Episode 11
· 35:02
How do you make a name for your product and get it out there, get it known? That's the question we posed for Brenna Dunn. Seems like almost overnight this guy was everywhere. Blog posts on Hacker News, popping up in our Twitter streams, and promoting a new product for consultants called Plan Scope. In this episode, we delve into how he made this happen.
Speaker 1:We asked him how he got his start in products, how he promoted himself, and what does Latin have to do with all of this? Stay tuned. Hey everybody, this is Product People, a podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. My name is Justin Jackson, and I'd like to say hello to my co host, Mr. Kyle Fox.
Speaker 1:How's it going, Kyle?
Speaker 2:Pretty good. How about you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I've gotten a few ski days in in the last couple of weeks.
Speaker 2:Ah, good to hear. I, I actually finally got out last weekend to Lake Louise, so that was nice. Beautiful. Little bit humbling first time out of the season, but onwards and upwards.
Speaker 1:Right on. Now to start, Kyle, I've got a question for you. When did you first hear of Brennan Dunn?
Speaker 2:I'm trying to think back here. And I think it was probably last fall, 2012, I came across double your freelancing rate in fourteen days, which as you can imagine, to a rookie freelancer was a pretty enticing title. So I may have read about it on Amy Hoy's Unicorn Free. I can't remember exactly how, but I'm pretty sure that W freelancing, his book is sort of what tuned me in. Then I sort of like, you know, down the rabbit hole we go trying to figure out who it was that did this.
Speaker 2:Then I came across Plan Scope and kind of been following since.
Speaker 1:Yeah. See, I think this is an interesting question because it brings up this idea of branding and marketing. How does a person build a following? How do they market their product? And we're in luck because we have Brennan on the show today.
Speaker 1:So he's going to be able to help us answer some of those questions. As a bit of an introduction, Brennan is the founder of PlanScope. Like Kyle said, he teaches a workshop at buildaconsultancy dot com. And he's the author of that book Kyle was talking about, Double Your Freelancing Rate. And we're really happy to have him.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, Brennan.
Speaker 3:Hey, thank you, Justin.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about when did I first hear of this guy? And again, I think it was through Amy Hoy, and it was one of her emails or a blog post about 30 by 500. I think that you were one of her examples of, here's someone that's come through the program. So yeah, it'd be good to talk about that.
Speaker 2:So usually what we do, Brendan, I'm not sure if you've heard any of our previous episodes, but generally what we do is we kind of like spend the first little bit kind of like getting to know you as a person. So tell us a bit about yourself, where you come from, what you were doing before this, and how you kind of got into where you are now.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I guess I can start from maybe college. I I went to a school called St. John's College. I was studying the classics in Greek and Latin and fun things like that.
Speaker 3:And so I, you know, was going there and I always was interested in technology. I'd always kind of dabbled in development. You know, in high school I was hacking on PHP and Perl scripts. And even as a kid, my parents had an Apple IIe, and I was just playing with BASIC. But I never wanted to go to school for that.
Speaker 3:I never wanted to make my hobby or my passion be my career. So I figured I'd be this, you know, classics professor or something, and who happened to run Linux on the desktop, you know, at night. And so I was going there and I started freelancing because I needed cash. I wanna get a job as a waiter or working in the campus IT department or anything, so I started doing Flash websites. And this was back, I wanna say 2003 or so, and I was doing a lot of Flash, and I just started realizing I was spending a lot of money, and I was really kind of liking doing, you know, this computer work for pay.
Speaker 3:So I I actually dropped out school, and I got a job as a flash engineer, which turned into a flex engineer, which then exposed me to the wonderful world of Java because flex has no, or it might nowadays, but back then it didn't have any concept of persisting to a database or anything. So I kind of had to learn Java, which led me to Spring, which led me to Rails, and, you know, I got into Rails back in version 0.8 or something, and I convinced my boss, who was a huge Apple fanboy, to let me rewrite our Java app in Rails, because I showed him, I don't know if anyone had seen it, but apple.com used to have this like profile on 37 signals as a company. And it had really, you know, like, you know, cool music in the background, and Jason and Dave looked cool going up elevators and stuff. Yeah, anyway, it was just basically to to the to my boss who who was, you know, Steve Jobs' number one fan. He somehow correlated in his mind, my company can be cool like this company if I use Rails.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, even though it was unproven, even though no one had ever, like it was still really not used in production anywhere, I had no idea, you know, how to deploy it or anything like that. I got the green light to go ahead and rewrite it. And then the company actually started falling apart. So I had to, you know, get something new.
