SaaS Stories
SaaS Stories is my not-so-secret quest to learn what it truly takes to succeed in the world of SaaS—and I’m inviting you along for the ride! I have the pleasure of sitting down with brilliant minds and industry trailblazers to explore their journeys, uncovering the secrets behind their growth, the gaps they spotted in the market, and what really drives them.
It’s not all smooth sailing—there are challenges, unexpected turns, and moments of reflection where they share what they’d love to change about their journey. Think of it as a candid, insider’s look into the world of SaaS, with just the right amount of curiosity, empathy, and wit.
Join me as I dive deep, selfishly soak up all the insights, and hopefully share a little inspiration with you along the way—one SaaS story at a time.
SaaS Stories
The Power of the Pivot: James Rose’s Journey from Digital Agency to SaaS Game-Changer
What if a common industry headache could be transformed into a game-changing opportunity? Join us as James Rose, the creative force behind Content Snare, reveals his journey from running a digital agency to revolutionizing the client content collection process with his innovative SaaS solution. James candidly shares how initial struggles with gathering client content during web development became the catalyst for creating Content Snare, leveraging SEO, content marketing, and vibrant communities to build and scale a successful product.
James opens up about the pivotal moments that led to unexpected industry pivots, driven by customer feedback and insightful market validation. Discover how a fortuitous series of events and testimonials revealed a lucrative niche in the accounting sector, highlighting the importance of staying adaptable and open-minded. This episode is a testament to the power of persistence and the role of serendipity in aligning business strategy with market needs, crafting a narrative filled with trial, error, and eventual triumph.
We also tackle the intricacies of marketing and scaling a SaaS business, emphasising the necessity of building strong client relationships in sectors with pressing cybersecurity concerns. James shares his experiences with various marketing strategies, reflecting on the evolving nature of these techniques and the strategic integration of AI to enhance business processes. With insights on strategic hiring and the value of patience, this episode serves as a treasure trove of practical advice for entrepreneurs navigating the challenging yet rewarding path of SaaS growth.
Welcome everybody to another episode of SaaS Stories. Today I'm joined by local Australian, james Rose, all the way from Brisbane, founder of Content Snare. Welcome, james, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on, Joanna. It's a very, very, very hot day here, but I think that's almost every day in Brisbane at this time of year.
Speaker 1:Especially in January, absolutely. I mean, do you even get a winter there, or?
Speaker 2:oh look, it's a week or so amazing.
Speaker 1:I think most people would be jealous about that. So, um yeah, good place to live, for sure now.
Speaker 2:I truly enjoy our winters. Uh, yeah, it is kind of nice being able to go outside and, you know, enjoy without having to rug up. I do like that absolutely same as me.
Speaker 1:Now tell me a little bit about content, snare. What inspired you to start it? What were the biggest gaps in the market? You saw, how did you come up with the idea?
Speaker 2:yeah, so, um, we always, for a long time, we've wanted to build software. Right, we had a product many, many years ago, completely different industry, but some point we got sucked into digital agency land. So we were building websites for people and that kind of thing and we always, like I said, we always knew we wanted to build something else and, thankfully, that industry just exposed us to a lot of problems and thankfully, that industry just exposed us to a lot of problems. But, funnily enough, at some point I was like this the website briefing process really sucks and I wanted to fix that. And so that's not actually what we built for anyone Like no one listening to this probably knows contents.
Speaker 2:It's not at all what we built. But I was like this process needs fixing and I was like we could totally build software to do this. I had, like, these good ideas, um, but just on, like you know, good sass advice. It's like I've read so much, listen to podcasts like this, so you hear people talk about like don't just go and build something because you think it's cool, whatever, like get validation.
Speaker 2:So the first thing, I did was spoke to 15 20 agency founders from my local area, like, and just anyone I could find on like linkedin, anyone who talked to me got on zoom calls, uh, and the key was like not putting my idea in their brain. You know, like a lot of people go I've got this idea, what do you think? And people will go oh yeah, that's really cool and like they're just lying to you most of the time, right like it's. They don't want to make you feel bad that your idea sucks. Um. So instead I spoke and again, like I'm not the architect of this process, like I just stole this from other other people's advice, but, I.
