Episode 12
· 44:40
Hey, product people. We have a great show coming up. It's part two with Brennan Dunn, he'll talk about tactics like building an email list and how to have paying customers lined up right when you launch. But first, we have a big announcement. Thanks to you, our listeners, this show has grown and grown and grown.
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Speaker 2:So what I'm kind of wondering is how kind of like how crucial do you think it is for you you to position your app as being different from everything else out there? Like, how has how has that helped plan scope?
Speaker 3:Good question. So really, what I haven't done intentionally is I haven't started saying that I'm a sexier project management tool or whatever. I don't even, I don't care that it's project management tool. Most of my users don't care. They want that outcome.
Speaker 3:And so I just, I really try to market it as a tool that produces that outcome. And doing that allowed me to kind of build it with this blank slate of, okay, don't care what other PM software has as features because I know what problems they have, you know, my customers have, and I know how to inverse these problems, and realize what features end up needing to be built in order to realize that. So instead of saying, you know, every PM app out there has collaboration tools, and this and that, and whatever else. I just really had, I started with this kind of blank slate of, let's just focus on what problems people have, and if I want problem X to go away, what needs to be built to kind of bridge that? And so that's really what I did, and the sales copy and everything else kind of just flowed from, like if you go to the features page, it's not, it's more of a, almost like a story, I think.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah.
Speaker 3:It's done intentionally that way. Because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to portray this, if this resonates with you, if this is the problem you have today, this software will make tomorrow look like this for you. So instead of just listing out a bunch of, you know, technical features, which, you know, as an engineer, that's, it's hard to do that, because I wanna list out features. I wanna talk about how, you know, the fact that I made it so people can reply to comment notifications emails from their inbox, and it'll get filed and Plantscope will intercept that email and everything. That's cool to me, and I want to write about that.
Speaker 3:I want to promote that I've done that. But it's something that, it's not a direct part of that story, so I've intentionally kind of not included that.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah, it's kind of a narrow focus on like one part, Probably one of the most challenging parts of consulting, which is keeping a client informed about budget and scope. And it's kind of you're not really, you know, saying anything about file sharing or or things like that, typically where, you know, the project management apps just get into a whose feature list is longer type thing. You're just focusing on this one problem that any freelancer who reads, you know, your lead in sentence here about, PlanScope helps you and your clients stay on top of the budget and scope of your project. Like, that'll immediately resonate with anyone who's ever done freelance work.
Speaker 2:So, it's kind of interesting that you've, you know, focused on this one thing and really, like you said, told a story around it rather than explain what the software does specifically. Like, I don't it you don't really say how you do it. You just kind of say what the end goal is. And to me, that's kind of what makes Plantscope really stand out from from a lot of other PM sort of solutions. Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, again, I'm not, that's kind of the goal. I mean, people ask me, like, can I use this at my startup? And my response is typically, theoretically, yes, but you probably should, here are some tools you should use probably instead. And I intentionally don't want to just load it with so much stuff that it works on every possible, in every possible situation, because then I can, then it won't have a story anymore. Then it won't have, then it won't be so singularly focused on doing one thing really well.
Speaker 3:That it'll actually end up hurting the people that I originally built it to help.
Speaker 4:So if you decided to go after this market you said, Okay, I'm going to you did your research and you were in some forums it sounds like and you saw that there was some reoccurring pain and then you decided to build it. How did you get people to care? How did you get people to notice it? How did you build you started with zero customers. How did you get people to even know that this existed and then get them to use it?
Speaker 3:So my entire marketing strategy, really even to this day, is marketing through education. So knew the audience that I wanted to attract. And I knew what problems they had. So I just started really blogging about my thoughts on those problems and everything. And I would get my blog posts in front of the audience I was intending to get.
Speaker 3:So if, case in point, let's say I'm reading a forum and people are, again, complaining about you know, transparency with their clients or something. I would then just say, hey, you know, I would include myself. I wouldn't just throw in a link. I would say, great question, this is something that, you know, I've been thinking about for a while, and I'd on for a paragraph or two, and then I'd say, I happened to write about this on my blog recently, and I'd link back to my blog. And this doesn't scale well, but it's good initially.