Speaker 3:I dabbled in actually my own little startup, which was pretty much just a lead generation platform that let me, collect leads and sell them directly to mortgage agents, and that was okay. I didn't really know what I was doing.
Speaker 1:What was that called?
Speaker 3:So it was called Agathon Solutions, to go back to the Greek section.
Speaker 1:It comes full circle. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so we were just kind of like a this is during right before the subprime mortgage fallout, when everyone was getting mortgages who shouldn't have been getting mortgages, and back before AdWords was as expensive as it is nowadays, we were basically just running AdWords campaigns and collecting, you know, leads and sending them directly to, agents who would hopefully pay us more than it cost to acquire that lead. So I kind of, this is my first kind of, you know, entry into realizing that, you know, what cost of acquisition means, and you know, what value people will pay for and everything. And it was going okay. And like I mentioned, I didn't really know what I was doing.
Speaker 3:I had hired a sales guy, and I I had a partner who I grew up with who kinda did the legal and administrative side of the company. I did all the development work. And and then the the whole mortgage bubble burst, and we realized that no one would wanted buy leads anymore. So again, I was kind of needing to find something else to do and I found a job at a interactive agency. I was brought on to do kind of like R and D on a CMS they were developing, because every agency on the planet has their own content management system.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So, you know, really poorly written PHP op that they were literally cloning for each, each new client of theirs would get a cloned copy of a code base that wasn't even in any sort of version control. And they would just hack on it, and it was really difficult when you wanted to say client x, we developed something really cool, and then client y wanted that. It was just, it was really painful. So I convinced them to let me write this kinda centrally hosted thing in Rails. And I did that for a while, and it was going pretty well.
Speaker 3:And actually, I believe they're still using it for They have cruise lines and small hotel chains and stuff as clients. So you know, was doing that for a while. It was down in Miami, back when I lived in Florida. And my wife got pregnant, and her family's up here in Virginia. And one of the kind of pacts that we made was when we got pregnant, we had moved back to be closer to her family.
Speaker 3:So we packed up and moved, and I was still they let me be a remote employee, but at the time, I had become the technology director of the company. So it didn't really work out too well, me being the only remote employee in the whole company, and I happen to have a very senior role. They wanted me to fly down twice a month, and it just, when you have a pregnant wife, it's just, yeah, I didn't wanna do that.
Speaker 2:I don't appreciate that too much.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I got I got kind of like a telecommute job doing rails work up here for a few months, and then I went out on my own. And that's kind of my entry into into freelancing, really the first time since college. And I went out on my own and kept getting leads, I I kept realizing, you know, yeah, sure, I could pass them on to other people, but wouldn't be nice if I could just kind of get subcontractors and make make a small figure off each of their hours that they build on my behalf. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I, you I scaled up a team of, I believe, subs, or seven subs, including myself. And it worked out for a while. Unfortunately, we kind of put all of our eggs in one basket. We had one decline, and they overnight literally went back to just me. So I started kind of started from scratch, and then a few months later, I decided to just on a whim get a lease on an office building And realized that if I had a lease, I would naturally need to fill the space up with people.
Speaker 3:So I started hiring and, you know, we had a pretty good brick and mortar consultancy. We had, at our peak, 10 people, or 10 employees, not including myself. And we were doing work with, you know, international clients. We had a client in Tokyo. We had clients all over the country.
Speaker 3:And we were doing pretty well. But really, what I always kind of wanted you know, I'm I'm a I'm a loner at heart in a lot of ways. And I I really like the idea of kind of this the looking around the the product companies, or you know, these kind of solopreneur people who are running products, and kind of living really the lifestyle company model, right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And I I realized that that that dream was kind of incompatible with running a consultancy, because, you know, your your people want want you to be there. They want you to be on-site, they want you to be dedicated and and working full days with them in the office and everything. And that was just kind of incompatible with what I wanted. So I ended up promoting somebody internally to replace me, and started building products, my first being Plantscope. And right before that actually, I skipped over this, but I had taken Amy Hoy's 30 by 500 class.
Speaker 3:And that kind of set me straight in terms of how to minimize risk. Because the one thing I didn't have a lot of time, or well the one thing I didn't have a lot of was time. And I couldn't just kind of think, you know, shoot in the dark and build a, you know, create a create a blank Rails app and start coding and and go based on my ideas, and then determine, you know, well, is anyone gonna buy this? How do I get it in their hands? And what will they pay and everything else?
Speaker 3:So Amy's class was instrumental in getting me to realize kind of how people why people buy a software, and and how to go about determining what to build, and how to market it, and everything else. So I did that with PlanScope, and kind of at that point I withdrew from the company, and started working from home, and and moved on and started doing other stuff, which we can talk about.