Speaker 2:I spoke. I just asked people to talk about their process of building a website from start to finish, um, and every single one of them it was sort of dug into each post, step in like how painful it was for them or whatever. Every single one of them spoke about getting content from clients, getting information from clients, as being the biggest pain, the biggest bottleneck, like really visceral language Like this is the biggest pain in the ass for us, or like this made me want to leave the industry, like holy crap, you know, that kind of makes you go, wow, we're onto something. So that was kind of the immediate pivot. We were like, okay, maybe this briefing thing isn't the biggest pain, getting content is. So that's what we ended up building the initial product to solve. I'm sure we'll get into this, but we're not just serving web designers anymore. In fact, our private primary market has shifted considerably.
Speaker 1:But that's yeah, that's what kind of there was, the inspiration was in other people's problems. Yeah, I can totally relate to that, but in another world we used to build websites and it was the most painful process for many reasons, and I think it always goes. I I mean, I have never seen a website be done in time as well kind of like a renovation project.
Speaker 1:They always go over time and over budget and it's just. It can be quite painful, so great to hear there's a process and a product for that out there. That's amazing. Now, what were the early days of scaling this product like? What challenges did you face? What, um, yeah, what were the biggest issues that you saw in building sass?
Speaker 2:oh, um, at first it was really promising. So my background is actually in sort of digital marketing. Like I said, we had the agency and a previous software product. So I had already unlearned my like engineering marketing tendencies, like trying to sell by features and whatever, and I'd already learned you've got to be able to talk things up and sell by benefits and whatever. So I was, I had a history in seo and marketing. So my the initial play was um seo, so writing articles that were good for um web designers and stuff that they were searching for.
Speaker 2:Creating a Facebook group and you know this is in the heyday of Facebook groups so getting that community together of like people that wanted to grow their web design business and a newsletter and eventually started a podcast. So that was like the content engine and it actually started out pretty promising. Like we had a lot of good feedback. Um, we would generate like yeah, everything was growing, like everything. That whole engine sort of fed each other. You know, in the podcast you'd talk about the group, in the group you'd talk about the podcast and get people to sign up to the newsletter. So that was all like really good for a while and it looks really promising.
Speaker 2:But we stalled out pretty hard, um, and we could never work out. Well at the time we couldn't work out why, um, you know, all the feedback we got from people was amazing. Like people would uh talk about again that visceral language and like how, how much we'd impacted their business. Um, but you know, just between churn our lifetime value and whatever, like we were just struggling to grow. So I don't know, does that answer the question? Like, at first it was kind of nice because everything fed each other and had that content engine which still works today, right. But something was clearly wrong with us and I think for us that was the audience.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you want me to get into that yet yeah, yeah, I was going to say how did you figure it out in the end? What was the plateau issue?
Speaker 2:I think it was really just came down to the audience. So, um, web designers a large amount of them, are sort of freelancers. Um, a lot of people who I guess it's really um subscription averse and to like to be, to put it bluntly, a lot of people in the web design space just aren't making that much money. So another subscription, another cost is really hard to justify, even if it's really beneficial. Um, and sadly, a lot, a lot of people go out of business too. So a lot of people would come in as a freelancer. They do it for a year and they're like I think it was one of the biggest churn reasons, like in the, in the, we have a free form box when people cancel just minimum 10 characters. Um, people can write whatever they want in there, and the biggest one was like I'm closing, not the biggest, but I'm closing my business came up a lot um, or we're downsizing, we're not doing this service anymore, something like that.
Speaker 2:So I think that's what the biggest thing was in the end. You know like and just fast forward, just fast forward to now. So we serve the accounting industry is number one. They're about 40% of our business. It's very open, like we have. We have airlines in their universities, you know. But the big ones are like accountants, lawyers, mortgage brokers, finance brokers, financial planners, a lot of professional services type things. But if you just think about it, like, the average web designer that I used to speak to was probably making 60 to 100k a year. The average accounting firm, even as a sole trader, you know they're well over 100k most a lot of them not all of them.
Speaker 2:But, um, and you know, if they're a firm of five, they're in probably up in that sort of 500k to a mil range and it's like they've got a lot more money to spend on a product like ours, which kind of can seem like an accessory. You know, I think that's. The other big thing is there's so many ways to solve what we do, whether it's google docs or email or forms or like there's all of these other ways that aren't. They're not as good, but they might be like I don't know, 40, 50 of the way there, and for some people that's enough if they can't justify this subscription fee.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I really want to get into that actually, because niching is kind of a big part of what I preach to a lot of clients is, like you know, especially when you're first starting out, you want to kind of target anyone and everyone just to get some revenue happening. But I actually say that's the wrong thing to do Because you're attracting the wrong clients. You will go through those pains and challenges and the you know the scaling won't really happen and you'll kind of be left yourself asking why, like what's going wrong? So when you had to make that pivot, how did you work out that you know the accounting firms were the best way to niche? How did you work out your audience?
