost no competitors who serviced QuickBooks outside of the U.S. Shopify, BigCommerce, ShipStation and other companies had no native integration. Mine was one of the first. I recorded videos and added landing pages that ranked high on Google with minimal effort. Since I had a shoestring marketing budget, this was very important. The issue I had with other products was that they didn’t offer free promotion. Since my company was one of the first, we had ample time to add features and fix problems. We have a solution that is light years ahead of competitors. Why would someone want to compete with us? In the words of one of my partner companies, “We could build one, but yours would be a lot better.” My app required no desktop apps or website plugins to install. Since my audience was small business owners, the easier the install the better. Most business users have a limited understanding of websites. Asking them to change a bunch of settings or configure something on their own is daunting. We set up Connex for qualified users. Many competitors just let users go through a self-guided trial. We received feedback from many customers that they would purchase if they could make Connex work. I added a talk-to-sales component, and our conversion ratio increased. Connex was successful because I added a personal touch in a world where SaaS owners expect users to just “figure it out” on their own. Software that requires no support and maintenance is a pipe dream.

Does It “Really” Need to Be an Email? By this point, you’ve probably figured out that I love email. Well, in spite of my love for email marketing, not every communication needs to be an email. In fact, there are times when emails really aren’t the best solution. So, if not email, what else? Other solutions include: In-App messages like popups, sidebars, site notifications, chat messages, browser or push notifications, desktop notifications, text messages, and even product tours and onboarding flows. Email is great when the user isn’t currently using your product. It’s great to drive them back in, but when they are right there using your product, you can’t expect them to be checking their emails at the same time. Before setting up a new email campaign, ask yourself if email is the best way to achieve your objective and drive the user behavior you seek. Maybe a popup or site notification would be more effective. Users can’t typically unsubscribe from popups, sidebars, site notifications, chat messages, or onboarding flows. They are usually better embedded into your app and more contextual. Because of this, they tend to reach users more directly than email can. That means that they can often be more effective to influence user behaviors. Push notifications, desktop notifications, and text messages still have some novelty to them. They can also reach users in different contexts from email. Although sometimes it’s better to use a different communication type, sometimes combining email with other options is the best way to go. For this reason, it’s important to consider the mix. For example, an email followed on-site by an In-App message, or an onboarding flow followed by an email summing up the process may be more effective than a single email. It will allow you to follow up on user actions, and make it really clear what needs to get done. By breaking down the steps one at a time, there’s more chances for users to learn. At LANDR, we often followed feature launch emails on-site with In-App messages. This helped to keep communications simple and goal-focused (one goal per message). The email was about getting people in the product, while the In-App message was about getting them to engage with the product. This approach allows you to evaluate and optimize each step of the process independently. Automation platforms like Intercom, ActiveCampaign and HubSpot generally allow you to combine messaging types. If your platform doesn’t currently have site messaging or onboarding functionalities, you may have to use multiple tools in conjunction in order to maximize results. This will make it trickier to track pacing, sequencing, and goals but it isn’t impossible. You also need to consider tracking effort when adding new communication types to your mix. As your program becomes more complex, it can be easy to lose track of the overall user experience: Are your users getting spammed? Are you creating a disjointed customer experience? Test things from your users’ perspective. Keep an eye out for social media messages and support requests as you do. In the next chapter we will look at setting up automations to minimize issues and maximize outcomes.

Once you’ve narrowed down your list of potential approaches, you can use any prioritization framework to sort them. I’ve found the ICE framework helpful for this purpose. ICE stands for: Impact: If this works, how big will the potential impact be? Confidence: How likely is this to succeed? Ease of implementation: How easy is this to execute? ICE is often used to prioritize feature development, but it’s also a good tool for prioritizing marketing. To do this, list potential approaches in a spreadsheet and rate them on a scale of one through 10 for each of the above characteristics. I’ve seen people use several methods to get the score. Score = Impact x Confidence x Ease: This gives you a score with an exponential impact. In other words, the higher you rate any one area, the more confident you need to be. Score = (Impact + Confidence + Ease)/3: This gives you an average of these three scores. However you rank those facets, using the ICE framework is a way to get your approaches into a spreadsheet and figure out which are the best to start with. You can list things by high-level approaches (content marketing, PPC) or by individual tactics (ebook, blog post, guest posting, YouTube ads, Facebook ads). You can also start by ranking high-level approaches, then start a new tab in the spreadsheet to break down the top approaches by individual tactics. Then tackle the highest-rated approaches and tactics first.