Speaker 3:And then all of my blog posts would always have a call to action. I would make sure that I made it so if people, you know, I knew they were coming because they had read, they were wanting to read a post on being more transparent with their clients. So my call to action would just be something like, you know, would you like to be more transparent with your clients? If so, you might be interested in this project I'm working on. Click here to be the first to be notified when it's available.
Speaker 3:And so that was kind of my initial strategy and that's what kind of Steam basically snowballed, plans to open new existence.
Speaker 4:Mhmm, and so you were writing these posts and engaging with the community while you were building the actual product.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because people aren't, I mean no one's buying, people don't buy software to buy software. People buy software to make their lives better somehow. So a blog post is equally able, sometimes even more able, to do that than a piece of software. So all I really had to do is jump on the thread of how do I help people make their lives as consultants better? And I would just, you know, knock out blog posts and content marketing, or content around that.
Speaker 3:Jump into people's conversations, talk with them about it, engage with them, and really build up this kind of audience of people who, you know, wanted to be a part of that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And can you give me a sense, you know, you published your first post. You started building this product, you published your first post on planscope.io. What kind of traffic did you get on that first post?
Speaker 3:I mean it was maybe back then I was blogging on Tumblr, so I don't even think a lot of those articles even made it. But, you know, I probably got, I don't know, a few thousand total over the months I was developing Planscope. And like I mentioned, I had 300 plus people on that list by the time Planscope was ready. So, yeah, I mean I would just kinda balance. What was really helpful about it was when I could remove myself from the editor and write about the problems that I was tackling with Plantscope, it kind of let me level myself again.
Speaker 3:I I could get I got out of the weeds, I got out of the code, and I could kind of center myself again on, okay, why am I doing this? What is the is the desired outcome? It let it was almost like a a meditation of sort, but it it helped me build up that initial customer base.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so how long did it take you to build that list of 300?
Speaker 3:So I started Planoscope, wanna say October or November. Not 2012, but 2011. And I had launched it at Lastconf in February. So about four months.
Speaker 2:Okay. And was that primarily through your blogging? Like, how did you manage to build a list of of the 300 people?
Speaker 3:Blogging, I had at at that time, I had, like, 300 Twitter followers. So it wasn't really
Speaker 2:Got every one of them to sign up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I really have a huge audience there. But, I mean, the thing is, I didn't ask people to join this list and let it go silent for four months. I kept up a dialogue, and I encouraged people to, you know, if they knew people who also share this problem, because freelancers know freelancers, right? Don't have specific tracking data on that, but I know that a lot of the growth was probably due to people spreading the word around their circles.
Speaker 4:And were you working full time? So that four months, were you working full time on building PlanScope or were you juggling consulting at the same time?
Speaker 3:Well, at that point, I was still running my consultancy, so the benefit of that was I didn't really need to worry about making money, because I had other people working for me. And I, but I still had to run the company, so I was still always distracted, but I was more or less full time for four months working weekends and neglecting the family and everything else.
Speaker 4:So that was a hard four months.
Speaker 3:It was grueling, but my goal was I really wanted to see my, I wanted to get these payment notifications from Stripe. I mean, really wanted to sell this. I really wanted to get it out there and get people doing more than just join my announcement list. I wanted to verify it the best way possible. So when I launched it wasn't as full featured as, anywhere near as full featured as it is today.
Speaker 3:But it had just enough to solve a few core problems that this audience shared, and that's all it needed. And that was it.
Speaker 2:And so how long after you launched was it until you saw that first Stripe payment?
Speaker 3:Everyone had a month trial, but I mean, thirty days or a month after announcing it, payments were coming in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you pretty much had people ready ready to use it because you had built up this list and Yep. Kind of built up excitement about the product. Yeah?
Speaker 3:Exactly. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Definitely beats launching in the dark and hoping that people somehow It stumble upon
Speaker 3:does. Again, I don't I don't like that that amount of risk. I don't wanna be in the game where I'm crossing my fingers hoping that someone somewhere finds this valuable enough to go out and get out their credit card and pay for it.