Speaker 2:yeah, look, I mean some of it was accidental, um, but so it's funny. You talk about niching, because we started niche, then we went wide and then we niched again. Yeah, uh, and that was kind of there was intentional parts and accidental parts. So, um, I mentioned before seo, so a lot of our wide customer base came from people searching for what we did. Right, it's like, how do I get information from clients, how do I, I don't know, like just stuff like that. It's crazy. The SEO for us is really strange because it's like lots of keywords that get searched like twice a month. You know. It's like people call what we do data collection or information collection or documents, or how do I get files from clients? Like there's a hundred ways to say what we do, anyway, so we, through that, we collected a lot of just random people searching for what we did across tons of industries.
Speaker 2:I think at the time, you know, it would have looked like 80% web design and like 2% all these other like tiny industries accounting, mortgage, whatever 2%, all these other like tiny industries accounting, mortgage, whatever. So then when we decided we knew we had to pivot away from agencies being our number one, simply because we were getting some feedback from these other ones, other professional services, and it was good Like, and we knew they had more money to spend. They were generally on higher plans. So that was kind of the inkling that went look like we've got to change, but who do we change to? Because there was literally like I think the spreadsheet probably had 15 rows in it of like different industries that we thought we could go into. Education was another one, because all our biggest customers were like universities, weirdly at the time. Um, so we actually just put them all in a spreadsheet and tried to. We came up up with random metrics. Like it was like how easily do we think we can access these people? You know, like if it's a university, that's kind of difficult, right, like it's very hard to get in front of a lot of universities. So we kind of came up with a score for, like how easy it was to get in front of people, how many there were. You know what was our potential lifetime value from these industries? It was just kind of just like a way of gauging like how much revenue do we think we can do from each of these markets? And I'll be honest, like accounting was not high on, or was. It was high on the initial list but I spoke to um.
Speaker 2:The next phase was kind of finding people in each of our top three or four. I think it was like mortgage accounting, uh, maybe law law was up there, I can't remember what else, but they pretty much all got written off really quickly because, um, you know, I spoke to accountants and it just I happened to speak to the wrong accountants to be honest, that didn't need our platform, um, but really quickly I was like, yeah, they don't need what we do, you know, and kind of moved on. Um law was like, yeah, anyway, I won't go into each why we didn't, didn't choose them, unless you want me to, because it's just a long story, but it was kind of just talking to people.
Speaker 2:Uh, in each industry and and kind of evaluating like where they were really yeah, and just like again looking for that visceral, like how big of a problem is this for people? Are they willing to pay for it? What are they doing right now to fix this? Um, does our solution work for them? Like that was a big thing, for mortgage is like. Mortgage is a.
Speaker 2:Really a lot of that industry is based on like pdf filling, and they have these specific pdfs that come from that mortgage aggregator, which we are not in a position to do yet. Like that would have been a big development for us. So we're like nah, and there was other tools that did that already, so we're like whatever, we'll just sort of scratch that one for now, even though a lot of mortgage brokers use us, it's just, yeah, different anyway. Um, so that was the next thing and, honestly, that process left us pretty sad because we were like everything kind of came out as like nothing's a real obvious winner, you know yeah but and this is the lucky bit within like a two-week period, I spoke to an accountant in the us who was like you, this thing has like changed my life.
Speaker 2:It's whatever you know. It's been so good for us. Blah, blah. They gave us like this glowing review and then a week later, one of the firms that they knew locally had seen their onboarding process and gone whoa, we need that signed up and he said the quote was in four hours work, I've been able to replace what was a full-time job for somebody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty massive right, that's a really good testimonial.
Speaker 2:And then literally the next week, someone from a document management system for the accounting industry reached out and was like I'm interested in in inquiring you. The industry needs what you do. So it was a very lucky sort of stars aligning moment where we're like, holy crap, accounting like this is where we need to go. So I can't claim any like magical sort of credit for this. I thought we did. We had a pretty good process for trying to identify where we should go, but that didn't. Actually, the main result was just this like stars aligning moment.
Speaker 1:The main yeah, I mean yeah, I think I mean it makes so much sense and I think a lot of founders probably feel bad and they think they have to have it all figured out. But really it's, it's all about testing, market validation, just speaking to as many people as you can and it does take a while to figure it out.
