Onboarding Funnels

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap. Web. It's Friday. We take a look back at the week. Brian, how you been? [00:00:25] Speaker B: Yes, sir. Man, I am. I am. I'm, like three days into recovering from going up to Boston on Tuesday night to see Pearl Jam at Fenway park, which was pretty cool. I got a last minute ticket from a friend and I had never seen them before, so that was a really, really cool show. I'd never been to a show at a ballpark like Fenway, which was pretty awesome. But, yeah, I mean, I spent basically most of the day on Wednesday napping, which then made me not sleep well at all on Wednesday night. So Thursday night was another or Thursday day was another recovery day. And now Friday, I think I'm just back to normal now. [00:01:08] Speaker A: That's how old you are. [00:01:09] Speaker B: This is. [00:01:10] Speaker A: It takes three days to recover. [00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah. This is going to concerts in your forties. This is what happened. [00:01:15] Speaker A: Make it in the middle of the week, that's going to cost me a lot of activity. [00:01:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:21] Speaker A: Cool. Well, here, I don't know. Life is nice and boring again. School, soccer games, you know, and a lot of work. Work has ticked up. My entire mood and outlook in the world is now dictated by signups. And so I'm there now. [00:01:40] Speaker B: Story of my life. Yeah, right. [00:01:41] Speaker A: It's like self serve means your mood is dictated by how your signups are of hour that day. That. [00:01:49] Speaker B: Man. This is the theme of our show for the last ten years. And this is so true. We've talked about it many times. It is so incredibly true and definitely super true for me right now, both with clarity, flow and the consulting stuff. I'm booking projects. I have projects now, and I just booked another one that sets me up in a pretty comfortable spot for the fall. I would love to book one more, but rewind, like, two or three months ago, and I was like, I don't know where my next consulting project is gonna come from. Right? And, you know, a couple weeks of, like, totally freaking out and everything, but, you know, that. And that's like the feast and famine. But now it's sort of on this, like, steady flow of both pretty regular sign ups and growth on clarity, flow and consulting is going pretty well. So it's like, my headspace is, like, comfortable and cool and, like the polar opposite from where I was three months ago. [00:02:56] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. It's funny. You do need to know. I think both of us have done this long enough that, you know, when you're riding high, you gotta relax. Cause it's coming down soon. And then the opposite of when you're not feeling good. So that's helpful. But you're still in the moment. [00:03:11] Speaker B: Yeah. There's still, like, things that really frustrate me right now, and it's more the other thing, which is like, okay, now I'm really busy, and what I actually really want to be focused on and building, I don't. I don't. I can't carve out enough time to actually do that. So that's the thing that I'm frustrated with. But it's still sort of, like, a good problem to have. [00:03:30] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:03:31] Speaker B: Like, whereas, like, a few. A few months ago, I. It was more like an existential threat to my livelihood here. [00:03:39] Speaker A: Yes. So it is a perspective issue to. [00:03:43] Speaker B: Be overly dramatic about it. [00:03:44] Speaker A: I mean, whatever. That's how it feels. Yeah. My wife was laughing at me because a few weeks ago, when we would get more than one sign up in a day, I was like, okay, okay, momentum. And now if we get less than ten signups in a day, I'm like, there's gotta be something wrong with the sign up process. [00:04:00] Speaker B: Of course. Yeah, that's been me forever. Any, like, 24 hours period where. Where there's no activity, I'm like, what's down? What happens? [00:04:09] Speaker A: Yes, I'm pinging the team. Guys, can we just double check? Can we double check mobile? [00:04:15] Speaker B: Oh, it's. Because it's Saturday night right now and nobody's in line. [00:04:19] Speaker A: I'm the only one thinking about this. Yeah, yeah. We have a two step signup process right now where you put your URL in, we generate the agent, and then you create an account. And so the ratio between the two is a number that I fixate on. Also, is it a 40%, 30%, 50% conversion from URL to account? So if that falls out of whack, even if the signups are still good, I'm still, like, pinging the team, saying, what's going on? What's wrong? Do we have any errors? Can we look into it? [00:04:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:49] Speaker A: Yes. [00:04:50] Speaker B: Yeah. I think this is sort of a theme for today for both of us. Right? A little bit of onboarding design, user flow work. I made a tweak recently on clarity flow. I could talk about that. That's working surprisingly well, but, yeah. What do you got? [00:05:06] Speaker A: I have something similar. What has helped me in that mood conversation that we were just having is trying not to get ahead of myself on the funnel. And I'm saying, look, we're early. We're basically just building this thing out. And so I'm focusing on being happy that we have accomplished, or we've got the green light on the first step of the funnel. So the most important thing for us is that it feels like we built something that people want. Like, it's working. Like, there's a problem and people come across our solution, and then they sign up. So, like, I'm allowing that to make me generally happy about where we are. And I don't look too far into the funnel. Like, monetization and pricing plans and retention. I know that's a dumpster fire, and I will get there, but I'm not letting that, like, affect my mood. Where we are right now is activation and onboarding. So this conversation with you is very timely. I have. I have a lot of questions I want to ask for advice, or if you want to get into the change that you made recently and talk about the results there. But that's where I would like to spend most of the time in this conversation is not, like, what should we do now? But, like, how do we think about it? That's been the challenge. [00:06:25] Speaker B: Well, okay. Yeah, I mean, before I get into that stuff, one thing about what you're just saying about the levels of the funnel and where you're focused on, I think what you say makes total sense. Like, taking it one step at a time. Like, first, do people even care to even put their email address or sign up or put in their website? That's green light. That's great. And then focusing on conversion and account signups and stuff, but I know that