Speaker 4:And what was that initial launch like? So you said you had How many people signed up when you launched, and then how many of those converted to paying once the thirty month trial Sorry, the thirty day trial was over?
Speaker 3:I don't remember exact I know I had 24, I wanna say, paying customers, so about 10% maybe. Although it's funny, I still, just last week, somebody, back then, I mean, was 50 off permanently from a baseline price of $12 so I got like a new customer last week, it was $6 and I was like, what? And then I realized it was, you know, it's still kind of, the gaps trickled in, but immediately, I wanna say probably about 100 people from that list ended up getting a trial, and about a quarter of them ended up going paid.
Speaker 4:Wow. So you had about 24 paying customers shortly after launch.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, you could say Yeah. I mean, yeah. Just We weren't think that paying customers yet, but a month later after their trial expired, they were.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I just think it's neat to actually see what are the real numbers. What should people's expectations be? In your case, that's interesting. The four months to build, you build up a list of 300, 100, sign up for a trial, and about twenty, twenty five of those folks actually start paying you.
Speaker 2:So this kind of like leads me to another question that I always have for other folks who run SaaS apps, which is like now that you've been doing this for for about a year, I guess, What what sorts of like metrics do you track and what like how do you do your analytics? Do you use pre built software for that or do you kind of roll your own analytics or sort of do ad hoc reporting? Because I I know that like when I talk to like I I have a SaaS product I run on the side and then other folks I talk to as well. It's people track different things like churn and retention and they measure it in different ways. So I'd be curious to to know what are your key metrics that you keep track of, and technically, do you do it?
Speaker 3:Sure. So I use off the shelf stuff as much as possible. So I'm using Intercom to just kinda see who signs up, how often they they log in, things like that. Mhmm. That just gives me general I I send over data points that I care about.
Speaker 3:And I can segment people and and send them messages. Like when we rolled out international currency support, I just segmented everyone who was not in The US and sent them an email that way. So that that was really helpful. Okay. For revenue tracking and general event stuff, I'm using Kissmetrics.
Speaker 3:I love Kissmetrics revenue graph. They show you churn, how that churn affects, or what that churn, or given given the income coming in and your churn, what's what's the lifetime value of a given cost, of your average customer?
Speaker 2:Does plug into Stripe directly, or do you have to?
Speaker 3:No, you just, so on the hook on the app side that sends off the email receipt whenever a charge happens, I just, when I send out that email, I just register the amount and who was charged with Kiss. And Okay. It does that all. What's cool about it is I can actually, because Kiss Metrics tracks where they came from and everything initially, I can see like we integrate with Harvest and Harvest put us on their add ons page. So I can see how much money has been made from people that came from that add ons page.
Speaker 2:Right. Okay.
Speaker 3:It's pretty easy to do that. So Kissmetrics is great. I've just started using DigMyData, which is just kind of like a projections app.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was using them for a while. Projections are really handy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is. And I've also started doing The only bit of custom reporting code I've written is something that will just tap into Stripe and find all the upcoming charges for the next thirty days. So I can kinda see and I also apply my given trial conversion rate to that. So I can kinda see, you know, what's February gonna look like? Given what I have now.
Speaker 3:Given the trials that we've had sign up. So that's really the only thing I've written custom and that's a very like something that's maybe fifteen minutes on. Very very bad code, but it works and only I see it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And how much business have you had from integrations like Harvest?
