The MicroConf Europe 2014 Hub Page has notes on all the talks and additional information.
Website: Grabaperch.com
Twitter: @rachelandrew
Slides: here
Additional Material: here
EdgeOfMySeat.com – Getting Started
- 4-year old daughter, during DotCom crisis
- Lots of friends turned up for work in the morning and the company was gone
- started own company as a Perl troubleshooter (!)
- later turned business into a consultancy
- turned bits of the consultancy into products
- CMS framework licensed along with development services
- license cost $4,800
- average cost per site built $10,000
Moving on to Perch
- downloadable self-hosted CMS software, licensed per site
- Recurring revenue because designers build multiple sites on perch. Average 2.8 licenses/customer
- Motivation behind Perch
- need to have tool that would make small jobs profitable
- drop-in CMS for tiny sites
- started as internal tool, quickly turned into standalone product (“Scratch your own itch”)
- “We had no idea what we were doing”
- version 1
- built over 4 weekends
- sold for $55 on launch
- “profitable” in 24 hours
Keeping Your Customers Front and Center
The “Missing Features at Launch don’t Matter to Anyone but You
- Solve a complete problem for your customers
- Sell your solution to that problem
- Existing customers enjoy getting new features after they paid – FREE STUFF!
Scratch Your Own Itch but be Aware that You are not Your Ideal Customer
- Version 1 was the product we wanted & needed
- Our first customers were our friends & peers (People like us)
- Second wave of customers had different requirements
- ==> Version 2 was the product that our real customers needed
Lesson 3: The Happy Majority will be Silent
- Provide great customer support
- there are many terrible ways to configure PHP web hosting – we know all of them
- The more people CAN do with your product, the more they WANT to do (more feature requests)
- June to October 2014
- 38% of people who bought also raised a thread in the forums
- Your best customers may never speak to you
- Find out who they are & get in touch.
- Ask for feedback
- surveys can prompt customers to give feedback
- Happy, Silent Majority will answer with “Please don’t change anything”
- Ask for feedback BEFORE you change features
- Helps you not to break things for existing customers
- when it feels like “everyone” is asking for features, it’s often just a few noisy people
- Make sure you don’t break your product for the happy majority because of a few noisy people
Lesson 4: Your Customers can Show You how to Sell Your Product
- We love:
- Storing structured data
- Templates defining a schema
- Speed & efficiency of the template engine
- Our customers love:
- not having to know PHP
- that the CMS doesn’t mess with their markup
- that the end client doesn’t need handholding to edit the site
- that they can use any Bootstrap template or jQuery plugin
- The fact that great code makes that possible is NOT a selling code, the side-effects are!
- “The things your customers tell you they love should be your headlines”
Lesson 5: We’re NOT Looking for Features, we’re Solving Problems
- Customer: “Can you add a setting for this?” (Blog post: Checkboxes that kill your product)
- Ask back: “What problem are you trying to solve?”
- As the product owner you need to get from specific to the general use case
- Collect use cases from support, from feature requests, from the way you see people use your product
- New features keep your existing customers happy and sticking with you as their needs are met
Lesson 6: Expecting new features to mean more sales is a mistake
Lesson 7: You can Learn a lot from the “misuse” of Your Features
- Perch has blog module
- customers didn’t use it as a blog, but as a portfolio, gallery etc
- “Why are they doing that?”
- They used it because it allowed them to CATEGORIZE!
- Pave the cowpaths
- See what users are already doing
- Don’t penalize them for making that choice
- Find ways to help them do the thing they want to do in a better way
Lesson 8: Great Support can be Your best Feature & Your most Effective Marketing
- Keep your clients (and their clients!) happy
- Help people to do things they couldn’t do before they started using your product
- “One customer well taken care of is more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising”
- Care about your first run experience (Minimum path to awesome)
Lesson 9: The Influencers are Fickle
- ideal perch customer
- freelancer or agency building lots of sites
- understands that time is money
- prefers running a solid business over constantly learning new things
- often does fixed price website builds
- the “influencers”
- well-known in the web industry
- can charge a premium for their work
- can treat each project as a “special snowflake”
- have time in higher budgets to try new things
- have a need to learn new things in order to be able to talk about them in their influencer role
- ==> We don’t chase the influencers
- Don’t rely on influencers for marketing; treat attention from them as a bonus
Lesson 10: You are NEVER Done
- We are so lucky
- We can live off our product
- We are so tired
- We’ll answer support requests from the beach
- We’ll add new features occasionally
- We swapped 10 clients per year for 1000s of customers
- We are supporting our customers every day of every year and have been doing for over 5 years
- With no exit plan, we are never done. We need to learn how to make this work well.
Questions & Answer
- Up- & Downsides of building a business with your significant other:
- You don’t stop thinking/talking about your product
- If things aren’t going well it is doubly stressful (business + personal – i.e. financial problems)
- Can you tell us more about your 24 hours to profitability?
- We built a landing page, told our friends
- got mentions on Twitter
- –> 500 people on launch list
- costs were really low
- Was it a conscious decision to NOT grow the company more?
- Never wanted to be a manager of people (again)
- Purposely didn’t take more work with consultancy
- With Perch we wanted to learn how things work before we hired
- We need to grow now, we need PHP experts to bounce ideas with
- Why have you not done a SaaS model?
- we want to have a SaaS option in the future (less server configurations)
- We didn’t want to provide hosting (low-margin) in the beginning
- How are you going to grow exceptional customer support?
- Hard, because our support is highly technical
- Train people by installing perch for new customers
- How do you resist urge to implement every feature request?
- Drew will see interesting code challenges, Rachel is more pragmatic
- Keep complexity down, don’t add features that add complexity
- Keep Perch simple and do complex things in new product (Perch Runway)
- How did you grow business after the initial “friends and peers” phase? What’s your best marketing strategy?
- Word of mouth
- Content marketing
- Speaking at conferences
- What did you do to keep yourself motivated?
- Go for long runs
- Listen to podcasts
- Set achievable goals
Thanks for this Christoph. I was battling jet lag and the time on my iPhone reset which meant I missed Rachel’s presentation. Your notes are amazing.
Hi Kelly.
Love it that the notes are helping you! Let me know if there is anything I can do for you.