you're not quite at the conversion and focusing on the paying customers and everything, but I feel like there's. I don't know what the right answer is to this, but I feel like so much of that equation is attracting the right people at the front of the funnel. Like, knowing which people really have the pain and want to pay, and then. And then optimizing to get those people visiting the homepage for the first time. [00:07:22] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. You know what that makes me think that that feedback right now is extremely qualitative. It is individual conversations and individual statements and these little facts that bubble up, and then it's a filter on whether or not we should pay attention to what this person says or nothing. So, an example this morning, I'm going through intercom conversations, and I see a user saying, can't wait to do it. Can't wait to tell all my friends about this, but I cannot launch until you give me this feature. And the feature is something that we just pushed into development and is going to QA on Monday. So, like, it's a little dangerous to. To take that in as, like, great feedback. Cause we're right. But it's qualitative, so you don't actually know. But, you know, it's a feature that we kept hearing and people said, I love that it can take a message for me, but that does not help me unless you send me a notification that I got a new message. Otherwise, I don't even know. They called. We were like, oops. You know? Okay, you're right. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:31] Speaker A: So that feels like the type of feedback around conversion and ICP. And then, of course, rock. Rock. I have to give a lot of credit. He's very marketing minded for a CTO. He saw that and pinged me and said, I don't see that on the website. So that's a feature you kept hearing, we built it. We are about to launch it. This person says they can't launch without it. Get the thing on the website now. Because it's that feedback between the conversion portion and the activation monetization. And then it goes back into the marketing to refine ICP. Because that is another problem. It is kind of for another day, but it does need to be ongoing. [00:09:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Earlier this week, we did finally publicly launch everything with the appointments like calendar, scheduling and clarity flow. And that's been one of those things where we've launched really big features like this before that we've spent months building because customers tell us that they really want it, and then reality is they don't actually use it all that much. I feel like appointments. It's good to see. It's actually being used fairly heavily right out of the gate in the first week, customers are connecting their calendars and using it, and we put it right on the pricing page and everything. It's a pillar feature that we're promoting now. I think that's helping. We've had some conversions this week since it came out. All right. But the tweak that I made, that I want to talk about is. All right, so I've been talking about. We've been doing this pricing experiment for the last month and a half now. We don't have any trial. It's just, come to the site, you pick a plan, you pay for it up front. We offer a money back guarantee, but, yeah. [00:10:16] Speaker A: So they're just paying for the first month? [00:10:19] Speaker B: Yes. [00:10:19] Speaker A: Okay. So it's like, let's just say $50 a month. You come in, you put your credit card, you pay $50, you have a month of usage. [00:10:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it starts at 50. Our current pricing is 49, 99, 199. So, yeah, so that's been going actually pretty well for the last six weeks. At first I thought it would be a short lived experiment, and now I'm leaning more the other way. I think it's probably here to stay because it's working pretty well. We'll see. I still want to see how the rest of this month plays out and next month. So that worked fairly well. And then about two weeks ago, one or two weeks ago, I made one more tweak on the site, like on the homepage. And basically every page of the marketing site, the big call to action button, the most prominent one, the pink button, used to be the one that points you straight to the page where you can pick a plan and purchase. Then there was a secondary thing here and there where it'd be like, if you want to see a demo, click this small link over here and you can view our demo. [00:11:28] Speaker A: Now that's video passive. They can watch it on their own. [00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah, they can watch a video now. It's flipped. The big CTA is sending them to the demo. And there's small CTA's small links. Not even buttons that say, when you're ready, check out pricing and sign up is over here. But first, big button. Go watch the demo. [00:11:51] Speaker A: Okay, so not sign up for a demo request. A demo. It's. See the demo. It used to be. [00:11:55] Speaker B: Sign up for the demo. We've since removed the email blocker for that. [00:11:59] Speaker A: Little dangerous on the. Even I would say the word demo is a little dangerous also. Maybe something to experiment with. Okay, so I'm on your site now. I click on see a demo and you get to a big page with a video. [00:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Now the demo. Video is something I've actually planned to re record pretty soon. But. But the idea now is really embracing this idea of like, we don't have a trial, so we, so we don't expect you to be ready to buy when you first land on the site. [00:12:28] Speaker A: Okay. We shouldn't want, you shouldn't feel like a risk. [00:12:32] Speaker B: Right. We want you to come here and spend some time and watch the videos and really understand what this product is all about. And when you feel really compelled, you can follow the link over to the pricing page and purchase. And I think this does a number of things. First of all, it just helps our traffic flows. Second of all, it really well qualifies the people who do decide to buy. It's only two weeks in, but my hypothesis here is that it's going to reduce churn because we're bringing in more educated customers. I think I've. So since launching this change, since flipping the CTA, my fear was like, oh, we're going to. Sign ups are going to be killed. No one's going to be able to even find the signup button. But the opposite was true. We might have even had more conversions since flipping this change on. [00:13:30] Speaker A: Okay, okay. You're pushing further away and converting better. [00:13:36] Speaker B: I'm sort of nudging them through toward the demo page before they get to the pricing and purchase page. It's like multiple steps, adding more time in their buying decision, and that seems to actually be