Speaker 3:So I'm talking to So we've integrated or I've integrated with quite a few different invoicing tools. Harvest is the only one that I have on who has me on their add ons page. But I've had a lot of people Googling around for like, you know, FreshBooks project management, and I show up. I'm now working on doing now that we're getting you know, when you're nobody and you have 30 customers or something, it's hard to go to someone like a multi million dollar company like Harvest and Bean and asking, hey can you do a cross promo for us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But once you're more, you know, once you start getting more exposure and everything, it, you know, I've had a few, I won't name him, but two of the, it's funny, two of the people that we integrate with, both independently within the last month, reached out to me saying that they wanna find a way to mutually benefit both of our audiences, which happen to be mutual customers of both of ours. So that could mean me promoting them to my list and then promoting us to their bigger lists.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think there's a point probably with that that sort of cross promotion where you reach kind of like a a critical inertia where, you know, getting those first few people on board is probably a little bit difficult. But once you've got a couple, then their competitors see them on your site and they kind of feel like maybe they're missing out. So I imagine like once you've got a couple, the rest kind of gradually trickle in as well. Like you said, reaching out to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So that's I mean honestly, majority of our growth hasn't been through integrations. It's just been I mean that helps, but it's really a value add once people because most of our customers have used one of the products we integrate with anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Part the onboarding is figuring that out.
Speaker 4:So most of your customers are still coming to you just from what you've been doing, writing blog posts, having an email sign up form. Is there anything else kind of significant on the marketing side?
Speaker 3:So I actually kind of discovered when I wrote my book. It was kind of strange. So I wrote the book because at the time, PlanScope was maybe doing a thousand a month or something, and it wasn't gonna, you know, it wasn't paying all of my bills anytime soon.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I I wanted I wanted more transactional revenue that could sustain me, could keep me in the product business self sufficient. So I did this book, and the book was complimentary in the sense that it's targeting the same exact audience as Plantscope. One thing I discovered after that was, wow, a lot of people who read my book are ending up signing up for Plantscope. And what I quickly discovered is, books or info products that are, like my book, are largely impulse buys. Getting people to switch and ditch whatever PM software they have now is pretty tough.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So the book was more of a, kind of almost like a gateway drug into me and my philosophy towards consulting. Then a lot of people who would read the book, you know, would not promote it outright, but I would mention like, you know, oh this is, I built PlanScope for much the same reasons that I'm telling you to do this. And I ended up getting a lot of people subscribing to PlanScope who read my book. So I started thinking like, wow, this is interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I took that even further, and I started, I had a, I built up a weekly newsletter for my people who bought my book. And I'm just sending out free kind of educational, no strings attached content each week, when now we're at, I think 3,500 people who I show up in their inbox each Tuesday.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And a lot of them, there's almost like this progression of they join my newsletter, a few weeks later they might buy my book, and then after that they might subscribe to Plantscope. And then I quickly realized, and this is largely after reading Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, I was like, wow, this is a low barrier of entry way of getting potential new customers for PlanScoping My Book and everything else. So it actually just started within the last few weeks, driving paid traffic to get people on my newsletter. Yeah. Get them into my little world, and you know, over time, deliver value to them consistently week by week, which then gets them to realize, okay, this guy aligns well with the problems I face, and there's something that I like about what he's saying.
Speaker 3:I might like his project management tool for that, because of that same reason. Yeah. So that's really my, that's really been helping more than I ever thought. So I'm getting a lot of people who, you know, go through that avenue. I'm also getting about a quarter of signups coming organically, so people Googling around for whatever and finding me and signing up that way.
Speaker 3:So really I've just started dabbling in, I guess, paid acquisition, but I wouldn't I think it's almost suicide to say, I'm gonna run a PPC ad and send them to buy my book, or buy Plantscope or something, because for all they know, like who am I, why is my book any good, why is my software any good, but getting them into a mailing list or newsletter, which over time I can really qualify people by, if they like what I'm gonna say, they're gonna keep getting what I'm saying. Otherwise, they're gonna unsubscribe. And that's kind of been my new goal, or my new tactic, I think.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And do you think you could have written a book first before building PlanScope?
Speaker 3:If I could start over, I would
Speaker 4:have. Interesting.
Speaker 3:That would have I had no audience, really. I mean, I had my 300 announcement people, but I didn't have an audience of people who looked at me as an authority on consulting. Now I have that audience who looks at me as influential or as an authority in freelancing and consulting, makes it so when I have a new product or promote one of my products, that promotion falls on receptive ears.
Speaker 4:Yeah, because in some ways a book could be like an MVP. Does content solve a useful problem for people? And then, could do what sorry, now I'm losing his name, bootstrapping design. Jared? Is that
Speaker 3:his name?
