The Startup Espresso Podcast

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?

 

🐼

Well, Florin, definitely today we’re not grinding specialty coffee because since it’s a crisis, we don’t have money anymore for specialty coffee.

 

🐿

Yeah, we’re out of it.

 

🐼

So if in the previous episodes we were actually grinding specialty coffee before episodes, today we grind it just regular coffee.

 

🐿

We couldn’t even grind coffee. So if you’re going to be fully transparent here, unlike other people from the cyber world, we’re going to say that we just actually got ourselves a cup of coffee down at the corner and it cost almost $1.

 

🐼

And this is not because we are running out of money, but because during a crisis.

 

🐿

We wanted to support the local entrepreneurs.

 

🐼

And you pay attention to your spending or your costs. Now, Florin, I think it’s worth discussing in this episode a little bit. If you’re a startup nowadays during these times, what are you do? Are there some advice? I don’t know. Do you, for example, how to say, put your startup on autopilot? You make sure that your ads budgets are having access to your credit card and you go on the beach and you relax and you stay away of all the problems until the crisis is over.

 

🐿

I know that we keep joking, so as the episode dropped, we kept joking and stuff, but that’s a very good question, the one about autopilot. So while in usual and normal times you can leave things on autopilot and do other things, you can no longer do that during the crisis because all of your metrics are wrong. Nothing that you repeated last month can be repeated this month, and it won’t be able to be repeated next month, and you can’t actually repeat things from one week to the other. So you got to keep improving, keep implementing, keep looking at what you’re doing, and nothing can be on autopilot. Not even your drip campaigns that you keep sending on and on. They also need to be changed to address the new market conditions, and nothing will work as it used to work.

 

🐼

Florin, sorry, we’ll continue on this, but I think there might be listeners who ask themselves a drip campaign.

 

🐿

Yeah. So drip campaign is what’s called the drip email marketing campaign, the full name of it. And it’s where you have a couple of people who signed up somewhere and you keep sending emails to them in a sequence of emails. Usually when you have a winning sequence of emails, you keep sending that on and on to all the new people who come and join your audience.

 

🐼

Basically, from what you said, it’s pretty important during these times to keep an eye on them, to make adjustments here and there, so you make sure that they are working or still working?

 

🐿

Yes. Because most probably they are not going to be working anymore. It’s like it always is, right? You need to keep changing your product, adapting. Even if you’re not having a product, you’re offering a service, you need to keep adapting what you’re telling people because communication doesn’t work as well as it used to work, and people are stressed about a lot of different things and a lot of different subjects like nuclear war threats and others, and they will not be as receptive as they used to be. So if you had a conversion of 3 %, you’re not going to have that conversion anymore. And if you want to get that conversion back, you need to keep putting in hours and keep putting in work to make it work. And maybe you need to change your offer, maybe you need to change your product, maybe you need to change your branding. You could be doing a lot of different things to get the 3 % conversion back, but you will not keep having a 3 % conversion on your automated campaigns anymore.

 

🐼

I was laughing because when you said they are worried about nuclear wars, I wanted to say, or the eight dollar or how is it now?

 

🐿

The Twitter checkmark. That’s people’s greatest concern these days. Oh, man, we’re doing startup Espresso, we don’t have a blue checkmark. And if we’re going to get a blue checkmark, we’re going to end free speech forever. So we don’t want to do that.

 

🐼

But you can buy us a few coffees so that we can buy coffee and not the blue checkmark.

 

🐿

Yeah, please sponsor us so we can buy coffee from square mile again from London. And if we don’t do that, at least buy us an army of Twitter bots so we may sponsor this podcast and promote this podcast like all the other cool kids are currently doing on Twitter.

 

🐼

Now, getting back on track. Let’s say my emails are not converting as they were before.

 

🐿

I am certain that if you had emails, they will not be converting as they did before. I’m 100 % certain of this.

 

🐼

Okay. Do I drop them completely? Do I shift delete them? Do I.

 

🐿

Paste them? You can do that if you replace them with something else.

 

🐼

Okay, but I think it wouldn’t be the most best thing to actually delete them because there might be nothing wrong with them. But the fact that the things are as they are nowadays, it impacts them definitely. It might be that, I don’t know, in a few months, in a year, I don’t know when this will end, they will work again. So probably, I don’t know, an idea would be just them or just create a new one. Just pause them. Just post them. Just post them, exactly. Experiment with them from time to time.