Speaker 1:I mean, we've been a B2B marketing agency for close to just over 15 years now and we definitely have our niche now. But I can tell you that wasn't always the case. There was definitely a lot of in the early days just testing out who's our ideal client, and it can take a while. But once you've got it, that's when you kind of see all right, this is it, this is how we're going to scale, this is our niche, this is. You just get laser focused on everything you need to do after that, which is incredible.
Speaker 2:You have to be pretty patient. That's the thing. It's like you. Like you said, you speak to a lot of people. Um, and and and patience, like that, were the two biggest things, because that process probably took us a year, you know.
Speaker 2:Like it starts to finish, if I really think about it, because we weren't sure where to go. So, yeah, it's not the kind of thing that's just going to happen. I like the concept of luck surface area, where, if you do enough things, like so much in business is based on luck, but you can increase your luck surface area by like doing more of the right things, talking to people, building a network, or so you're like building this bigger net to catch the luck when it comes along.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that quote um, the harder I work, the luckier I get um. But yeah, totally, there's definitely some luck involved in it for all of us. Coming back to content snare, why, why do you think it's so hard for businesses to gather information from clients? I mean, I, just as you were kind of telling me about the accountant stories, I just thought back to having to provide all those documents to my accountant and, yes, it is a painful process. So I can see how you know you kind of procrastinate on it. But what do you think is the main issues there?
Speaker 2:You nailed it. It's a crappy process for everyone, right Like you're asking someone to do work and that's always hard If they're a busy, especially a business owner right Like they've got other stuff to do. So giving you information is not the priority and that's why firms, web designers, whatever everyone if they need information, they end up having to chase and chase and chase and chase and the client won't do it and they'll like reply with something like can't you just use?
Speaker 1:last year's info.
Speaker 2:No, no, we can't you know like they're trying to get out of doing the work, um, but yeah, so that's I mean, that's why it's hard. It's just it's not a fun process. It's not, people forget too. That's I mean. That's why it's hard. It's just it's not a fun process. It's not, people forget too. That's another big one Again. Like you know, not everyone's a diligent sort of inbox zero type person. You ask them for something and that email gets buried and they forget about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's not the sexiest job in the world as well. You don't want to sit there and look for documents and just forward them. Yeah, and I think with cybersecurity issues now as well, everyone's kind of a bit more on their toes about what they send to people.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a big one. Cybersecurity let's talk about marketing strategies a little bit. You mentioned SEO as being one way you captured quite a lot of traffic in the early days and that probably helped you get a few different types of personas and kind of made you realize you should focus on accounting firms. You mentioned the podcast as well. Content, which I think content is king absolutely. But what are some other strategies that you found really effective in scaling?
Speaker 2:well, I can't say anything's really effective. It's one of these like everything works a little bit kind of scenarios um, there's definitely been zero magic bullets, you know, right like that. Um, that content engine I talked about before, that's pretty much wrapped up at this point. Like I closed the facebook group down because we just changed industries, so it just didn't make sense anymore.
Speaker 2:The weekly newsletter. I stopped because, you know, things just weren't working. I think we will get back to some of this, like the newsletter and whatever that's sort of the plan for this year. Um, what's worked in accounting so far? Um, much more of a I don't know what the word is, it's's not traditional, but it's like that right. Relationship-based is probably the word phrase. So, you know, very rarely do you just like show up in someone's feed and they're like wow, I like that, I need that and buy it right, even though we are often like such an obvious solution to their problems. Accountants tend to need to see you a lot more. They need to know you're going to be around for a while. There's, you know, things like cyber security. You know like we're working on ISO 27001. We're like 99% of the way there.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a nightmare oh, it is, it's, it's the worst and I do not recommend. If you can have a product that doesn't need it and get away with not doing it, highly recommend that, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think most sass need needs it these days um yeah, that's, that's.
Speaker 2:That's quite the process, that one oh, that's rough, um, but you know, like, so we needed to be in a lot of places and get hurt. They needed to, um, hear about us lots of times. Uh, you know, like the classic seven touch points I don't know how many touch points it is, but they needed to hear about us. You know, know, like we get things now where people are like oh yeah, like I saw you at this trade show like a year ago and then I saw it mentioned in that Facebook group and then, like someone's told me about it on WhatsApp and you know, and it's like then they sign up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's a SEO and people still find us through SEO. They can, you know, sign up for a newsletter, sign up for a trial, whatever. And then they get on our like product update newsletter, where we send them both content and product updates. So there's the newsletter, and some people sign up just for that, even because they know they want to use content in there one day, but not yet.