LOW: Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC) In its simplest form, CAC is all the costs associated with landing new customers (e.g., marketing, advertising, sales) divided by the number of customers you acquired during that period. It’s sometimes tricky to calculate because getting a handle on your marketing costs can be tricky. If you’re focusing on SEO, you may be creating all the content yourself rather than paying a writer. You may be getting a lot of your early customers from forums you spend time on or by getting in front of other people’s audiences. In those cases, the cost is your time rather than an easy-to-calculate number. It’s a lot simpler to calculate CAC if you’re running ads. Then, you can see how much you’re paying per click and track how many people convert from each source. But if you’re not in that position, valuing your time at a certain rate (e.g., $150 an hour) and taking your best guess at time and money spent on marketing in a given month can get you to a good enough estimate of your CAC. How do you know if your CAC is too high? By calculating how long it’ll take to pay back the costs of acquiring each customer. As I was first getting into recurring revenue, I thought that if I was getting $1,000 in LTV from each customer, I could spend $700 to acquire every customer and make $300 a pop. Right? The problem is that you’re not getting $1,000 every time you sign a new customer. With a $50-a-month contract, you’re getting that $1,000 over the course of the next year and a half. If you spend $700 per new customer in January, you won’t break even on those customer acquisition costs until next February (assuming the customer doesn’t churn). With venture capital, the rule of thumb is that you should spend no more than one-third of your customer’s LTV or no more than one ACV. As bootstrappers, we don’t have enough cash to wait 12 months to recoup CAC from every customer. Most successful bootstrappers I know are in the two- to six-month payback period (depending on how much cash they have in the bank). There are times when that number can get more aggressive. For example, at our peak with Drip, we could afford to spend more on customer acquisition because we had the cash in the bank and I knew the numbers in the rest of our funnel by heart. Even at our peak, though, we were only running seven or eight months out—that’s the high end for bootstrapped companies.

Don’t Invent Job Titles I used to make up job titles because, as a bootstrapper, I didn’t particularly care what someone’s title was. I didn’t want it to matter—but it really does. When we realized we needed an architect to scale our infrastructure at Drip, we asked our internal recruiter to hire for the job of “Senior Scaling Architect.” She eventually talked us into the title of “Senior Architect.” Why? Because when she ran the data, she couldn’t find enough salary information on the title we’d given her. Not only that, but if we’d used a made-up job title, qualified candidates wouldn’t have known what we were hiring for. There are standard SaaS job titles. Use them. Your ideal candidates have saved job searches for things like “Engineer,” “Customer Service Lead,” and, yes, “Senior Architect.” Ignoring that makes it harder to connect with people searching for the job you’re hiring for. It also does a disservice to whomever you end up hiring. They’ll have a much tougher time explaining their qualifications to their next employer when their job title was “Code Wizard” rather than “Senior Engineer.” Although a treatise on organizational structure is beyond the scope of this book, here’s a typical hierarchy of engineering titles (in descending order of authority) that can be easily translated into other departments: Chief Technical Officer VP of Engineering Director of Engineering Manager of Engineering Senior Software Engineer Software Engineer Junior Software Engineer Entry-Level Software Engineer Note: These titles assume the typical path is to move into management, which doesn’t have to be the case. Individual contributor titles above Senior exist, such as Principal Engineer and Distinguished Engineer. But for the sake of simplicity, I’m laying out the above hierarchy, which will work for companies well into the millions of ARR. Another note on titles: be careful with handing out elevated job titles to early employees. One company I know named their first customer service person “Head of Customer Success.” When they inevitably grew and added more customer service people, they didn’t want him managing them and ended up in a tough situation. Should they demote him and have him leave? Or come up with an even more elevated title for the real manager?

Adding Other Verticals Too Early Adding other verticals is the easiest siren song for me to justify. Sometimes it makes sense to pivot or expand to other niches. For example, if you have a product that’s working well for wedding photographers, chances are it will also serve wedding videographers. But unless you’re pivoting your product, you must be extremely careful about adding new markets. For example, if you add wedding coordinators to your wedding photography SaaS, you’re probably dealing with audiences that have different needs—even though they’re in the same industry. The danger of adding other verticals flippantly is that it can lead to a lot of complexity in your product. Unless you already dominate a particular niche and are moving into another or are making a full-blown pivot into the new space, be careful with this one.

So in a quest to balance rapid growth and increased profitability, startups (especially the software-as-a-service or SaaS kind) have adopted the rule that a company’s revenue growth rate added to the profitability margin should be equal to or greater than 40 percent.

If you think only 5% to 10% of your customers will use something, go a step further and spot-check which users they are. If it’s a random group of users, it might not be worth building. But if that 5% to 10% are power users and this feature would make your product more useful to them, consider building it and keeping it hidden from the average user by omitting it from the standard UI and only enabling it upon request. Why hide these features? Because if the vast majority of your users will never need them, adding dozens of checkboxes and drop-downs will make your core product confusing for them.

O vi Selv, vi Selv endnu ere vilde i vor Hu, stundom og i vore Skikke. Vestens Indianer ikke ere i saa hadske Slægter, skjøndt hverandres Blod de drikke, splittede i Skoven ad, som Europa er i Sekter af forbittret Meningshad.