Rob Walling: How to 10x in 15 months – MicroConf Europe 2013

The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here Speaker: Rob Walling (@robwalling)

Things you’ll learn

• Inside story of a small acquisition
• specific steps taken to grow it
• How to apply what you’ve learned to new products

The State of Rob’s Product Portfolio

• Drip (just launched to 700 people)
• HitTail 
• DotNetInvoice
• LinemanJobs

HitTail Then…

• More information on the acquisition is here or in Rob’s own words here: (part 1, part 2, part 3)
• 100 paying customers, mostly on $9.99 / month plan – many free users
• Good things
  • Credibility (mentioned in BusinessWeek), incoming links, good market (SEO / Internet Marketing)
• Not so good things
  • Prices too low, only 2 tiers
  • 60 day free trial
  • complicated signup process
• Total Acquisition cost: $52,000 – including redesign, legal & technical

Redesigning the App

• Make signup process easier (only 5 fields required, more focused page, less fuss)
• Complete redesign (Bringing the website to 2011)

 

Growing The Business

• Business now running at about 84% profit after fixed costs
• It takes Rob 6 months of learning to market HitTail – expect even longer for yourself

Phase 1: Relaunch

• Posts / Mentions on Hacker News, Startups For The Rest Of Us, Software By Rob
• Traffic increased to 5,200
• Revenue stayed the same

Phase 2: Podcast Tour

• BlogcastFM, Escape Velocity, Foolish Adventure, Internet Business Mastery, The Startup Slingshot
• Partly knows the hosts, partly cold-call emailing
• Traffic up to 5,600
• Revenue stayed the same

Phase 3: Operation Retention

• Trial to Paid sucked (18%)
• Initial churn about 15%
• Actions:
  • Emailed cancellations and asked for reasons
  • Figure out what makes HitTail different from Google Analytics
  • Drip-Email-Campaign
• Traffic stayed the same
• Revenue increased to 150% (+50%  over last iteration)

Phase 3.a): How Rob fixed the Funnel

• no marketing (!)
• Enforced trial length
• encourage code installation (even do it yourself for free – LTV justifies that!)
• drip-email-campaign during trial period (education on using HitTail AND doing SEO)
• Implement downsell
• Implement one-click articles (don’t only deliver action items, but solve those items for customers!)
• Results:
  • Trial to paid doubled to 36%
  • Churn decreased to 8%
  • Overall a 4x improvement to the business (multiplicative improvements FTW!)

Phase 4: Return To Marketing

• Start retargeting (tried 4 different networks – recommendation PerfectAudience)
• Tried Facebook Ads – didn’t work out
• Google Adwords – too expensive for HitTail
• Guest Posts – work, but super time-intensive
• Traffic at 4,000
• revenue stays at 150%

Phase 5: AppSumo

• Rob does not like discounts, had real reservations about AppSumo deal (-70% discount)
• You get 30% out of gross revenue from AppSumo
• You get additional signups besides AppSumo – massive footprint
• Traffic to 11,400
• Revenue up to 344% (+130% over last iteration)

Phase 6: Paid Acquisition

• Reddit, Facebook, Adwords, LinkedIn, BuySellAds & others
• Reddit worked for a while
• Facebook Ads worked for about 7 months – what made it work:
  • Invested more time (1 month) & money ($5,000)
  • a lot of iterations (about 30 pictures tested)
• Google Adwords never worked out for Rob
• LinkedIn was too expensive for Rob
• BuySellAds didn’t work for HitTail
• Traffic up to 20,300
• Revenue up to 408% base level (+19% improvement over last iteration)

Phase 7: Product Manager

• reduce free trial from 30 to 21 days – almost no effect on conversion rate, but faster iteration
• Integration Marketing with Basecamp – didn’t drive many customers
• Drip-Email-Campaign to educate people about benefits of Longtail SEO and how HitTail plays into it
• Revenue up to 536% (+30% over last iteration)

Phase 8: More Integration Marketing

• When thinking “Search Engines”, start thinking: “Amazon, WordPress.com, Youtube, Drupal”
• WordPress plugin huge win: Easy to rank on WordPress.com, makes installation easier (Win-Win)
• Get a deal as “SEOmoz Pro Perks” (best converting traffic for HitTail)
• Revenue up to 636% base level (+19% improvement over last iteration)

Phase 9: Mentioned on Search Engine Watch & AuthorityLabs

• Got mentioned purely due to “Luck surface area” – “the harder you work, the luckier you get”
• Revenue up to 728% (+14% over last iteration)

Part 2: Moving to Drip

• Move from HitTail to Drip caused by:
  • saw writing on the wall (“Google is going to pull some shit with SEO”)
  • Churn Rate
  • Tough Market
  • Want to do something new
• Same three phases “Building, Learning – eventually Scaling”

How To Get 3,000 emails?

• concentric circle marketing (about 2,500 signups)
  • your own audience (blog, podcast)
  • other blogs / podcasts
  • Press (all inbound, no pitching)
  • Facebook Ads
• Viral loop (each Drip popup has a link back)

-Christoph