helping. Okay. I didn't spend a lot of time digging into, like, all right, how much, how many seconds are people spending on each page? I got it too busy. And I think the other thing, just qualitatively stepping back, I think I'm noticing that more of the new customers who've just paid, they are engaging with cat, our customer success person more, which is great, because the worst thing is when somebody signs up and they never even talk to support, and then they cancel. And she does outreach to every new customer. But I think more of them are not only responding, but she uses video async support, and they're responding on video. And we have really engaged customers coming in. It's a heavy support load. They're doing multiple weeks of questions, and she essentially coaches them and advises them on how to set up their coaching business. [00:14:55] Speaker A: Yep. [00:14:57] Speaker B: Which is great. I mean, it's working. So I feel like that back end of the funnel is working pretty well. And now if we can just. I think what I need to do more of on the marketing funnel is like, I'm going to re record the demo video. It doesn't even include some of our latest features. And, yeah, I mean, you know, and then, and then we can talk. This will be like another conversation, maybe later in this episode, I don't know. But I, I feel like that funnel is working. But the other thing that I'm starting to think about is what's a plan for a higher end, more revenue per customer type of plan? And it might be like an API type thing, so we can get into that later. [00:15:42] Speaker A: Okay. I was going to ask you about the higher tiers. And when I do the math, and I do some fantasy math, some base case, bad case, good case type of a thing, and I look at the traffic, I look at accounts created, and then the key step between account created and convert to paid, that's obviously, a very big factor, that percentage. And then you're multiplying that by an average revenue per user. That is where I keep an eye and I think to myself, well, I got to figure out how to make that higher, because without it, it sounds. It sounds really painful. If we're at $50 average per user, it's not that we have problems. We just have a taller task. It's just much harder to get the number of users there. But if it's 80, it's different. 110, it's different in the back of my mind at all times. [00:16:43] Speaker B: We made a big step forward on that when we switched from zip message to clarity flow. We were way too low priced under the zip message days. That brought our ARPU up from, like, it used to be somewhere around 26, 27. Now it's closer to, like, 99 because most customers end up on the 99 plan. [00:17:01] Speaker A: Okay, cool. We have an issue with usage. Using the number of minutes used as the key metric is a challenge. I want to include in the mix actual features so that companies that use more of the features get more value need those types of more complex features pay more. Even if they don't use more minutes necessarily, they'll probably go hand in hand. But I don't want all of our pricing to be based on the number of minutes. I've seen competitors come out that are just usage based, and that, to me, sounds awful. [00:17:38] Speaker B: I've toyed with usage based a number of times, like, minutes, like, recording minutes on clarity flow for pricing, and it just never worked. Like, I didn't really launch with it, but, like, I talked to customers about it so many times, and, like, everyone hates it. Everyone doesn't want to be, you know, penalized based on, like, the number of, you know, the amount of time that their customers call into their business or that they're talking to their customers. Like, they don't want to be even thinking about how much is this costing you every time, you know? That's right. [00:18:10] Speaker A: That's right. Just be in the bucket. Be happy. This bucket satisfies you. [00:18:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:14] Speaker A: Okay. Some of the things you brought up, or maybe. [00:18:19] Speaker B: But actually, later in the episode, I do want to talk about, like, aRpu, we're closer to 99, but now I'm starting to think about what is the one that can get us into the hundreds. Cause we have a higher plan, but it's not really doing much. So. Yeah. Yeah. [00:18:34] Speaker A: I think it's a key problem. [00:18:37] Speaker B: Yeah. All right, so what do you got on your end? [00:18:38] Speaker A: So what you were mentioning before, I was going to say some of the things that you mentioned was really, was under the surface. You're talking about. You're talking about making your own rules for onboarding activation, the decision process on whether to buy trial versus no trial. And what I got from that under the surface is if you look at it and just want to apply best practices, that does not sound like the right approach these days. It really requires a thought process focused on the user, focused on your specific solution, the good things about your solution, the bad things. And then you layer in, like, your situation, how you want to handle things. Do you want volume? Do you want quality? Do you want some combination? [00:19:26] Speaker B: I mean, that's also, like, I am always 99% focused on my own product and my own customers. And what they're telling me, I don't really, I definitely don't ever look at competitors in terms of what does their product do. I know who our competitors are, and I know, especially I know who our competitors are based on who our customers tell us our competitors are. Like, I could see other. I think this is a big misconception that people have about competitors. We know who the other players in this market are, but I found that, like, most of the other players that I'm aware of, my customers don't even. Either they don't know about them or they don't think of them as competitors. And there's really only, like, two or three that my actual customers verbally tell me, like, yeah, we're switching from them or we're considering them. Like, that's who I think about. But even then, I don't even know what their products look like. I only really care about, like, what are my customers actually requesting and what are blockers for them, you know? [00:20:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it's an interesting problem. It's very, you know, egocentric of the company to think about their competitive landscape. Our customers, the people that sign up, they come up with the craziest competitors, the craziest things we've never heard of, the worst looking junk on the Internet. People tell me, like, oh, I went on Clickbank and bought some AI bot thing that I uploaded to my phone, like, just the craziest things. And the competitors that were, like, focused on and looking at their advertising, all that, I don't think anyone has ever brought