Speaker 2:Living the dream.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about Amy Hoy for bit. Kyle and I, we're big fans of Amy Hoy. We love her. We think she's great. But there's a part of her message that I kind of struggle with a little bit, and that's I think along the lines of what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:So I understand that not all product ideas are good ideas. And I also can understand this idea of minimizing the time you have between nothing and a profitable idea. Amy has this idea of targeting a community you're already a part of and looking for pain in that community. So if you're a design dev, target the design dev market. If you're a consultant, target the consultant market.
Speaker 1:And that's different than how I've seen folks like Patio11 build his business with AppointmentReminder. He targeted a market that wasn't really his community. And he seems to be doing quite well. So I'd like to just, as someone that's gone through her class and built a business kind of on that philosophy, what's your take on that?
Speaker 3:So that's actually incorrect. The goal is to find an audience that actually pays for things. And that doesn't while I happen to be a freelancer, therefore I built a suite of products for freelancers, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's what I should have done. Really, what the goal is, is to, like I mentioned, find people that pay for things. So, you know, Patrick found people who pay for things.
Speaker 3:You know, people who have businesses and are losing money due to missed appointments.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think, you know, even if you were to ask Patrick, I think he would tell you that teachers notoriously are people who typically do not pay for things. And that's why, you know, don't, he hasn't had a runaway success, or it wasn't easy for him with Bingo Card Creator to really make a lot of money. I think that's why, you know, he's, and I've heard him many times say, it's hard to sell to teachers. And likewise, it's I have from my own personal experience. I've tried to sell Back in the day, I kind of dabbled with selling like a electronic menu system to restaurants.
Speaker 3:Restaurants are really notoriously bad at buying software. I think it's more of a target people who have so I listened to this podcast called The Foolish Adventure. Mhmm. And one of the things that really struck me was, they made this comparison. I was listening, actually, this morning on the way to drop my kid off at school.
Speaker 3:They were talking about the difference between an audience or a demographic and what they call a cash flow. Or really what we would call an audience in thirty five thousand five hundred. And their example was, people who own cats are not an audience. But people who buy cat furniture are an audience. So it's really just a matter of determining a group of people who share a common need and are willing to pay to get that need solved.
Speaker 3:And that usually involves businesses, because businesses tend to better value their own needs, right? Mhmm. So, yeah. I mean one of the like with with the class, we one of the first things a new student will do is is investigate info marketers and you know, people like that to see what we could build for them. 90% of people who take her class probably would not identify themselves as people, the kind of people who would hang out at, you know, the Warrior Forums and other info marketing, you know,
Speaker 1:sites. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I I think that kinda leads into to another question that I had, which was a little while ago you wrote a a fairly well known blog post called Why I Gave Up a Million Dollar Consultancy. And and in that, you said I'm just gonna read a short passage here. I had done my homework and was a 100% confident when writing my first line of code that it would be successful. I had put my ear to the ground and listened to what people who build projects for clients struggled with and flipped their pain points around. So so you you're kind of like, I guess you Planoscope is sort of built for this audience that you're a part of.
Speaker 2:But how did you So how did you actually go ahead and do this? And how did you get 100% confident that PlanScope was going to be successful?
Speaker 3:Sure. So, you know, I I talked earlier about how I dabbled in kind of the failed product stuff before. Right? I was building a you know, I I saw companies like Airbnb who are wildly successful. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if there was an Airbnb but for homemade meals?
Speaker 3:And honestly, I see variations on this pop up all the time.
Speaker 1:The idea was Airbnb for homemade meals?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, you know, if if you wanna find like in like so I live in the suburbs of Southeastern Virginia, and there's really no good Thai or Indian food anywhere.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But I I see, like, you know, ethnic Indian families, and therefore I imagine that they must have some really awesome homey meals. So I I thought, you know, wouldn't it be cool if if I could go and I could go and have dinner with a family from India or I could go and have dinner with some people who are really into the paleo diet. So it's kind of like a, you know,
Speaker 1:yeah, I love this idea. It's making me hungry.
Speaker 3:So, you know, had this, what I thought was a grand idea, I, honestly, no one had ever asked for it. No one had ever said that this was a pain point of theirs. And things like this can work, it's just more of a lotto ticket. Mhmm. Because you really need to have the stars aligned and you usually need to have a lot of money behind you to promote it and get the, you know, get it.