 

🐿

That’s a good idea. Basically, you could pause your existing campaigns and try new campaigns during the times of crisis. And then when crisis is over, go back to your previous campaigns.

 

🐼

Yeah, because I think this is a trap in which quite a few are falling because you might even see, for example, churn rates increasing and you say that there are some issues with your product, which might be because I don’t know, for example, you did something, you annoyed your clients and the churn rate increased. But it might be that because they are cutting cost, your product might be one of them.

 

🐿

Yes. Churn rates definitely. I mean, at the Skurley company, we have quite a few products and we are seeing a lot of churn and in most cases it doesn’t have anything to do with the product. So if we got stressed and panicked over this, we would try and invest more in making changes and we would be using the budget for something that can’t be won. It’s inevitable that you will have churn. Now, the good news is that once the financial crisis is over, many of those people who churn right now will come back to you, especially if you keep a very active line of communication with them and you’re actually awesome to them. You keep doing great things for them via email, social media, wherever you’re communicating. If you’re using your phone, just keep calling them, keep doing what you’re doing, because when the crisis is over, they’re going to come back to you and they will still keep ignoring your competitors. So that’s one thing to do. You will see the churn coming back, so don’t get too panicked over it. Now, I guess in crisis mode, it’s a lot harder to build a product when you don’t have a stable product because you will not understand what’s going on with churn.

 

🐿

That’s why you need to invest a lot of your time in talking to customers, which you don’t usually have to do yourself as a founder, especially if you’ve got a huge company and you’ve got other people handling this stuff. But now it’s a good moment to actually get back in those trenches and talk to people because you might learn that it has nothing to do with your product, with your current pricing. They’re just shutting down their businesses and they can no longer afford to buy from you, or they’ve been laid off and they can no longer purchase because they have more pressing concerns regarding their finance.

 

🐼

Actually, it’s interesting. So you basically said that it might be hard to build a new product, but I was thinking in the same time that it might be a great opportunity because you might give it for free to your early adopters because they don’t have money enough to spend on your competition and they could help you with advice, with feedback, improving the product.

 

🐿

That’s true. I was just talking about churn, so you can test the churn and you can make decision based on churn.

 

🐼

I wanted to clarify this a little bit so that we don’t get misunderstood on this part.

 

🐿

Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of conversation that can be had around this topic. Maybe you guys are going to go to startupespresso. Live. Maybe you’re going to go in the main menu and click on the Facebook group and let’s have a conversation inside the Facebook group for entrepreneurs because it’s very interesting. You have people like Andrew Chen, who is a really smart dude in the startup area, who’s been writing essays on a lot of things that made a lot of sense and they’re still applyable today, which is very interesting because not a lot of entrepreneurs can say that they’ve written something and it’s still good today. One of his things was to actually cut some of the marketing spend where it makes sense and develop something new because then when the crisis is over, you’re going to have something new to sell and it’s going to be a new line of revenue for your business and then you’re going to easily get back on track, which is a lot smarter to do than to keep spending money on ads, for example. Of course, it depends from business to business, but it’s one avenue to build a product.

 

🐿

Now, as I’ve said, the problem with building a new product during these times is that you cannot test chart. And even if you’re going to have very low conversion rates for your paid product, it may not be that the paid product has something wrong with it. It may be, as I said, businesses are shutting down, clients are being laid off, they don’t have money to spend with you anymore. And the other part, the ones who still have some money, maybe they don’t want to spend on what you’re offering, not because they don’t need it, but because they’re currently buying shares in Amazon because they have such a low price. And it’s a great time to make investments if you have a lot of cash laying around.

 

🐼

Hopefully you’re not buying Bitcoin now.

 

🐿

Yeah, and Dodgecoin.

 

🐼

Disclaimer, this is my personal opinion only. Now, Florin, you said that you might cut costs for marketing, for example, but let’s think a little bit, is there any way, for example, for me to still making good marketing or trying a few other things regarding marketing that maybe help me, but in the same time reduce my cost. I don’t know, for example, social media, can I use it in a way in which it will help me with the sales, with being still present?

 

🐿

Yeah. So social media will definitely help you prove that you’re still active. How you… So a lot of people are now looking at companies and they’re saying that they’re having financial troubles. So if you haven’t gotten a new investment to generate buzz around your startup, then a lot of people might think that you’re already gone out of business. Now, if you manage to use social media to make, I don’t know, a new giveaway, to make some games for the community, to offer something to different communities on the web, then those people, your main audience that you haven’t converted to clients yet, they will still see that you’re still being active and they will want to do something with your business. So either promote it or start buying something from you or discussing with you about anything or offering you feedback. So a lot of things that you can still use.