up. [00:21:03] Speaker B: No, literally not one. [00:21:06] Speaker A: Okay, so our focus right now is rethinking our onboarding activation and admin. And I put all three of those into the same breath because they feel inseparable. Oh, man. But I. I don't know how to approach it right now. So the team, the people relevant on this, right. The designer we're working with, Francois, the product people, myself, the. The Sam who's also go to market. We got together, we did like a long call, and we tried to put our heads together and say, all right, how do we think about this? One of the things that I think was really helpful that we did is we took a document out and we wrote down all of these, all the milestones, all the things that happened, the events that happen, finding us, putting in your URL, getting a phone number, forwarding the phone number, choosing a voice. Like all these individual steps that people take, putting in their business info, uploading, training stuff, changing things. Like we tried to put down. These are all the potential markers. Which ones are absolutely required, which ones are frivolous, which ones are nice to have, which ones have to be done in order for you to get any value whatsoever? So we tried to look at it in that way, and then we said, cool, we have a document. Here's like a bunch of boring stuff, but at least we have it documented now that you need to do all this stuff. So, you know, we're not going to forget it. Let's go off on our own and let's come back in a few days and see where people are. Like, let's take a stab at it. Like, either design it, write it in bullet point format. Step one, step two, step three, sketch it out on a piece of paper. Whatever is good for you. We did that on Wednesday. We said, cool, let's come back on Friday. [00:23:01] Speaker B: Like, each of you doing your own version of that? Yes. [00:23:03] Speaker A: Just to kind of brainstorm on our own. Then come back Friday and put our heads together. [00:23:06] Speaker B: Yep. [00:23:07] Speaker A: Friday morning comes around. It's where we are now. And everyone's in the same boat. Everyone's. I'm stuck. I got a blank piece of paper. I'm thinking about it all day, so I'm imagining it. I'm looking at what we currently have, and I don't know where to start. Everyone's like, I don't. It's like a blank page problem. Like, we don't really know where to start. [00:23:30] Speaker B: Maybe I'm unclear on the same thing that you're all unclear on. It's like, what is the actual question? What's the. What are you trying to solve for right now? [00:23:41] Speaker A: What we're trying to solve for is the ability for a new visitor to go from where they are at moment zero. Like, they get to our site or a landing page or something. The first interaction with our. With our product, with our marketing materials. How do we get them from there to forwarding their phone number to the Rosie agent? Okay. That initial time. So I think about the admin and the onboarding a little bit separately. And that's actually one of my questions. Should we try to do this all at once or should this be very incremental? Like, let's just improve this part of the process. This step, then this step, then this step? Or do we want to think about all of it as one big picture so that it's all cohesive and so on? [00:24:43] Speaker B: All right, so I'm not super familiar with all the details of how the product is set up. All right, but here's my gut assumption. Sure. Or guess at this problem. This is probably going to be way off. Whatever step one, they put in their website URL, as you have it on your homepage. Right. Current step one, so they're not registered yet. They've only put in a website URL. Step two, I'm guessing you can use AI to gather some information about that website and then. And then make some basic common smart assumptions about. This is weird to think out loud on a podcast. So some basics, stuff that's not going to be way off, that they're going to need to, have to want to change. And then I guess the thing that they have to actually take action on is getting their phone number. Right. Like, but they're probably not gonna be ready for that quite yet. That's gonna come later. [00:25:53] Speaker A: That's right. There's, there's. There are a few steps before they are ready. [00:25:56] Speaker B: Like, in terms of, like, the training, I was thinking, like the training, whatever defaults that you can put in. Like, I know every business is gonna have different training and stuff, but there's probably some stuff that is super common. Like. Like business hours. Right? Like, or what is your address? You know, like if there could be a simple thing, like are your business hours Monday through Friday, 09:00 to 05:00 and it just defaults to that and then they can say, no, actually we're open until seven, so then they can just tweak. That is your address. This because our AI found it on your website. And so at least right there, you already have two bits of training data pre built in. [00:26:43] Speaker A: Yeah, we have things like services you offer. Yes, open hours. [00:26:49] Speaker B: So technically it's not ideal, but technically they could launch with just that. Just an AI bot that all it ever knows is some basic service offerings, your address and your hours. If they do, no other actions. At least you have that. Of course, they could see and they can add to it over time. But, like, that's enough to have something. Yes, yes. And then from there, it's like, all right, do you want to use it and then get your phone number and sign up? [00:27:20] Speaker A: Right. Or write or test it? Right. [00:27:22] Speaker B: Just. Yeah, test. So I guess I don't know how your testing system works, but, like, they could test it and then hear it, and then if you want, then from there, it's like the signup registration. [00:27:37] Speaker A: Right, right, right. So it's like confidence building. What is your thought on the first time experience? Do you view that as a unique experience that has a unique set of screens, or do you look to the. [00:27:54] Speaker B: Admin, like, wizard versus, like, just use the admin as is? Yeah, look, I think all these questions, I don't like how, again, so many people in our circles, our industry, try to. There is one right way to do this. There is not one right way to do this. Every product is completely different. I've gone back and forth on this multiple times in clarity flow. Right now, we're in a phase where we actually have killed our whole wizard system. And now it's like you just. We drop you into the actual interface, and you can explore on your own. But we have little pointers. Not actual pointers, but we orient you based on wherever you go. In this case, I would go for more of a. [00:28:46] Speaker A: Close the window. [00:28:50] Speaker B: I would go for more of