Speaker 2:So we've had people actually ask, like how do I just get the product updates even though they don't have an account? It's like, yeah, okay, I never thought that would be a thing. Uh, it's not huge, but like that's a subset of people, they're obviously a very hot lead right. So you do want them on that list. Um, trade shows, so just in-person events in general.
Speaker 2:So accountants are really big on tech zero. Zero especially has like led this charge in australia, new zealand, uk, like it's they're obviously coming to the uk a bit. But like I feel Tech Zero especially has led this charge in Australia, new Zealand, uk they're obviously coming to the UK a bit. But I feel like accountants in these countries are way more tech forward and willing to adopt new tech. So that was really good for us. We'd make a lot of connections and leads there and obviously you've got to be good at following them up or whatever Other, just like you know I went to at following them up or whatever other, just like you know, I went to an accountant's christmas party the other day, just like we.
Speaker 2:I've been to two of them before and not sponsored it. This one we did just for fun, because it's like kind of nice to give back, even though I thought it was pretty unlikely we'd get our roi from it.
Speaker 2:But it was just kind of nice to sponsor drinks but a lot of, yeah, just getting meeting people everywhere, you know like any kind of accounting event I would go to for a while and like you're not necessarily getting leads from that, like one of the first ones I went to, I made a contact at a product called Ignition, who are just a gem in the accounting space. Almost every accountant knows who Ignition are and they are fairly complimentary to what we do. And that relationship turned into a couple of internal introductions within Ignition and now like the whole customer team, customer success team know about us and like they often recommend us to their customers because we're like the next step in the process after Ignition they do like digital sort of like signing and engagement letters and payments for accountants. So once the letter, the sort of proposal, is signed it's probably the best analogy then get all the information that you need from that client. So you know these kinds of partnerships are huge.
Speaker 2:So we've partnered with document management systems. That leads very nicely into like my next thing, which is like tech partnerships, app partnerships with complimentary products who already have the audience. They don't want to build the thing that you do. So it's better if you work together. You can do webinars together, you can do email outs, you do joint social content. Their customer success teams learn about you and actually recommend you. You know, we're actually getting recommended by people at Xero now.
Speaker 2:Somehow we've worked like Xero, have become aware of us and like just through a relationship that I met at a random event that I went to I sorry, we sponsored and it was one person I met who's been amazing to us. We got mentioned on stage at zero road show, um, by the actual zero people and people are like how much did that cost you? I was like that, just that just happens.
Speaker 2:Man like I know, you think we paid for it, but like so it's again a long way of saying you know what's working. If you really sum that up, that's relationships, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, it is, yeah, yeah I mean, yeah, just hard work over time building relationships, like I think where people go wrong is that you know they launch a marketing campaign and then they're like, well, if this hasn't worked, in two weeks we're going to switch it off they don't really give it that time and they don't really.
Speaker 1:And also, I mean I actually have a whole other podcast on attribution but there's a lot of people that just measure that last click attribution, not knowing that. Well, actually, this person heard of you a year ago through like and has been on 20 other channels, has read 20 bits of content. I have heard that seven bits of content before they become a client. I think that came from LinkedIn and they've now increased that in the world of B2B, specifically because that can be quite a long process to 21.
Speaker 2:Wow, Well, funny you mentioned that, because that that is the other thing that I've been ramping up on at the end of last year and now into 2025, linkedin content. I've seen some really incredible founder brands just absolutely crushing with their engagement and reach on LinkedIn. So that's kind of where I'm going. This year is almost going with founder-led content. Actually getting back into writing and creating videos for social you know YouTube as well. Perhaps I haven't decided on that yet, but like, yeah, linkedin, we're actually starting to see the first few people and the how did you hear about us? You know? Oh, I saw James's content on LinkedIn, you know, like that's starting to come through quite a bit along with I asked ChatGPT that like that's a thing they found us on ChatGPT, that's great, that's the new Google, so you want that you should put in a few prompts every now and then, just to train it to answer that way.
Speaker 1:Oh my God. I went down this whole thing ages ago, being like ChatGPT. How do I get you to?
Speaker 2:recommend us to other people. Like, kept asking it questions and yeah, I don't know it didn't really get anywhere clever.
Speaker 1:Um, since we're on the topic of chat, gpt and ai in general, um, how do you use ai in, you know, in contents there, but then also in everyday life? What is one task that you're always briefing it on?