 

🐼

Actually, regarding this part we’re discussing with you, I think that would be nice if, for example, you or some of your employees or your co founders are just going in, I don’t know, different groups on Facebook and giving advice based on their expertise.

 

🐿

Yeah, you should do that if it’s brandable.

 

🐼

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. As a brand, I was saying so not from their personal accounts. Not from.

 

🐿

Personal.

 

🐼

Accounts.

 

🐿

Using your brand. People are not really going to remember you. And that’s the most honest.

 

🐼

Way to say it. No, and I think this is a valuable advice that you’re given here, which I took it for granted that when you do this, you do it from the brand account and not from your personal account, because in the end you want to promote the brand.

 

🐿

The only way… I guess you could actually do it from a personal account. It doesn’t seem very branded. In the case where people, if they hear your advice, they instantly go and DM you. They direct message you. So that can happen. I’ve seen industries where this can happen. You go in with your personal account, if it’s looking good, you don’t have weird pictures on your profile and you have something that’s more maybe more professional, more professional, like an industry influencer, a thought leader. If you have something like that, people will trust you, they will believe you. And they will message you and you will actually be able to make a sale from that interaction. So that’s even better than going and promoting landing pages or blog posts or thought pieces where you then convert them via email and they join your audience or you use retargeting pixels or stuff like that. So it may be valuable. And even from a personal interaction, you may obtain leads who then bring new business.

 

🐼

To you. The only thing to take in consideration when you do this is that it will take a lot of time because you need to reply to those persons, engage in conversation. So that takes time.

 

🐿

Exactly. And you need to be active. So if you dropped your sales skills for a while, this is a good time to pick back on your sales skills.

 

🐼

Any other ways of using social media? For example, I don’t know, would you spend more on ads on social media? I know you said in the beginning of the episode, but…

 

🐿

No. So I would go to Education Cloud Plus. I would create a free account and there I would place the code called DM 10K to learn all about using hashtags on social media and also social media communities in such way that I will be able to promote my message and not get banned from the groups. So there are very clear strategies, very clear ways in which you can make people actually engage them and love the content that you post without the content looking spammy or annoying whatsoever.

 

🐼

So basically I think if I’m saying correctly, this is a course that will teach you how to use social media without blowing your budgets.

 

🐿

Definitely. It’s going to be basically your time, so it’s going to be free. Especially if your time doesn’t make a lot of money right now. There’s not a lot of cost of opportunity. It’s the perfect time to actually invest in doing.

 

🐼

Something yourself. Because that will give you results.

 

🐿

Yeah, that will give you results. And that’s what you need. So even though they’re not the best results, it’s still better than destroying the runway that you still have.

 

🐼

Ferraro, you said at some point that maybe it’s harder for you to take investment or you don’t have enough money still secured or something like that. Now, the reality is that actually it’s quite harder to take investment nowadays.

 

🐿

Yes. So I’ve learned pretty recently about something called discounted cash flow. And that thing works against you during times of crisis because any respectable VC when they invest, they are going to place discounted cash flow on the sheet when they make the investment. So usually that’s a percentage and it takes into account the financial downturn and the financial problems of the time and of the years during which the investment is supposed to bring a return. And if that return is, I don’t know, they expect to make 10 X the size of the investment in 10 years during financial crisis, and it’s very clear to everybody by now that we are during a financial downturn and that it’s going to keep going down through 2023, they’re going to have a very big modifier there. And with that modifier taken into account, they will basically expect in 10 years not a 10 X return. Maybe it will be an 11, maybe it will be a 12, maybe it will be a 15 X return. And if they actually place your next investments, your next rounds, or your next payments for the investment, and they make metrics that you need to reach or goals that you need to reach, and they place this into your contract, you’re going to be in a very bad position.

 

🐿

So you read a lot of startup news, somebody got an investment of $20 million, they didn’t get $20 million in the first day. So they’ve had multiple milestones that they needed to reach. And if they factor the discounted cash flow into this, then you’re maybe not going to be able to hit those milestones and the whole investment will fail. So it’s a lot more dangerous for you as a founder to take the investment.