a. We found this info on your website. Click yes if this is correct. If not, fix it. Okay, now you're all set up. What do you think? And then if you want to further customize this, come on into your admin area. But for now, you could be good to go with the basics. [00:29:13] Speaker A: Right. It's almost like instead of asking for information, it's just allowing them to either confirm or edit information. [00:29:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes, exactly. [00:29:21] Speaker A: That's our ideal. It is more than. [00:29:23] Speaker B: That's the key. Like, the fewer blank fields that they have to fill in, the better. Those fields should have some defaults that they could just be like, oh, that's not quite right. Let me just fix it. [00:29:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I'm so excited to redo this. And then I'm at that moment in the process where you just, like, encounter all this emotional friction around, like, should I hire someone that specializes in this? I can't do it myself. I have to break through it. [00:29:52] Speaker B: I feel like this kind of thing is not really hireable, to be honest. Not for an outside hired gun to come fix this. Problem. This is something that's you personally and your product people directly in touch with customers and then just making the changes and just trying it one way for a few weeks and then tweaking it for the next few weeks, you know? [00:30:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It is. It is definitely not going to be right, right away. It's very frustrating how difficult it is to instrument a analytics around this stuff. [00:30:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:31] Speaker A: Yep. [00:30:31] Speaker B: It's very frustrating. [00:30:32] Speaker A: Cause you're like, oh, cool. We took a stab at it and then you go to Google Analytics, which we, we almost insisted on getting Google Analytics to work because every other tool we looked at was just like going to end up at a month just because of volume. Yeah, we already have all the data. It's very frustrating. [00:30:49] Speaker B: I've been painfully through all of this. [00:30:53] Speaker A: We built our own stuff internally. We use Laravel Nova for some internal stuff and all the numbers are totally different from Google Analytics. And it's impossible. [00:31:01] Speaker B: I still pay for, but I don't look at it as much as I should mix panel for this. I know amplitude is another good option. Just don't like Google Analytics. I have it installed, but I never log into it. I don't plan to log into it. I just have it installed for whatever reason. I use plausible. For actual traffic analytics, I use mixpanel, which can get pricey, but the way that I keep the pricing down a little bit on mixpanel is I'm not using it to track every single page view. For that I can use plausible, right? I only use mixpanel to send key events. [00:31:48] Speaker A: Okay. [00:31:49] Speaker B: So that's they charge per event or they have usage based on the number of events. And if you're sending page every single page view for every single user as an event, that's going to drive your pricing up the wall. That's crazy. But if you only send events for like when a user converts or when a user does this activation step or when a user does this thing, then it's a little bit more manageable. [00:32:15] Speaker A: Cool. Their website is very interesting. That's just a lot of copy. [00:32:22] Speaker B: What? Mixpanel? [00:32:23] Speaker A: No, plausible, easy to use and privacy friendly Google Analytics alternative. One screenshot of the product and then a whole bunch of copy. Very interesting. [00:32:34] Speaker B: Yeah, they're good. You know, they're. Another good one, of course, is fathom analytics. Is it fathom? [00:32:45] Speaker A: Yeah, fathom. I love, I love the guys at fathom. I have no morals, bro. When it comes to tracking, I want all the data. I don't care about privacy. [00:32:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I think like from a marketing standpoint I feel like they've gone a little bit too heavy on the privacy thing because I agree, I don't care as much. Plausible. Does this essentially the same thing as fathom? I think there's a few more of these simpler Google Analytics alternatives, but yeah, it's good. [00:33:19] Speaker A: Cool. [00:33:22] Speaker B: But yeah, tracking overall, man, it's like I have plausible for traffic. I have mixpanel for like usage based, which features and which activation steps are being used. Then I have chart mogul for the SaaS metrics. We have our own custom built stuff and that hits the database. It's just bad. It's all bad. It's so much. It's ridiculous. [00:33:49] Speaker A: Let's talk software for a sec. We have been using segment a lot. That's very helpful because at least it feels like you are more in control of events. Then we connected loops. Remember when I thought about building an alternative to loops? Loops is quite good. [00:34:06] Speaker B: Is that for email? [00:34:07] Speaker A: It's email for SaaS. [00:34:10] Speaker B: For that we use customer IO, which is also its own. We use it for email, but it's also an events tracker as well. [00:34:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Speaking of email, you want to laugh at me for a sec? [00:34:19] Speaker B: Sure. [00:34:20] Speaker A: You know, we realized yesterday, yesterday we weren't sending an email after someone created an account. Just no, welcome email. [00:34:28] Speaker B: Nice. [00:34:29] Speaker A: I just used it as an example. I just went to slack and was like, this is what happens when we go fast. This is why it's okay to make mistakes. I don't think we got it up. We fix it right away and we're good to go. Don't feel bad to make mistakes. Go. [00:34:42] Speaker B: I don't think we have an immediate email on clarity flow signup. We do have an onboarding flow and they, they get a first email, but I think it's at least an hour later. It might even be a day later. I got to check. [00:34:54] Speaker A: Yeah. For us, it was just felt like a funny thing that we just overlooked. We were like, you know, when, when someone signed up, like, you know, we're trying to automate a bunch of stuff. So Facebook is very interesting. Let's talk ads. We're all over the place. Screw it. [00:35:09] Speaker B: Sure. [00:35:10] Speaker A: So Facebook has been very interesting for us. We ran a split test of two types of Facebook ads, one for registration. So the goal was go to a landing page that we built and sign up. And when you sign up, that's a conversion in Facebook. Cool, straightforward, the most well understood kind of ad campaign. The other side of the test was lead ads. So Facebook allows you to collect information inside Facebook. And because of that, the data is perfect and all this other