# Building Things to Help Sell the Things You Make

Written — Updated
• Author: Patrick McKenzie
• Bingo Card Creator
• This was a B2C which was very hard to do as a small entrepreneur.
• Appointment Reminder
• This was the next venture, after Patrick had quit his job.
• It was the "great business idea but I have no passion for it" type of idea, and this was a mistake as well because there wasn't much to keep up the motivation in the hard times.
• Patrick did consulting at the same time too.
• Three L's for a successful business journey:
• To love
• To live
• To learn
• Fundamental SaaS Equation
• $\sum {traffic} * {conversion rate} * {ARPU} / (1 - {churn})$
• Traffic is hardest to optimize for,
• Conversion rate is easier but takes a while to see results.
• ARPU (average revenue per user) is easy, and can be changed with a few minutes of work
• Churn requires working on retention of existing users
• See 2011 presentations from Rob Walling and Patrick
• Charge more
• Appointment Reminder started at $9,$29, $79, and enterprise "call me for price" plan • Dropped the$9 plan and added a $199 "office" plan, and revenue went up 60% in 2 months. • Lifecycle Emails • This is different from a drip campaign because you the recipient is already a customer or in a trial. This is basically an email designed to trigger an upsell or conversion. • It requires some thinking about what your funnel looks like and the right time to send these emails. • Annual Billing • To add it after your business exists: • Offer a discount (1 month free) if they switch to annual • Offer to "loyal customers" over email • Make it easy to switch, 1-button click • When you have happy customers, this gives the impression of free money to the customer. • Upsell Tiers • When you have usage tiers and your customers are close to their quota: • Send an empathetic email about it • Upgrade with a discount for "peace of mind". • Example • 1. Query for everyone within 20% of their quota on some features • 2. Add in extra special offer plans at a slight discount (say 20%) to "make it an easy decision for you". • 3. Write a two paragraph email referencing the upgrades from one plan to the next. • Internal Dashboards • Just run some queries to look for interesting patterns • heavy usage, light usage • Upcoming plan renewal • Trials • Look at the differences between those who convert and those who don't. e.g. for Appointment Reminder the converted customers used the product a lot and the cancelled trials used it lightly or not at all. • So what goes into those "lightly or not at all" trials? • Was the product not useful? • Did they have trouble figuring it out? • Managing Trial Users • An email sequence can help with these things. • Auto generated welcome • Establish expectations. • Recommend checking out the tutorial and also using it actively on their own needs. • Personal touch "If you email me, I will personally read it and can do my best to help you" • Personal Welcome • Announce availability • Ask then to email you • Trial Check-in • For a good trial, sell them on conversion. • Simple ROI calculation with money saved. • Offer to close now with personal consultation or something. • For a bad trial, try to rescue it. • If they didn't use it, try to find out why. • Sympathize with them being busy • Ask if they had trouble with anything • Offer to extend trial • Not great conversion rate on this but it is very valuable • Great opportunity for customer development, finding out where your product might be falling short • End of Trial • Send an email a few days before the trial ends, letting them know and that the credit card charge is coming up • Weekly Checkup • Put in some ROI calculation from the week if you can. • You did this much stuff and saved this much money! • This makes it easy to continue justifying the price they're paying for your product. • Account Investigation • Have a per-customer dashboard with some recent usage (anonymized as necessary) and with month-over-month and lifetime usage stats. • This way you can see when a good customer cancels or just their credit card fails to approve. • Call them if you can. "Just want to get the new card info to make sure your account doesn't get cut off." • And if that doesn't work, send a friendly email letting them know that the credit card didn't go through and give a 3-day grace period. • Follow up each day. • After that, send an email letting them know you "took the liberty of pausing your account." • Thoughts on Consulting • Scaling Consulting • Increase your rates • Hire people • Improve how often you get contracts and get paid • Reasons to Not Consult • Constantly looking for new clients. (Ideally you repeat business with existing clients) • Lots of unpaid administrative work (billing, talking to lawyers, etc.) • You have a boss and have to go to work and do planning meetings and stuff • Replacing Consulting with a Software Business • It can take years to become profitable, if ever. • Revenue can be very spiky. • How to Get Out of Consulting? • Productize your consulting service • Basically take the thing you do for people and take "you" out of it. • This can be a book, a course, or even training events. • Patrick's "Non-software Product" • In consulting, customers would need help with email and Patrick would set them up with drip and lifecycle emails. • This generally took a lot of sales, a little bit of coding, and some copywriting (by a self-proclaimed "not great" copywriter). • So why would a customer buy a book about this when they could just hire the consultant? •$500 instead of $20K-ish • Don't have to find a consultant • Don't know if you have the time to really act on it yet. • A lot of companies aren't really. able to get everyone in the same room for a few days just to focus on email marketing. • Cheap easy way to get into email marketing without going all-in • Why not just get it for free from blogs? • Real businesses spend money on their problems • "Free" takes longer to research than just buying a package, and "free" isn't free when you're paying employees • In larger orgs, putting money into something indicates seriousness and quality of the initiative to those that might otherwise object. • How to do it • Started building an email list a few months in advance • Focused 75% on teaching, 25% on the upcoming product • Sent just 2 sales emails which linked to a long landing page with more details • Landing Page • Establish value proposition early • Unusual phrases in copywriting attract attention • "unreasonable amounts of money" • Case Study on how the techniques work • Assuming you're coming from a consulting career, use one of those • Personal testimonial • Acknowledge and answer objections • List the benefits of the course. • What it will do for you is more important than the table of contents and all that. • Jobs to be Done style • Multiple Pricing Tiers • He did a single user and team license for 4x as much. • Nathan Barry (ConvertKit) had three tiers. • Focus was on what you get, not on the prices • Started with the expensive one so you see all the stuff first and go "less" from there. • Most sales were for the highest tier. • The product • Speaking into a webcam and decent microphone. Would add slides next time. • Partnered with people with related interests • Made$65K as of the time of the video. Two thirds of that was in the first month.
• This is actually pretty good ROI since it took about the same amount of time as a consulting gig but paid about 2-3x the amount and didn't require a bunch of contract negotiation, etc.
• Keys to success
• An active email list is very important
• Target a pain point you know there is a demand for
• Work on your copy. (See Copyhackers)