Simplify Launch

Spending most of my time digging into what marketing methods have the most impact and which are just kind of a time burn. ⌛️

Focusing on:

• Spending time in several analytics platforms
• Running tests
• Experimenting with new techniques that I'm seeing product founders talk about in their build-in-public journeys

Trying to hone in on the most effective current techniques that founders can use to grow their paying user base.

Challenges:

• Everyone is using different tools
• Not everyone implements a method in the same way - sometimes my suggestions call for a 10 in terms of change, occurs may feel like a 10 to them, but it looks like a 2 to the world. How to get founders to let go of their work a bit and experiment more?
• People work at different pace from each other (one person may take a few hours another a couple weeks)
• There is a conflict to interest with many IH'ers who want to..
  -- a) make money while also
  -- b) not spending money.

This causes friction between getting there quickly, using inadequate tools and possibly not getting to the destination at all.

I spent the summer undergoing some major surgery. This kept me from going full throttle on anything. But it didn't keep me from researching, watching and listening to the SaaS founder community.

It seems obvious at first, that, with my startup marketing background, I might have started with this audience, instead of needing it suggested to me.

But I guess like so many of us, I saw something that needed to be fixed and set about trying to fix it.

I just didn't realize until I was a few hundred hours into it. That the contractor/home service provider audience did not need fixing. They were quite happy with the biz that was landing in their laps, the freedom to turn down work, and for some, they just didn't have time to stop and look around at a longer term solution.

One of my marketing leaders back at a startup, had often said,

"you should be a marketing professor...you're always up at the whiteboard mapping it out, showing us how we can make it better/increase CR% etc..."

So - here I was, back with my roots. I had come full circle.

And, I shouldn't have been, but, I was shocked to find that this audience was always looking for marketing ideas, strategies, the latest, assistance, another eye on, a roast of their landing page....it was an ever-changing world of eye-balls moving from one platform to another - one medium or social space to another...and the product creators just wanted to get their thing out there. Some wanted to scale and sell. Others wanted a side gig, or a stream of revenue enough to justify continuing.

I put together a curriculum. I looked at what would make an impact. And how long of a sprint made sense.

And it turned into a cohort. A group that meets every week, for 8 weeks. I mapped it out 🗺 to cover a diverse enough range of experiments and tactics that people would see movement.

I'd also need them to understand where users were in their journey with the product - so, I'd fit components neatly into the lifecycles of marketing. This would give the members a way to always come back to a single sheet, and see what areas they may be neglecting that could make a difference in customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value.

But I needed a way to make sure that they got more than they had counted on, more than they could by googling around. It needed to be so good, that founders couldn't turn it down. So I agreed to create and edit everyone in the cohort, a commercial.

I'm not pro-level yet - but I have learned a thing or two about vids that get traction, building energy, making a vid worth watching. And I suspected (not confirmed yet) that many product creators simply had not the time to go down the video editing rabbit hole on their own -- and probably had not hired a firm to do it for them. It put me in a position of having to invest an extra 40-80 or so hours to make this work, but I felt that it was worth it. I knew what joy they'd experience when they put a video out there online and woke up to thousands of views and more awareness. I couldn't resist giving this to them. Had I a partner at this stage of the journey, I'm sure they would have tried to talk me out of it. 😋

The timing could be good, I reasoned - with the changes to the economy and a recession looming, the prominent accelerators were reducing their footprint. Bringing in fewer founders, investing in fewer. And there are just so, dang many people out there creating products now and wanting to see them soar. I could get on board with that. I could work with this audience. I already had a soft spot for them, I already emphasized with their plight.

So I set up a new landing page (again spent way too much time on it...should hire a designer next time I come up with something new) - I put the parameters in place for what we would work on, how we would move forward. And created a decent video (if I do say so myself 🙄) 🎬 📹.

I've probably painted myself into a corner, timewise.

Sometimes the realizations and the ability to turn-on-a-dime and get it out there, don't correspond well with the calendar.

But I am off to the races again - and thrilled to see what kind of growth the founders and I achieve in our 8 week marketing cohort.

It was while I was out engaging survey tools, digging in forums, asking questions on Reddit. That an Indie Hacker popped into my dm's.

That guy was Fed, at Gummy Search. He said something about my last post, and how it looked like I was trying to do some research and did I want to take his tool for a free spin and see if it helped.

"I built an audience research tool for Reddit which makes it really easy to dive into those communties and figure out pain points, solution requests, and opinions on various topics. If you're interested in checking it out, it's free to try, and would be happy to help you accelerate this process of yours. do you want to give it a shot?"

At first, I assumed it was yet another spammy whatever....