stuff, and they reward you because they want to keep people there. Who knows? But the result of that, the conversion, is the submission of information. You do get a chance at the last screen to put a CTA. So we do have. The last screen is ready to start your trial. Click here. And that takes you over to the landing page. So Facebook, I mean, their ad platform is absolutely crazy. My personal Facebook is not allowed to advertise. I have no idea what I did. I have no idea about anything, but my account is banned. That has made it very difficult for me to see any of the results of our Facebook campaigns because it's connected to your personal. We were running this test and I was telling the advertising company, I was like, you got three more days on this test. I hate this. I do not want lead ads. This is. And part of it, because I just didn't have any visibility, and so a signup would come up and I wouldn't understand where it was coming from, whatever else. Turns out I was completely wrong. And what's happening with these two, with the split test, is that our cost of conversion, like cost to create an account, is almost identical. But the Facebook lead ads has, like 40 leads a day of people filling out the form. [00:37:06] Speaker B: Right. [00:37:06] Speaker A: So it's the same cost, but we have all these emails of people who have said, I'm interested, and submitted, but didn't go to our website. [00:37:12] Speaker B: And so on Facebook, through the lead ad, which. The lead ad can actually get their email address. Yeah. [00:37:20] Speaker A: They put in, like, you can select which questions you want. We just made it simple. We were like, you know, basically your business URL and your email. [00:37:27] Speaker B: Okay, so they fill that in on Facebook? [00:37:30] Speaker A: Yes. It stays inside. [00:37:31] Speaker B: And then after that, there's like a button that they can click to. [00:37:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like the last panel. It's like, you know, one panel is like the last. [00:37:40] Speaker B: So these people are seeing the ad, they fill in their business information. They do that, but then they don't click the button to go over to Rosie. [00:37:48] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. They feel like they're done once they've submitted the information. [00:37:52] Speaker B: What's the promise of the ad? Like, what compels them to see an ad and actually take action on it in Facebook? What are they getting? Or what are they trying to get? [00:38:01] Speaker A: They're just showing interest. That's it. [00:38:03] Speaker B: So they see some video about. [00:38:06] Speaker A: Yeah, our videos are basically like, you shouldn't miss any phone calls. And when you're out on the job, you're losing money when you miss phone calls. And I just found this new tool powered by AI called Rosie, and now I don't ever miss any phone calls again. Are you interested in that? You know, click here. [00:38:23] Speaker B: Are they clicking it? And then Facebook is like sucking their data from their Facebook account and giving that to you as the lead, or are they like typing in their business? [00:38:33] Speaker A: They're typing in. Yeah, yeah, they're typing in. It's interesting. It's like, it's like a, it's like an in between step and you get higher conversion from it. What I, what I didn't know until we had the transparency was that the number of people clicking that last panel and going and signing up was almost equivalent on a dollar basis on a cost of a new account as the other campaign that only goes there. So we were basically paying for the same amount for both types of signups. [00:39:04] Speaker B: If that's the case, then isn't the non lead ad better? [00:39:08] Speaker A: No, no, because the lead ad, I. [00:39:11] Speaker B: Hear what you're saying, like, yeah, you're getting their information, but they're not even clicking the button. Who's doing that? [00:39:15] Speaker A: But enough of them are actually clicking the button that it's basically, let's just call it $100. Right. The first campaign doesn't have the lead form. It's just a button that goes to our site and we're paying. Let's just say we're paying a signup. [00:39:28] Speaker B: Right. But then you're coming to your site and coming into your app. [00:39:31] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. Then the lead ad was, has the same thing. Let's just call it again, $100 per actual sign up that clicked on the last panel and went to our site and signed up for an account. So I was looking at them like, this is apples to apples. In my mind, it was apples to apples. And we're paying $100 per. And I don't know what's happening with these leads and I don't like it. And it turns out I was totally wrong. We're basically paying, let's just, again, this is not the right number, but $100 per signup. But we also get like 40 leads with it that didn't sign up. [00:40:04] Speaker B: So the benefit of the lead ads is like, you can also get their information added to your list. [00:40:09] Speaker A: Yes. [00:40:09] Speaker B: Follow up with them. Yes. [00:40:10] Speaker A: And the bringing this up was triggered by the loops conversation because now we went into Zapier and connected. Oh, wait, you're saying that all in. [00:40:19] Speaker B: All, the emails of people who, including both the people who went all the way into your app. And the ones who didn't, you're still getting all their information into your list. [00:40:28] Speaker A: So we don't email the ones that signed up. Cause now they're in that process. [00:40:31] Speaker B: I see. Whereas the other ones, you're just getting the sign up, but you're missing. [00:40:34] Speaker A: And I wasn't seeing it and we weren't emailing them. And I was like, this is idiotic. I have to go in and download a CSV once a day. And then I emailed them like 12 hours after they signed up. It didn't make any sense to me. Now that we finally got access and we connected Zapier to loops, now all of a sudden that campaign looks so much better. So I was like, my instinct, my emotion, because I didn't have the transparency was totally, totally off. And hopefully we can figure out a process that actually converts some percentage of the people that just filled out the form but didn't go to the site. And then all of a sudden, we have, like, a winner on our hands on the advertising front. [00:41:09] Speaker B: This is why I could never get my brain around being a marketer, because it's like, what person is just scrolling through Facebook, sees an ad, clicks it types in their own personal or business information, la dee da, and then just drips away and does nothing. Who does that? Like, who actually does that? [00:41:29] Speaker A: I don't know who these people are. I don't know what's going on out in the world. People act very, very