Speaker 2:Jared, yeah.
Speaker 4:Started with a book, but now he's building an app called Cascade, is that right? Yeah, I guess in some ways that was his path. He wrote a book that was kind of MVP for now the product that he's going to build.
Speaker 3:People like Nathan Barrier doing that, a lot of people, I mean again, when you finally realize that people don't buy software, they buy outcomes.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You realize that software is a medium, books are a medium, video courses are a medium. I mean, are all just different mediums of achieving a goal, or achieving some outcome. So, you know, the book is an easier way of getting to a degree of achievement for the outcome I was hoping for. And it would have been a far easier first step, I think.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I love how you keep bringing back this idea of people don't buy your product, they buy outcomes. Sounds like that was something that you were pretty disciplined in reminding yourself throughout this whole process.
Speaker 3:Definitely. I mean, again, when you get into the quicksand of being obsessed with features and code and everything else, it becomes very easy to write code for its own sake and not and start to deviate from the the path that you should be on, which is making making tomorrow a little brighter for your customer. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it sounds like, you know, how you said you you had the your email list and you you were reaching out to customers and and starting discussions with them, and you had those, blog posts, like, basically you would come up for air and kind of meditate back, on sort of the big picture thing. It sounds like those are some of the some of the ways that you kind of did that without like to keep yourself from just getting lost in the code kind of thing.
Speaker 3:That's right. Yeah. That's definitely right.
Speaker 4:Well, I'd like to start winding down here, but I think next I'd like to know how much money have you made so far? Are you comfortable sharing a few revenue numbers?
Speaker 3:It's all on my blog, so yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, let's start with Planscope. What's been the revenue so far?
Speaker 3:I just hit 6,000 a month. So I don't know what the total the total if you go to my you can see what the total is up to, what, a month and a half ago.
Speaker 2:If you That's
Speaker 3:look my blog, I did like an annual report, end of year thing, where I crunched the numbers. But yeah, Plantscope's doing well. My workshop, I So one of the things that I learned, the workshop just kind of evolved from me talking with my customers who have bought my book. Mhmm. And a small percentage of them were saying, Hey, you know, I wanna grow, I wanna go beyond myself.
Speaker 3:I know you did the consultancy thing. I have some questions, can you answer them for me? And I would answer them, and I kept doing this over and over and over. And I kinda realized, wow, there's a lot of people who have this need to wanna know how build up a consulting company. So instead of me going to internet forums and finding this independently, I was getting this first hand from people who have historically already paid me something.
Speaker 3:So I kind of had a one up in that regard, and so I put together a workshop, a two day kind of intensive workshop. And the price point on that is $1,200 for a seat. So it's significantly higher than the book. And what that's done is it's kind of made it so, you know, I could've just sold a book and made $49 off now 2,000 something people who have bought my book. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But a percentage of them have increased their customer LTV, or lifetime value, by going and getting a Plantscope account, or registering for my workshop. So I, now I have a lot of customers in the 4 figure LTV, who could've just been a $50 customer. But I'm providing additional value to people who want that additional value, who wanna grow more. And so I've done the workshop, you know, if I sell that out, that's, well the total revenue's 30,000. I've actually, Obi Fernandez of Hash Rocket is co teaching it with me.
Speaker 3:I'm not keeping all of that. So there's that, and then the book sells consistently, you know, a few thousand a month. It's kinda tapered off, but it's still, it's never been, I wanna say below 2,000 for a month. My upcoming book, which I've started presales with, gets released middle of next month, and that's already done, I think, 7,000 presales. Wow.
Speaker 3:So yeah, mean, again, it's validation. The presales came from people who already know I know how to ship, right? I've already launched a book. I've put together a workshop that people rave about. I built a plan scope, you know, and keep it maintained.