But I pulled up his search tool and instantly realized that this could get me to the answers I was looking for, in much less time.

I set up an audience targeted around the contractors - including some massive-sized subreddits that had 10's of thousands (and I think 1 had a few hundred thousand members).

Now I was getting somewhere! 🤪

My hope was that I would find a different line of phrasing, or some word choice I had not considered, or some gathering place where all my buyers were hanging out. Once I implemented that across my marketing, I'd be off to the races!

This is NOT what happened.

I realized that, across so many of the ideal people I was looking to market to, none of them seemed to be looking for help in generating leads. Or getting customers really, at all.

In fact, it seemed to be much the opposite. I came across one particular thread from an electrician...the title of his post was "I HAVE SO MUCH F&^%ING BUSINESS RIGHT NOW, IT'S BECOME A F&^%ING PROBLEM"

• The commenters seemed to agree with him. They went on. The supply chain issues had slowed their ability to get what they needed, to be able to complete jobs in a timely manner. And the labor shortage in play meant they couldn't find good people...they were doing nearly everything themselves and turning away new and old clients.
• Now I was starting to understand why the power washing company was ghosting me after being previously so excited about receiving free leads. Business was falling in people's laps.

For our new home back in the midwest..I had contracted quite a few people already, a painter, an electrician, a water filtration company -- all were performing well below the bar of standard acceptable work. Some were also charging a premium for sub-standard work. And us customers were paying it. We had no choice. Few options. One landscaping company told me, "I used to do the lawn for the home you just bought - I just cannot keep up - I wish I could take yours on, but I can't"

In that situation we hired a new landscaper. The cost was higher than we'd ever paid before. The output was poorer than we'd ever gotten before. It was clear that you could open a business in any number of home service areas, and succeed with little experience and little effort. Who was going to buy a 38 lesson lead generation course?

In my conversation with Fed - from Gummy Search - I recounted this realization, much of which came from using his Reddit Search tool.

At one point he says,

"I don't want to push an audience on you, but had you thought about working with startup founders/IH'ers/bootstrapped founders? They're always looking for ways to get themselves to work on their marketing - we all love coding new features, but marketing...we have to find ways to make ourselves work on it.."

That for me - was like a thunderbolt. 🌩⚡️

But I had my reservations about this new audience. I was not going to make the same mistake twice. I didn't feel that a course they'd self-pace through would be the right thing.This needed to be something different. Something tailored to them.

I paused for the holidays. 🎄

Then picked it up at a rapid pace on January 1st. I didn't care if it was New Years Day, I knew what I needed to get in place and it always seemed to take longer than expected.🏃🏻💨

I started working on the website, the landing pages, the checkout, the funnels, forms, opt-ins, email flow, connected to Stripe. 📋

This took me to mid-Feb but it was all there, the course, a way to buy it, some additional supportive products and services (like a landing page review for people who wanted to dip their toes in the water) and a Built-For-You option for those that wanted someone else to do it from start to finish, and then hand it over.

Now it was time to get it out there.🤩

I had taken some time to listen to some of the successful influencers of the day. 3 Days of speeches, more tactics than a small marketing army would know what to do with.

I was showing up on the first of every month for an influencer marketing session with nearly 1,000 people. Walked away with some good tips, implemented many strategies. Tested a bajillion different things.

My vids on Insta were TIME CONSUMING. I'd have an idea, bang out a script in an hour or so, get myself costumed up, deal with lighting and camera positioning. Film away for a few hours. Return again the next day to start editing, improving motion effects, sometimes spending many hours just searching for the right title overlay, sfx, music, motion effect, transition or film look. A couple shorts or reels burned 4 days. Sometimes they'd get lots of views, sometimes they'd seem to play well over along the coast of Africa somewhere. What they were not getting, was in front of my ideal audience. That was frustrating. ⌛️

I employed quite a few other strategies to make sure that I was getting in front of them. Targeted ad campaigns, boosted posts, performance max campaigns, optimized video campaigns with highly targeted audiences. 🤷🏻‍♂️

After a couple months of this - I could tell something was wrong. The cost-per-email signup was waaaaay too high. Like $100 per email. When I would get the campaign in front of the targeted audience - they wouldn't bite. 😠

I started surveying and researching, lurking and listening. 🙉 Was it the message? Something was wrong. In all of my marketing days, I'd never put in so much work, to get so little back in return. The 1 Day Course, for example, the quick thing that I built around a fictitious power-washing company in Florida - had oodles of traffic in hours. I had to shut off the test campaign in the first 3-4 days so that I didn't brake the bank.💸

I had partnered up with an actual power washing company in Florida. One that I had used for 4 years while living there. And once I was ready to send the owner free leads, it was radio silence. Now 1,400 miles away (no longer living in that part of the country) I couldn't just pop over. Emails and texts went unanswered. No vmail on their main line at the office.