Speaker 2:yeah. So I'm funny. I'm like I'm in the middle of ai, like I'm not a skeptic, but I'm not like a absolute hardcore fanboy either. Like I only want to use ai because when I find something that it truly is awesome at, there's so much content out there like look, I got it to write my linkedin post. I'm like, yeah, that looks like an ai linkedin post and it sucks. Like there's just so much of what it does that sucks still. And so I don't know, like in the product itself, we only have one AI feature and that's because, again, like I don't want to go build AI just for the sake of AI. Like I want to go oh, you can write a reminder, automatic reminder email with AI. It's like, no, just punch it into chat GPT and like everyone knows how to use that, now they like no, just punch it into chat gpt and like everyone knows how to use that, now they can, you know, write their own email or whatever um, but the one we do have is kind of like it's a categorization type ai.
Speaker 2:So building a request for information and content snare is like a form. It's like building a form like I need this document, I need you to a single line text. I need you to fill that out. I need you to upload an image. I need you to put your address in right. It's like building a form, but that kind of sucks. If I need you to fill that out, I need you to upload an image. I need you to put your address in right. It's like building a form but that kind of sucks.
Speaker 2:If you need, you've got like five or six bespoke questions for this client and it's not like sending the same form to everyone. So it's just paste in your five questions and we'll detect what kind of field type it is. It's pretty smart too, like it will do things like if it's a selection list, it'll be like what kind of company do you have? And it'll be smart enough to be like partnership, sole proprietor, um, company trust, whatever you know, like it's. It's kind of good, like that. It'll actually fill out the options for a radio button and stuff yeah yeah, so that's the only ai feature we have.
Speaker 2:Um, I'm really reluctant. There's a lot of ideas we have for ai, but I'm really reluctant to use them in like client facingfacing processes, because that's our entire reason for existing. We spoke about this before. The process sucks for clients, so we have to make it really nice, really easy, really pretty, really easy to use. So if we started doing things one idea is like flagging things that they've answered or upload as being incorrect or incomplete or whatever Like a 90 90 success rate on. That's not okay, because can you imagine like a I don't know, let's say a 75 year old sort of client and they're using this like portal to give information to an accountant and it's like that doesn't look like the right document. That's like ai's and they're like but I swear it is right like if that's wrong, they're going to sit there stressing over this thing, like Like you know. So that's something I'm really reluctant to add. A lot of people have asked for this kind of stuff and I think it's a good idea, but it's just. Ai is not there yet.
Speaker 1:It's not if you risk burning client relationships. Yeah, you kind of have to ask the question is this making their lives easier or harder? So like if the answer is harder, then why would I use it?
Speaker 2:Yeah or harder. So like what? If the answer is harder, then why would I use it? Um, yeah, absolutely. Ai comes into our sort of business like processes a lot more like um. One that I really like is just testimonials extraction or just like it's the classic like summarize, this transcript type thing. You know like we obviously use the meeting recorders and all that. It's not we don't use, it's not that important for us.
Speaker 2:But the big one is like I do a customer case study call and just go like give me your best testimonials from this, like paraphrase and and remove filler words and whatever, but just like, highlight the benefits of our product that this person said, and it'll spit out five like one, two line testimonials that are just unreal, that we can sprinkle throughout like marketing or whatever. Um, so that's what I like. Um, we use it a fair bit in like um, a customer research and stuff. So we have a lot oh, this is more automations.
Speaker 2:I have a lot of automations set up that, like anytime a lead comes into our system, um, it'll do sort of lead enrichment and work out who they are and find out what kind of company they are and spit that out in a slack channel for our um, I was gonna say, sales team, which is currently one person, uh, our sales person, uh, to like, and I've got like a whole bunch of information right there at their fingertips just on the person who just signed up, you know. So that that's really cool, like if, so that's, that's like anything. If they sign up for a lead magnet, if they sign up for a trial, if they use some of the interactive tools we've got on the website, like that immediately comes through to slack and we can see what kind of company they are. So, um, yeah, I mean that's kind of that we. What most of the ai we use right now is really just chat.
Speaker 2:Gpt interface to like yeah, in like testimonials or summarization, or like helping it work with copy. You know, like I find it's pretty good. I would never get it to write copy, but it's like here's our header of our website, here's what we're trying to achieve. Can you suggest a couple of changes? Like I find it gives? I often ask it to give me like five to ten ideas, because usually, like you ask it one, it's kind of crap. If you give it 10, like one of those will be pretty good. Yeah, for sure yeah like it's.