strangely. Right. That's just the reality of marketing on the Internet. You just don't know what is going on. People do chargebacks. People use prepaid cards and then cancel. Like, a lot of it just doesn't make sense. [00:41:50] Speaker B: We've had one customer on clarity flow for over well over a year. His card declines at least every other month, if not every month, because his debit card is nothing. Filled up with the $49 a month to cover the cost. [00:42:06] Speaker A: Yes. [00:42:07] Speaker B: What are we doing here? [00:42:08] Speaker A: What are we doing? I don't know. Yeah. We actually just went into stripe yesterday and disallowed any prepaid cards because that. Prepaid cards are the single biggest source of frustration because people use prepaid cards to control their expenses, but they also do it to control the services that they're signing up for. [00:42:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. Yep. I don't know, man. All right, so I've got a. So you had some. You needed some feedback on the onboarding thing. I need a little bit of feedback on this, so. All right, so, like, the upper end of the revenue spectrum. Okay, so I feel like we've done a lot of work on product market fit and the funnel and the conversion and the no trials, stuff like that. We've done a lot of work there always more to do. But now, and we've just launched a big feature with appointments, there are a couple of other potential new features that we'll do in the next few months. Nothing super major, but now I'm starting to turn my thought as a potential new initiative for clarity flow is what to do to get at least a small segment of customers paying a lot more for clarity flow. Yeah, we have no in our market, or at least our customer base, we don't have the concept of like enterprise customers. We're not an enterprise product. We are selling mostly to solo coaches. There are some that are like coaching companies with multiple coaches and things. We have some of those and they actually do pay a bit more for the product. We have team member pricing, but not many accounts have that. And even if they do, if most customers are paying 99, they might be paying like 100, 3140, something like that. [00:43:58] Speaker A: Okay. [00:44:01] Speaker B: We have a higher plan, which we call premium. It's at 1.99 a month. Very few customers upgrade to that and there's frankly not a huge reason to do it. We give you access to our API, which is super limited right now. We give you webhooks, which is somewhat limited. I don't know. That's basically it. We've had this request come up for years at this point. This is another one of those things that I have been very, very resistant to doing. So the request that comes that this has been happening since zipmessage and it continued on through clarity flow to this day, which is we get some customers who just really, really, really want to deeply integrate clarity flow within their own membership platform. They don't want to use clarity flow alone on its own as its own full platform. So most of our customers do. Right? Most of our customers do send their clients into clarity flow. They use clarity flow as their entire client portal. It runs their whole coaching business. That's what we've built it for, we've designed it for. That's great. But then we get this much smaller but much more vocal segment of customers who are like we need for whatever reason, to stay on our maybe it's a WordPress membership site, or maybe it's a custom built one. Maybe it's some other SaaS that's running their membership site, their client portal, and they want to embed clarity flow inside of that. [00:45:43] Speaker A: Is that a cosmetic issue or is that like a brand issue? Is that how they think of themselves? Like, no, we provide everything we don't want it to. [00:45:53] Speaker B: Okay, so what is it? Yeah, I'll talk more about what we've done about this problem, but I'll get to that in a second. To answer your question, within this group, there are some that, frankly, my opinion, digging into it on support with them over the years is like, you're making this way more complicated than it, than it needs to be or it should be. You should just use clarity flow as it is if you want to use clarity flow. [00:46:16] Speaker A: Okay. [00:46:18] Speaker B: But then there are some customers in this group who have a legitimate need, mostly because they are a much bigger business and they already have hundreds or thousands of customers in their membership platform that they're just not going to migrate them all over to clarity flow. And there's not even a really easy way to do that. It would just be way too disruptive. But they do want the benefits that clarity flow offers, especially with video communication and async and all this different stuff. Right. So they actually do want it like deeply integrated now. Okay, what have I. So this request has come up maybe once a month, if not more, over the years, and they've been very support heavy. And so what I've done up until now is like. So we currently do not offer any sort of like single sign on capability. We don't offer even our API is super limited. We do offer the ability to embed parts of clarity flow using iframes in your own website. That's essentially what they do, but that is limited in a few really annoying ways. Think about clarity flow. You can use it with your clients. The other clients actually don't even need to be logged in to respond. Yeah, but when they are logged in, it can identify who they are. And we have other little workarounds to identify who they are with some URL parameters and stuff. But when you use it in an iframe in your own website, we are not identifying the other person, and we don't have a single sign on sync with their login. They're using it in this logged out state unless they do some super complex custom coding around it. So it starts to get into very hacky territory at this point. The other thing is when you communicate on clarity flow, you send a message. It's going to send an email notification about, hey, there's a new message. But that email notification is going to link you into clarity flow. It's not going to link you into your platform yeah. [00:48:33] Speaker A: Okay. [00:48:38] Speaker B: My approach to this over the years to try to quellenne these requests, these demands, is to say, all right, we don't have single sign on. We're not a fully white labeled platform, but now we offer custom domain mapping so you can map your own domain to clarityflow. A lot of customers actually do that. It's a big, very popular feature for us that was extremely complex to build. [00:49:01] Speaker A: That's a good solution. [00:49:03] Speaker B: Good solution. And we also offer custom colors, custom branding. You can slap your logo on it so it starts to become really custom branded, like your