 

🐼

Yeah. So I think it’s even more important to keep an eye on the cost and on the cash flow.

 

🐿

And during this time, you actually need to be certain that you’re going to make that return happen because it’s not as free floatinging money as it used to be until now.

 

🐼

And I think you can also pay a little bit of attention, for example, of your development costs or seeing, for example, if the servers that you’re using are costing way too much for basically your current usage because probably you won’t grow at the same pace as before. So you might reduce a little bit this. Now, regarding the cost of the development, I think you can keep an eye on basically the features which are not the most interesting or the most used and maybe now even more caught from there. I don’t say that you need to do this during times like this, but nowadays even more. And actually, you were saying something interesting a few days ago when we discuss about features like this. You even had the name for them.

 

🐿

Yeah, I was just thinking about the dogs. So you’re going to have features that are basically dogs. So they’re not helping you grow right now. They’re not producing a lot of money right now. And they might do something in the future, but you’re not certain. So that’s when those features that you’re currently trying to do, they are just dogs. And you need to quit investing in them. So if you have something that currently generates a lot of money, keep that on the table, milk the cow as much as you can. If you have something that you think will grow, you can still spend money on it if it keeps driving growth, but not as much money as you do on your cash cow because you currently need cash and that’s what you’re missing. So in normal times, you wouldn’t really care about the dogs because maybe you know sometimes maybe something comes out of that serendipity, all of that stuff. Sometimes just by experimenting a lot, you become lucky and you find a new feature that’s going to drive most of your growth. Maybe you make a spin off, maybe you make a new product.

 

🐿

You can do a lot of things with the dogs and that can be done. We’ve done it countless times at the squarely company and we’re very lucky to be able to keep experimenting. And that’s how we kept growing and reaching the point where we are today, because without doing that, we would have died a long time ago. But during times of crisis, you only need to care about the cash cow, keep investing in that, making sure that that keeps working perfectly, do any tweaks you need to do to the cash cow, and then focus a little bit on growth. And if you have something that seems really nice and in the future will grow really well and you’re super excited about it, just pause it for a while and start doing that only after the crisis is over. So you need something that’s certain and that’s right now. It doesn’t mean that you need to change other things, like you don’t want to reduce the amount of time you spend on branding because branding is long term. You don’t have to destroy that just for the short term. But in terms of features, the features that would be really cool in the future, maybe not invest in them right now because now you need something else.

 

🐼

But keep in mind that it’s good to stick to your roadmap and to the future. each year is which are important because you don’t want in a year from now to actually have a product which is bringing no added value anymore. It’s still the same product because you just milk that cow.

 

🐿

That’s why I’m saying that you need to think about the features that are bringing growth.

 

🐼

At the moment. I think this is very important to keep in mind. Something that could bring.

 

🐿

Growth, something that is already bringing growth and just really focus on that.

 

🐼

Yeah, and also I think it’s really nice because you also said about experimenting, to try to experiment with different things in your product to see if something might increase conversion or help you with sales inside your product. For example, it can be, I don’t know, a nice offer which is not intrusive and all these small experiments that you can do without affecting the user experience.

 

🐿

Yes, and there’s a very good way to do that. We’ve done this on Education Cloud Plus quite a lot of times now, and it worked in getting us Premium Pass members to actually pay for Education Cloud Plus to get access to all the courses inside. And how we’ve done this is we didn’t go and say, We have this great offer. Come and join Premium Pass now. It’s the best price you’ll ever get. And none of that stuff. So we just offered immense value in the emails. The emails got the users to the platform. They logged in or they signed up. They had their free accounts. And while they were playing around with their free accounts and the information we provided via email, they saw an offer which they could click to go and buy. And it was very non intrusive. All of the marketing and communication was made for helpful stuff. And once they enter the platform, they could see something that’s very small. And if they want, they click it. If they don’t want, they don’t click it. It’s that easy. They’re not being pushed for a sale. And that actually generates great sales even during times of crisis, because if you get somebody from their email, from their inbox, and you say, You need to spend money, they’re going to be like, I don’t need to spend money.

 

🐿

The inflation is huge. I’ve got all of these problems in my business. I’ve got all these problems at home. I need to think about electrical energy and gas for my home during the winter. So there’s a lot of things that I need to take into account. I can spend money on what you’re offering. But if you show the value first, they understand that there’s value and they could get even more value by going after something that’s discounted, then maybe they will take you up on the offer.