I started to wonder if they were still in business. I could see their website was still live and active. Were they having labor issues? This was smack dab in the middle of what had been coined as "The Great Resignation". Why would he not want the free leads that we had discussed before I moved? What in the world was going on? 🤯

The home in Florida had sold in a weekend. Then fell through. Then sold again in another 2 days. Now the race was on to find our new home up in Wisconsin. We were moving back to my wife's hometown. To be back in the midwest. To be near family.

By the time we pulled off the move the dream was getting farther and farther away! Now we were up in the new place...but everything was in boxes and the kids were off from school for the summer. What a mess. I burned months getting us situated.

Come fall - I had an idea for a YT vid that I thought would not only get a channel started, but also give me some practice with my editing skills. It was timely, "How to Hire 257 People in 5 Weeks" - during a time when everyone was struggling to find hires and candidates had their pick of jobs.

I did interviews, filmed hiring billboards all over town, mapped out marketing funnels, talked to ad purchasing execs, gathered data, interviewed an app creator of a hiring app that leveraged existing employees networks. I put so much into that vid. It really should have been 5 vids in hindsight. It took 5 weeks. What a distraction. But it gave me some necessary experience on the editing side that I was going to need.

I also knew how to make it better. I had to get through those learning curves.

And then I finally was ready to hit it with the course. I was promising that these new business owners with no design or online marketing experience, could get their lead generation campaigns online in a day.

So - I filmed myself doing all of necessary steps.

And once I started filming stuff happened. Camera would overheat, batteries would die mid-lesson, stuff was going wrong at every turn...(oh s#!t was the mic offline?) It took me about a week. 🙄

It was a ton of footage to export, organize and get into the editor (FCPX). Exporting and moving footage to get it to a place where I could work with it, that alone was 3 days.

5 weeks to edit it into 38 lessons. Music, SFX, intros, outros, On screen text overlays, visual effects, cover images, descriptions, color grading, audio adjustments (removing hum from the AC - voice clarity). I had an elaborate cheat sheet that I had created over the months of prep work. That turned out to be invaluable. An evernote, note that is long enough to run the length of my 27" monitor turned vertical, at least 3-4x's. I would have lost my mind had I not created that!!

I learned from that - and created a resource sheet for the students of the course.

I had been talking to contractors, home service providers of all types for quite a few years. Think patio people, landscapers, electricians, power washing companies, pool leak detection companies...anyone that we had hired to come to our homes.

Their stories were all very similar, if they had made in through year 1, it had been tough. They would advertise, waste money on ineffective strategies, hope for more word of mouth business & sign up for high $ lead generation services that nearly broke the bank.

When I'd ask some basic questions about generating their own leads online - they'd usually tell me that they had a cousin or nephew that built a website for them for cheap and it had not worked out.

They'd take great pride in telling me which sources of leads they had cancelled. When I'd walk through the numbers with them, I'd often realize that those were sources of business they should have doubled down on, not cancelled.

I was pretty sure that, with the right tools, I could take them through all of these steps in a day - or at the very least, they could watch the videos in a day, and take more time - but still...realistically, they could have a lead generating campaign in a week at most, that they had created, that they owned and understood. One that they could turn on, pause, turn up, monitor, improve quality, optimize - be proud of having created.

It would include all of these components:

Buying a domain
Hosting that domain
Putting an email address on that domain
Create their own logo that looked good enough (without hiring a designer)
Create their own color palette that would pop.
Build a landing page to catch that traffic
Build multiple CTA's and 2-step forms to convert that traffic into leads
Some simple follow-up components and ancillary pages.
Testimonials - Before & After Photos
The psych behind what to focus on, so that customers call you
Inserting videos on their site
Consent / legal disclaimers /Terms
Redirects
Testing
Building a traffic campaign targeted locally and to their service type
Basic tracking code in place
Cost Per Lead strategies
Optimizing, improving cost and so on...

There was definitely some build up time...researching and buying equipment, lighting, camera and screen recording experiments..took an editing course..switching editors a few times. I burned a couple months getting ready to film the 1 day course. 🥲

But - as I was about to start filming....we had just sold our home in Florida. It was time to move back to the midwest. Timing was terrible. I was literally shopping for backdrops when I realized there was no way I could start filming, until we got settled on the other side, in the next house.

Sigh....so I paused.

For what turned out to be 4 months.