No exit plan – Rachel Andrew – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: grabaperch.com
Twitter: @rachelandrew
Slides:

Talk Recap

• Have no plan of ever selling to Facebook or anything
• What happens after you quit the day job?
  • You hit the goal
  • You don’t have a boss anymore
  • But what is next?
• Created EdgeOfMySeat.com
  • Things were easier back than
  • Swapping hours for money
• Launched Perch as a result of consulting work (scratching own itch)
• April 2013 we went full time on Perch
  • “The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.” – Ingvar Kamprad
• Goal: “Going full time”
  • specific
  • measurable
  • attainable
  • realistic
  • time-bound

What happened after we went full time on Perch?

• we’ve launched a second product that people love (a smaller version of Perch)
• still just the two of us
  • still working very hard – 7 days a week
  • but we love the work
• There is no transformation moment
  • even after going full-time, you’re still you
  • you still have your weaknesses & strengths
  • you may lose a team that covered your weaker spots
• We forgot to ask ourselves:
  • What did we want our life to look like?
  • What was the next goal for us?
• “We have a strategic plan, it’s called ‘doing things'” – Herb Kelleher
• What are your options? 
  • stay small
    • outsource to small team of freelancers
    • not all products suit small (customers need rapid support; mission critical)
  • hire a team
  • replace yourself
    • “get the solution right then remove yourself from delivery” – Brian Casel
  • sell up and move on
• We’ve tried staying small
  • Perch as a business has a lot of moving parts:
    • Development
    • Ops
    • Community stuff
    • Marketing
    • Support
    • Documentation
  • We can’t do the job of 5 people
  • We could have delayed that jump
    • continue with consulting
    • would have allowed to hire sooner
    • could have self-funded first hire
• sometimes it is OK to upset a few customers
• Why not hire/outsource support?
  • as a self-hosted product support is often our first run experience
  • it is truly technical support
  • not the sort of support a VA can easily handle
  • support that every person with technical chops in the company is going to need to help with
• hiring a developer: what will this give us?
  • more development capacity
  • someone to work alongside
  • focus
  • new ideas and input to the product
  • What’s stopping us?
    • Money – we’re not quite there yet
  • How are we going to get there?
    • Increase profit to hire developer
    • Working strategically on things that increase sales of Perch
    • Focus on most profitable customers?
  • Who are our most profitable customers?
    • Perch is one-off license sale
    • Recurring because people buy a license per site they develop
    • Support costs are front-loaded
  • How do we identify profitable customers?
    • Look at data
    • segmented our customers into groups: casual, committed, super-users
    • current list of top 100 customers on our dashboard
      • I never talked to some of those customers!
  • We want customers who:
    • run a busy consultancy agency
    • Are building lots of websites
    • are more interested in being profitable than playing with the newest shiny thing
  • Your sales data is a goldmine of information
    • you don’t need a SaaS for this
  • Prioritise features wanted by ideal customers
    • Add weight to feature requests based on customer profile
• Where do our customers come from?
  • our audience
    • seen me on stage somewhere
  • Colleagues’ audiences
  • NOT our ideal customers
• Where do our IDEAL customers come from? 
  • they have often never heard of Drew or I
    • e.g. in support they don’t know we are the founders
  • cold audiences from Google, or referrals based on word-of-mouth
  • “Our customers don’t come through the one marketing channel that I am good at!”
• content marketing targeted at ideal customers
• search engines
  • we do well in organic search traffic
  • which has meant we’ve typically been a bit lazy
• Placing ads
  • choosing sites that attract our ideal cusotmer
  • using ad copy that targets these customers
  • creating landing pages that speak to these customers
  • TEST!
• Plugging our leaky funnel
  • we love Drip!
  • Pushing our customer segments into Drip so we can target them as groups.
  • Identifying lapsed customers – those who haven’t bought a license for 6 months – and emailing them
  • Book recommendation: Watertight Marketing
• We have everything we need to do this
  • Nothing we’ve discovered has been a shock
  • Underlined things we really already knew
  • We’re looking at data through a different lens
• If you are stuck
  • define your vision for your company and life
  • what does it look like? What is your role? What else are you able to do?
  • “Arrival is not static” – Sherry Walling

-Christoph