Speaker 3:I mean, the problem with any marketplace is, okay, so you have, let's say you have a lot of providers, well then you need to make sure that there are people who are willing to eat their food, you know, in the same geographic area as them at the right time.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You know, if you list yourself as having a delicious authentic Indian meal coming up next Friday, and no one buys it, well, chances are you're not gonna come back because you had a really bad first run experience. Yeah, so. Yeah, so it was just a lot of things I just, I wasn't even thinking about the business end of things. I thought about the cool end of things, frankly.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:the difference with with something like PlanScope was, what I did, and this comes straight out of the 30 I mean none of this is original to me, just comes out of Amy's playbook really. Is I just started going through internet forums that freelancers and consultants hung out at. And the overarching theme is they keep talking about the same stuff over and over and over. Like if you go back in time and you look at threads, there's a small group of consistent threads that keep coming up again and again. And all I really did is I looked okay, so what are people complaining about?
Speaker 3:And I saw that people were complaining about, you know, their clients being very unclear about how something as simple as billing for time works. Or, you know, staying transparent with their clients and getting their clients off their backs and not being micromanaged. And, you know, the second thing, honestly, that they complained about a lot was how to how to charge more. So really, I mean, those were, if you look at some of the products I've done, I mean, stemmed directly from my experience, applied on top of the problems that I saw a lot of people having. So I knew this was an audience that had these needs.
Speaker 3:They're all business owners. They all have businesses of themselves. And most of them are used to paying for like a FreshBooks or a Harvest or something. You know, the idea of paying for software isn't foreign to them. So yeah, I mean I was very confident.
Speaker 3:And I also, I didn't make the mistake of doing this kind of stealth whatever. Know, I built up a list, I advertised constantly to that list, or I promoted what I was doing to that list. I pretty much had a you know, twenty, thirty people who said, hey, you know, if this is all all you're telling me, if this is pretty much what you're telling me it is, you've got my business. So there was very little risk during development.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So were you kind of like did you have like an ongoing dialogue with a few sort of select customers and that helped them help their or use their input to help shape the product? Or were you kind of taking everybody's, you know, pain as a whole and sort of coming up with your own solutions for it?
Speaker 3:So I kind of already knew the core pain points that they all had. And most who had signed up for the announcement list came because they had those pain points. But one of the things that I really did was I started emailing once a week or twice or once every two weeks. And just letting people know what I was doing and kinda what I was thinking. I I wasn't asking for people to dictate features.
Speaker 3:I was asking really to start conversations with people. So I would send out a mailing to my list, which at our peak When I launched, I think there were 300 and something people on that list. And you know, I just started emailing them about what I was doing and kind of what I was thinking and why I was thinking that. And I would say, you know, respond to this email and let me know what you think. What what or I'd ask them a targeted because that's very open ended.
Speaker 3:So I would usually ask them something like, you know, what one problem related to x have you faced with your business? You know, reply to this email and let me know. And so I really had a kind of an ongoing conversation while developing with my future customer base.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if I can back up just a little bit and focus on how did you choose that market in the first place? So, you know, you went to Amy's class and you had this idea for Airbnb for homemade meals. And then, you know, it became apparent that that wasn't a good idea. In between that, realizing your initial idea wasn't very good and choosing to go after this market, how did you choose that that was the market you're going to go after?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean so the obvious takeaway would be Brendan's a freelancer, therefore or a consultant. Therefore, he's gonna build things for consultants. The real reason, was during the class, we kind of do simulated kinda like, you know, our homework would be go and use this as an audience. Here's some watering holes as we call them, which are just places that this audience hangs out.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Go and go and do some research. Or, you know, as in thirty five thousand five hundred it's called safari ing. So, you know, I would one of these signed things for me was freelancers. So I was like okay, I'll go research freelancers. So it just kind of inertia led me to kind of sticking with it.
Speaker 3:I'd always known having run a consultant company, which kinda puts you in the position of being both a provider and a client because really I am the client for my employees. And so I kind of knew the frustrations that a lot of my clients had in hiring people. So I saw both sides and I kind of realized what deficiencies there were currently with the existing software. And you know, I tried running in running my company, you know, all these different project management tools. And nothing really aligned with the problems that I kept running into that were costing me money or costing me frustration or or whatever else.
Speaker 1:And did you so was this something you really realized yourself as you're doing this research and you kind of realized, you know what, like, I understand some of these root problems from my personal experience, And now I can see that there's other folks that have this as well. Was that something you realized as you were doing the research, Oh, this is a big deal. And maybe if you did notice that during the research, why hadn't you maybe thought of it before when you had your original idea for the homemade meals? Why had you missed this idea of serving freelancers?