own client portal. Right? You can put your logo in your email notifications and everything colors in there as well. And that's been, I think, good enough and actually pretty popular with most of our customers. And a lot of those features drive them into our, into our higher plans. Not the highest, but the middle plan. Still to this day, we still get people who try with a lot of friction to try to embed it and deeply integrate it inside their own membership platform. Despite all this. [00:49:46] Speaker A: Right, it sounds like demand, but how much are they willing to pay for that, though? [00:49:51] Speaker B: So this week we had another one of those customers come through and he's paying for one of our plans and he's doing what I just talked about. And I hopped into the support thread with him and I started asking him, I'm like, how? Like, yeah, how valuable is this? I was like, hey, if we do like a single sign on solution and we put it in our highest plan, which cost 199, there might even be a setup fee involved. How do you feel about that? He's like, yeah, I would pay for that. Like my platform. Like, you guys are offering stuff that other platforms don't offer and I want it. And that makes perfect sense to me. Now, that's just one customer. But I know that over the years I've had other customers just based on my conversations and understanding what their business is all about, they're doing really well. They have budget to do something serious and most of them end up churning because of the friction that I'm talking about. [00:50:53] Speaker A: Right. They can't do what they have in mind and they go, fine, we'll go build in WordPress by ourselves. Fine. [00:50:58] Speaker B: I, yeah, or they actually build something custom like themselves. They have that sort of budget. Not all of them, but some of them. So my thought is, so right now, I have my team sort of researching what would be involved in us developing some sort of single sign on option. And how do we make that available to customers who might be on all different types of platforms. It might be WordPress, it might be something else. What would be required? And maybe it even requires us to offer a developer support person for a fee to work with you for a couple weeks to get it up and running for each individual customer. So I'm sort of open to the idea of saying, hey, if you are serious about needing this, you go straight to our top plan and maybe you pay a setup fee, but we do have options for you. [00:51:49] Speaker A: My very, very quick take, I got a call, I got a jump to, but here's my quick take. That's not enough money for the level of complexity you're talking about and my worry. [00:52:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think I would raise the top plan. [00:52:03] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, look, maybe even make it. [00:52:04] Speaker B: Just like a contact. Right? [00:52:05] Speaker A: You want to pay $500 a month, you want to sign an annual contract. Like, like that territory starts to make more sense. [00:52:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:13] Speaker A: What I, my gut feeling is that you have other opportunities to mine to get people into higher tiers that are not as complex, that have a larger potential market than what you're talking about right now. Unless that market would find you because of it. If there's a market of coaching companies that are willing to pay 500 a bucks a month, $1,000 a month, because this is really important to them, and if you launch it with a few of them, then the others that want it will come find you and pay you, maybe that starts to get into the realm of making sense. [00:52:56] Speaker B: Just based on what I know about that, based on what I know about our current customers, there might be some room to raise our prices a little bit on what they're currently get. Like, what I mean is, like, using our product as is. Right. Like, using all the features that we offer, but not in that, not really deeply integrating with your existing platform, just using clarity flow with our custom domains and clarity flow commerce and all that, there might be a little bit of room to increase prices a little bit more. But I would say that we're definitely in the ballpark, if not on the upper end of what most. [00:53:32] Speaker A: Okay. [00:53:33] Speaker B: Because they had other options. They have plenty of other options. [00:53:35] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:53:36] Speaker B: And some of them are lower priced than us. Like, you know, like, it's not a matter of, like, us selling to more coaching companies with teams. I guess there could be some opportunity with that. What I'm saying is, like, we already naturally attract a segment of customers who just really want to deeply integrate, and currently we're just letting them pay for one of our lower plans and try to hack it together. [00:54:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:54:04] Speaker B: And it ends up being a big support headache. And they are the highest churning segment. Maybe instead of that being the case, those customers, we say, hey, you belong in the premium plan and we have everything that you need over there. [00:54:18] Speaker A: Right. It's a new set of rules because your demand is much higher, therefore, and it's going to cost us more. And we're not going to take the risk on getting you set up on this and you walking away next month. Yeah, very interesting. Like, the things I wrote down was like, where's the natural breakpoint? Like, we found one recently that most people just need a very simple scheduling solution and some people need much more complexity. That felt like this natural breakpoint. Oh, okay. So we do this thing, Google calendar for our lower tiers, and it's very natural that you're going to pay more because you need this complexity that requires a call and whatever else. [00:54:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like, I even think we could even like, remove our iframe embedding feature or hide it or whatever and just not even make that available to regular customers. [00:55:07] Speaker A: Yes. [00:55:07] Speaker B: And like, totally, if you want that plus, like some single sign on stuff and some API access, you go into premium, you know? [00:55:13] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. Interesting. [00:55:17] Speaker B: I'm still. I'm not even at 50% willing to do that yet right now. [00:55:23] Speaker A: This is where you noodle. [00:55:24] Speaker B: We're doing some technical research on it, but that could be a direction that we go at some point. I don't know. [00:55:34] Speaker A: I got a boogie. [00:55:35] Speaker B: It's Friday. [00:55:36] Speaker A: Hope you have a great weekend. Thanks, everyone, for listening. [00:55:38] Speaker B: Later, folks.