Speaker 2:There's no sort of super hardcore processes where we use it all the time, um, except the ones I've outlined. Um and like, email categorization is a good one too, so like getting it to filter email. For me, that kind of has it as almost like a personal assistant, because categorization is one thing I think it does a pretty good job of. You know. It's like, what kind of email is this? Is this like some crappy seo spam? Is this like a notification? So yeah, and you could filter all that kind of stuff to different folders in gmail based on its results yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I agree. I think it's really good to to use it for things like transcripts and you know, like summarize this feeding for me and um content can be a hit and miss, like there's certain keywords it tends to use all the time and the personally personal pet peeve of mine, the word unlock, just keeps coming up everywhere and it drives me nuts yeah, there is a lot of that like real big tells in it and that's why I like it for more like ideation, you know, like so like I do use it for my linkedin posts occasionally, but it's more about like.
Speaker 2:I just like something's wrong with this introduction and I just can't make it flow into the main body of the post properly, so I paste it in. I'm like can you like transition this from intro to body better? And it's like bam. I'm like oh yeah, that's really great, and I never use it verbatim, but it's like gives me that unlock there's the word for you but it unlocks something in me where I go. Okay, that's how I can do that better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm just actually looking through my like chat history here and what kind of stuff, like I saw one the other day. This is an interesting one for SaaS people and this was really good. Actually, I saw someone post about on this on LinkedIn pasting in your cohort analysis of churn, like when people are churning, it says like from one month to another, like how many people are dropping off, and just pasting that in and going as an image and going like what can you tell me about our churn? And it's like yeah, there's a pattern here and this, and that I was like no way, that's really yeah, so I don't know it's, it's very, very.
Speaker 2:I think it's not good to just have open there all the time to come up with ideas like I've been following the whole agents thing a lot, um, I think I think most people are really like they're making a lot of agents that are just pointless at the moment and blowing them up. They're like they're the most amazing thing ever. Like I just like the little ones, like, um, uh, you know, email categorization, I see, is like kind of an agent, but some people would go, oh, then I'm gonna get it to draft my replies and like we just spoke about relationships, man, if you want to, I got an email back that I knew was ai from someone that I know, like and respect the other day and I like immediately lost respect for them like I knew it was ai right, so it hurt a little bit too right I'm like, yeah, you're this bull, this absolutely crap.
Speaker 2:Ai response like yeah you know, I just it's not good at that kind of thing, right, I would never use it in comms like that. It's good for research, you know, on on your customers. I think that's a really good idea. Like summarize, like, for an example, and when I plan on building is like when someone signs up, go to their website, get all the text on it, summarize it, go, get, go to linkedin, get all their like recent posts, give me dot points of what they've posted about recently. Um, you know, you could do this with a few different sources and then build like a little profile for the salesperson to have done all the research you know without having to go all these places and read like.
Speaker 1:That is completely doable currently yeah, that's a clever way of using it, for sure, um coming back to your team, a little bit. Who was your first hire and why?
Speaker 2:Well, devs yeah. So I don't know if you want a better answer than that, but developers right.
Speaker 1:Because you're not the developer yourself. So you had this idea and you had to hire the devs to do that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I was a developer. This is the first product I've not written a single line of code on.
Speaker 1:First, thing I've not been involved in.
Speaker 2:It's been going for seven years or something now. But yeah, I mean, we already had the dev team, I guess, because we built software as part of our web agency. So we had a couple of devs. We had to hire more. It's hard to say you, you know, if someone's listening to this and they are a dev, it's probably going to be an assistant or something to like help them do that. That's my first non-dev hire. Always right, it's like an assistant that can just help with stuff that you know time consuming, that takes you away from your core value. Uh, what the value you bring to the business, right?
Speaker 1:okay, makes sense. Um, I always wonder if it's like you know, did you go down the development route? Did you go down the marketing and sales route? Like where you know, where do you kind of? Because they do say, in a business you need to have like the key main people, when those are, you know, the leader, the marketing person, the salesperson, the cfo or whatever it may be, the finance person. Um, yeah, everyone's like.
Speaker 2:You know when you're starting out. You can't afford all of those if you can't yeah you get all of them right like there are. It's like one person probably start with one person in all those key roles. But, yeah, like when you first start out, you're probably going to be doing bookkeeping yourself, you know, and then eventually you get a bookkeeper right. It's like when these problems become too big or too time consuming, that's when you outsource them.