Speaker 3:Well, I think initially I wanted to do something more or less groundbreaking, right? And creating a project management tool in my mind at the time wasn't anything remarkable. Now, I think considering that I'm getting testimonials from people saying that I'm helping their business dramatically, that to me is a lot more groundbreaking than hooking people up with really good and neat food. And so I'm actually I've definitely changed course in my understanding since then. But, yeah, I mean, I didn't really, I never put, I never really fully realized the mistake of thinking that because I think it's a great idea, or worse, the people I'm friends with say, yeah, that's a great idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, and getting using that as validation is completely incorrect. I mean, actually, I so when I started selling my book, before the book was even done, I was collecting presales. Because I knew that getting people on a list versus getting them to pay is dramatic even if it's just a dollar, is dramatically different. So getting that sort of upfront payment verification, to me at least, was not to me at least, I think in general, is a very, is a much better way of ensuring that you've got, you're on the right track than getting people to commit who happen to be your friends.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna Yeah,
Speaker 3:when a friend
Speaker 2:asks you, you know, I have this idea, would you pay for it? It's really easy to say, sure, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're not gonna say it sucks. I mean they're your friend, right? Like, you don't make them feel bad, even though you're probably gonna save hundreds of hours of their life they can get back. So, you know. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And maybe just one more thing on this. You know, if there's someone kind of sitting at home right now listening, and I think a lot of people who have a desire to build products, they're trying to think, like, what do I build? Like, what would be a good idea? Which is why sometimes I think we do grab on to those kind of that initial cool idea because we're, you know, it's late at night and, you know, we're hungry for Indian food and there's nowhere to go. And then we go, Oh, wouldn't it be great if there was a I could just go and get some Indian food?
Speaker 1:What are some things do you think people can do that they're looking for that idea to get started or they're looking for that market to get started?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think, I mean, everything to me boils down to a risk reward ratio, right? So the reward of a successful, of Airbnb being successful to the founders is gonna be, is far and above, exponentially bigger than PlanetScope will ever be. And I know that. But I also know that, you know, they they call it the startup lotto for a reason.
Speaker 3:Right? Like for every Airbnb, there's a thousand failures.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I've got a wife, I've got kids, I've got a house. I just don't have time to play roulette. Right? Mhmm. So I think if if you want to go in low risk, and meaning you want to build something that you have a fairly certain chance of being successful with it.
Speaker 3:I think that involves, first off, coming up with a b to b product. Consumers are are hard to sell to, and it's usually a winner takes all in a market. Like there's one social network, Facebook, that everyone uses. It's very hard to have a lot of competition in in the space. And secondly, businesses tend to, value things a lot more than consumers because it's literally costing them money to not have something like what you're proposing.
Speaker 3:And third, to minimize that sort of risk, and this is the biggest, is I think that just means listening to what people who have a financial interest are complaining about. Whether that be, you know, oh, I'm losing money because when my appointment doesn't show up, I have a half hour of dead time that I could have been making $50 off of, now I'm making zero. You know, it's an opportunity cost for them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So, you know, that's what Patrick's done. With me, it's more, I'm going through, I'm losing, not only am I losing, or I'm risking the, I'm risking the fact that my client might get frustrated about the fact that they don't really know how commissioning out work works, and that could keep me from having a happy client, which could mean less repeat work from them or less referrals. So it's opportunity cost. And secondly, it's saving a business from like, you know, a consulting business from, or a freelancer from needing to pick up calls during dinner time when they're trying to reclaim their life and not work from a client who wants to know where are we, how are we doing, much or what's my budget look like. That's pain killing, right?
Speaker 3:That's a pain that a lot of freelancers have. So I knew going into it that I kind of had, I was selling to people who have a financial interest in the outcome that the software provides or doesn't provide. And they've told me, not directly, but they've told others, and they've vocalized it online, that this was a huge issue for them. So I just kind of used that as validation. And then when I started selling it, I never really focused on the features, because the features are immaterial.
Speaker 3:I focused on what are the end benefits gonna be? So if you use PlanScope, what's tomorrow gonna look like for you? And to do that I kind of need to remind them what today looks like, which is clients pestering you about money and cringing after sending an invoice and hoping that you don't get a call from a client asking, you know, hey, where did all this money get spent? So kind of by painting that picture of today, and then really just showing, well what tomorrow didn't look like that for you? That's how I sold before I even, I had written really any, or that's how I built out my list without having built any software yet.
Speaker 3:And so that was kind of my strategy for that product and every product since.
Speaker 1:Man, I'm glad Brendan came on the show. We actually have him back next week as well, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, thank him on Twitter Brennan Dunn. We would also appreciate your feedback. You can get us on Twitter at ProductPeopleTV.
Speaker 1:Tell us what you like about the show. Tell us what you don't like too. And we'll use that feedback for future episodes. See you soon.
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