Speaker 3:You know, the risk of, if I pay this, am I gonna get anything in return, is minimal. So I'm offering a pretty good discount. And yeah, I mean, that's been great validation for that. So, overall, I've been doing in the neighborhood of, I wanna say, probably 20 to 30,000 a month, combined. And so it's definitely been nice.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, you're starting to really sell me on this idea of focusing on one kind of community of people and then getting to know their needs. Then because I can see you're just tracking with this one group and I can see how one phase kind of goes into the next. And I think for me, my problem is I'm a bit of a spaz and I'm a member of a lot of different communities and a lot of different places. And it seems like there is a lot of benefit for you to kind of choose this one group of people, really get to know them.
Speaker 4:And I can see each time you're helping them out. So when you're just in the forums, you're just helping them out the best you can and you keep going. This group of people that you've helped just keeps growing.
Speaker 3:Right. I mean, the goal is I don't consider myself a total authority on all things consulting. But I know for a fact that for a percentage of people I'm at least a little bit ahead of them when it comes to consulting. And there's a lot of freelancers and consultants out there. So well, all I'm really doing I'm sorry, I think that's my kid.
Speaker 4:No, it's okay.
Speaker 3:All I'm really doing is just, you know, providing value in the sense of, you you don't need to go Like, the whole pitch for my workshop, for instance, is I've lost more than $100,000 in screw ups when running my company. Here's what you can avoid and how to avoid it, and this is just, you know, this is I know what you want tomorrow to be, because I've been there. I know what it would mean if you can work less, charge more, what that means for your family life, and what that means for your health and everything else. And I always position things in that way. And also, another thing that works really well is, you know, stand behind everything.
Speaker 3:I've, I've publicly said, if you don't like it, I'm not gonna charge you for it. And that's helped a lot too. So, yeah, find something you're good at, that you're an authority at, and realize you don't need to be, like one of the biggest misconceptions I think is people say, well I can't teach anyone, because I'm not some pro Ruby developer, right? I'm not some like, well known, asked to speak at every conference developer. But the fact is, it's usually easier to learn from somebody who's more recently been where you are now, or been where you were.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah. And learning from them, and saving them time. Because I'm targeting people who have, who put a premium on their time. Can you probably Google for a few days or a week, and find a lot of the info I talk about in my book?
Speaker 3:Sure. But, if you value your time, and some people will never value their time, but I'm targeting people that do. And I'm doing the research for them, I'm doing the interviews, I'm doing all that work, which is, you know, benefiting benefiting a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's an interesting point talking about like not having to be an absolute expert before diving into creating some kind of info product. There's a if the launchcoach.com is a is a good resource that kind of like walks you through the steps to creating an info product. And one of the main points that he talks about at first is exactly that. Like, you don't you shouldn't see that as a barrier just because you don't know everything about a certain subject.
Speaker 2:He says, you know, you can rate expertise on a scale of one to 10. And even if you're only a six on a subject, well, you can still provide a lot of value to everybody's that's still at one to five. Yep. And if you were to kinda graph out the number of people in each one of those, kinda buckets, there's probably more people in the one to five group anyway than the six to 10. So even if you're, you know, not the, like, the best of the best in that particular area, there's still a lot of people out there that you can help even with, like, you know, just above amateur knowledge kind of.
Speaker 3:Or you can, conversely, you can do the research for them. I mean, you can do the interviews, research all the, you know, spend a lot of time so they don't need to spend the time and and tell them, I'm saving you time by doing the research for you. And you can, on one hand, you can spend forty hours researching this topic. Or you can pay me $40 and I've done that for you.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And I'm sure that, and you've probably found this as well too, that as you build products and talk with your customers, you kind of learn more about the topic yourself because you're So more immersed in it even if you're only a five when you dive in, by talking with your customers and figuring out what problems they have and how you can solve them, you kind of grow your own inherent knowledge of the subject as well.
Speaker 3:I mean, with my mailing list for instance, I have an auto responder for a few days out that asks people point blank, what one problem is keeping your business from growing? Reply to this email and let me know. And I get maybe, I'm getting about 30 to 40 sign ups a day on that, and maybe five or six people respond to that each day. And that is just, I mean, that's gold. I mean, that's just data I can use, research, and see, you know, is there a critical mass on any particular topic?