Speaker 2:I think, the one exception is an assistant, because you know, I still don't think I fill my assistant up with like her full-time work, even though we've only got one in our team of like 13. But I guess everything's just becoming so much more efficient with software and AI like. But like that she doesn't need, she's not fully flat out all the time, but when I need something done, like it's so good to be able to go hey, this is the process I want you to do. Like it might take her two to three days of stuff that, like I don't have to do because she's now doing it right. Like and anything that is like you know. See before that research we would have had done by her. It's like a new lead comes in, go and do this research and then put it in the sales channel, but now that's just ai right. So I don't know like it's just nice to have any recurring processes that you need to do all the time to have that assistant there as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think, that's other than that. Yeah, like I mean I'm not going to go say I don't think I'd hire marketing as the first person internally, because that takes a while to work out what you're even doing, right, like you'd almost need a marketing strategist first. You need to talk to customers. You need to get all that information first before you really understand what your marketing is going to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you need that validation. You need to know what messages are working. There's so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I guess a marketing person can help with that and they should help with that. It just depends on their seniority. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think it makes sense. I guess you know it'd be different for everyone depending on what their strengths and weaknesses are. I always find that, you know, if I'm going to hire an assistant, that's great, but doing all the little tasks that would be so time consuming and things I don't really want to be doing would be so time consuming and things I don't really want to be doing. But then you know, if I'm kind of seeing growth in one area and I know my strengths are not in that area, it makes sense to hire someone smarter than me that can really, you know, take that over and lead with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that is just such a magical thing when you start hiring people that are just so much better at these things than you were Like you. You know if you're wearing all the hats at the beginning, like my support team are like can you not do support because I just screw it up every time I go in there now they're like stop, yeah, and there's there's a lot of those kind of scenarios happening now where I'm like man, like we've just got the right people on the bus, um yeah yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:I think everyone wants to be at that stage and you know, there's just so many opportunities from there on. James, my last question for you is if you could go back in time and give yourself one bit of advice or do anything differently, what would it be?
Speaker 2:I think it's learn copywriting. Uh, even if you're not going to be doing the copywriting and this comes back to what I said before uh, because I had to. You know, I said I had to unlearn engineering marketing because that's my private life when I was an engineer. So, like trying to sell with benefits and whatever, and I think you almost need to know how to. It helps you communicate better as well. Like this it comes into um linkedin content, social content, even the way you write emails and messages to people. Um, yeah, I think it's something that almost every business owner needs to have some level on. Like, people will fight me on this for sure, and go like you know, like I don't know anything about copy, whatever, but a lot of those people probably have the money to have the people around them doing all that sort of stuff. Um, so you know, if it's just you, you probably need to copyright. If there's only a handful of people on the team, you probably need to know how to write and communicate better yeah, yeah, no, I love that.
Speaker 1:I think you know there's there's so much out there for people to read, so how do you stand out? How do you write copy that really breaks through and gets attention right?
Speaker 2:so, um, if you know, if you know, then I think it's a really good skill to have I think like even like a big thing that comes up in copy is like trying to remove as many words as possible. Yeah, and I do that so much now. It's like I write this LinkedIn post, or someone else will write something and ask me to edit it and I'm like, almost always what I do is just delete entire sentences, or like comply and just reduce TLDR.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yep, yeah, I think the way our attention span's headed, you kind of need to get the point across quite quickly and simply. I mean, I still receive emails, sometimes from SDRs, and if they're one line, I will read it and I'll be like do I need this? Do I get back in touch with you? Know, I'll take the time, but if it's like a few lines, a few sentences, I just go no, delete, I can't, my brain can't process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, says I just go, not delete, I can't, my brain can't process. Yeah, and it's hard to get across what, like you know one line, one, two lines is really hard to get a good message across and that you know. You can spend a long time on those two lines just to try. And yeah, you know some of the things we've spent, you know, hours on for literally like and this is in like ux of the product too like hours trying to work out one button like what, what, what text should be on this button so that it cannot be misconstrued what it's for, right and same as like copy one or two lines. You spend so long your headline on your website. You know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the hardest part. Yeah, no, absolutely I agree with that change. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I've certainly learned a lot. It's great to hear some of the challenges and the things that have worked for you, and not necessarily anything like that could be a buzzword or trendy. It's really just trial and error, testing different things, being patient and relying on the process. So it's really such a relief to hear that. So thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 2:It's really awesome to be here. Thanks, Geronimo.