Speaker 3:Use that to drive, to better the products I have, or even come up with new products.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Man, that's really good stuff. Brendan, you've been really generous with your time. I want to be able to let you go. But maybe to end, what is the title of your new book?
Speaker 4:What's the new book you're working on?
Speaker 3:So the new book is, again, part, the stuff that organically emerged from conversations with my customers. But the new book is all about, there's a lot of data out there and a lot of stuff on how to, if you have a product site, right? Like how to optimize that for conversions, and get customers to your product. And this is basically taking a lot of those same principles, but applying it directly to a consulting sales website. So instead of the typical, you know, freelancer site about, you know, I will bring your idea to life, and a bunch of vague abstractions, and here I am, I like snowboarding, and blah blah blah.
Speaker 3:Like, I mean, to the average client, that's not speaking to their needs. That's not, you know, if they're looking to get more customers in their business, you're probably not resonating with them. So the goal of the book is to just, what I've done is I've talked to a lot of people, I've interviewed a lot of different really influential people in this space, and used things that have worked for me. And I basically just go at it and say, you know, start to finish, here's how you put a lot of your business development and customer acquisition, and get your website to do most of that legwork for you. So a lot of it is, you know, what I call carrots.
Speaker 3:How do you get, know, free e books, or white papers, or whatever, into the hands of a prospective client. Get them to kind of what people are doing now with me. They get them on my newsletter, and they, any trust barriers they might put up slowly get eroded as they realize, you know, I know what I'm talking about, and I can provide value to them, and if I don't, they're gonna jump ship. And it's doing that same thing, but with consulting clients, getting people in the door, and building up an audience, a passionate audience of people who, even if they're not your direct client, will refer people to you. And I mean that's how, when I grew my business, I mean, we had to spend, I mean, my payroll alone was $100,000 a month.
Speaker 3:I couldn't just wait for referrals. I couldn't wait for people to come to me. I needed to make more than that each month to pay my bills. Mhmm. So it's really just applying a lot of that, the lessons I learned doing that.
Speaker 3:And getting it in the hands of the app, because let's face it, a lot of freelancers don't, they're more technicians than they are business owners. I fix that. I wanna get, I wanna make more of these people who quit their job as a developer and go out freelance developing, I wanna get them armed with everything they need to know that I learned the hard way on how to build a proper sustainable business around themselves. That's kind of what the next book's about.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And just from my own experience, I think, Brendan, I'm on your list right now just because I was curious. And I think you send one of the best newsletters of that kind. It always seems like it's actually from a person. And also the way that you've styled it, I think, really works for me for some reason.
Speaker 4:Some people over style their email newsletters and make it look too brandy, too much images and logos. But I think other people under style it and maybe make it look like plain text, 12 pixel font size or whatever. And yours is really quite readable but seems personal at the same time.
Speaker 3:Thanks.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Why don't we end right there? Brennan, where can people find you on the web and how can they sign up for this email list we've been talking about?
Speaker 3:So the email list is at freelancersweekly dot com. So freelancers, that's plural, weekly dot com. Actually if you sign up there, the thank you page has a link to just about everything I've done. So I, just to quickly recap, I have Planscope, which is at planscope.io.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I have my first book, which is wyourfreelancingrate.com. My second book doesn't have a formal domain yet, but it's wyourfreelancingrate.com/bblueprint. And I also have a weekly podcast that me and Eric Davis host called The Business of Freelancing.
Speaker 4:Oh, didn't know that. Yep. I'm gonna have Yeah, to check that
Speaker 3:it's pretty much just the nothing technical. It's just focused on the business side of freelancing. So we don't talk about design or development or any of that stuff. So I've got that. And lastly I have the master class or the workshop.
Speaker 3:That's at buildaconsultancy.com. But again, if you sign up for my newsletter, you can unsubscribe immediately, but it's all on the thank you page. There's links to it all.
Speaker 4:Brendan, thanks so much for being on the show. There is a lot of stuff here that even for me, I've been thinking about. So thanks for coming on, and we'd love to have you back sometime.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Thank you, Justin and Kyle.
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