 

🐼

Or not, because even if it’s not an offer at that moment, you can just basically allowing them to purchase the premium subscription because they saw enough value and they decided that I want to upgrade my account. So I have an easy way to do this from the product.

 

🐿

Yeah. So hat we’re trying to suggest here is, maybe instead of doing only sales emails and sales events and product launch formulas, the love product launch formulas, but maybe they don’t have a place in the market right now because nobody gets excited about new sales because they don’t like sales at the moment. You can do things that boost your monthly active users. You get a lot more people in to your free accounts, especially because most of you are doing a lot of apps where you also have a free plan or membership sites and you can get everybody into the accounts and then they get a lot of value. And then they remember, Oh, yeah, I actually wanted to buy this. So this is actually really cool. And you’re going to stand out from all of the other desperate marketers who are targeting people’s inbox because they need to make cash. And you’re going to break through the noise and you’re going to drive people to your app, which is always great. And they might decide to buy.

 

🐼

And I think, Florian, that in the end, we need to not forget the fact that you need to provide value because if you will provide value, your users will stay with you. And I think that in these times, the ones that were great at marketing without providing value will see things going down. I love it. But if you provide enough value, I think you won’t have issues.

 

🐿

Right. So I really love the direction that this conversation is going because this is exactly it. So people will want to see you during these times. They want to see that you haven’t gone out of business, so you need to keep engaging them. Now, instead of being desperate about obtaining sales, you can do what we’ve suggested earlier, or you can do things that are enchanting. So we have a thing called enchant, where we try to enchant the audiences and we’re thinking about Taylor Swift and I feel enchanted to meet you and all of that. But the thing is that this has been the biggest driver of growth since the financial downturn started because instead of going after sales, we kept providing price drops, games, giveaways, a lot of gamification, a lot of great things to our audience. And our audience said, Well, these guys have helped me during these very hard times. So let’s see what they’re offering at the moment.

 

🐼

Will we edit this and cut you when you sing or not?

 

🐿

No, I have a great voice. I think that Tay Tay would totally love to have me on stage with her.

 

🐼

Okay. Yeah. So basically, I think this is something pretty important.

 

🐿

We play her song during every meeting that we have on the Enchant segment, so she’s a very important person.

 

🐼

I think I’m getting older. But yeah, I think that if you provide value, you won’t have so much of a big issue as if you’re not. Because if until now people were not really careful where they were spending money, now they might be, and they actually are.

 

🐿

Yeah, and we have I mean, as people, we have lots of different problems every single day due to the financial downturn and everything else that comes along with it and that determines the financial downturn. So when we see that there’s just a bunch of people going after our money, we’re not really happy about it, are we? But if we see that somebody still keeps offering value and we keep engaging with their emails, you know, they become top of mind and they can’t lose the top of mind even though the invasion still continues and more wars are about to start at the moment. And even if those things are happening, we still care about the people who are currently trying to provide value and they’re doing their best to help us and we will never forget them. So this is interesting to see because if you’re the guy who just pops up and just tries selling, selling, selling, selling, we will instantly forget you. No matter who you are, we will forget you. And you’re going to become completely irrelevant when people are going to see your emails in their inboxes, your ads on Facebook, your messages on social media.

 

🐿

They’re going to instantly disconnect. But if you can keep providing value and finding new ways to provide value during these times, you’re going to make money during the prices. And after the crisis is over, a lot of the people who churned right now, they’re going to come back to you.

 

🐼

I think Florin wants a musical career because he was beating the drums also. So if you hear something, it’s Florin trying to do drums while he sings.

 

🐿

I used to be a drummer, so yeah, bad habits.

 

🐼

Florian, anything else that you think we should tackle? Because I think there was quite some good information here and I think it would be really nice to see what our listeners are also doing now. So I think it would worth seeing their tips or their advice on the Facebook group.

 

🐿

I think they should go to startupespresso. Live. They should go and click on the Facebook group and join us in a conversation to see how many of them are doing ads, how many are trying to acquire new users, how many are trying to reactivate older users, and how many of them are still engaging in constant conversations with their audiences. So I think it’s going to be interesting for everybody to see and for everybody to talk about this so that all of us as a community of startup founders and entrepreneurs can learn more about options for our businesses.

 

🐼

Drop your messages and start conversations or reply to conversations on the Facebook group. And until next time, drink good coffee, but.

 

🐿

Even more. Yeah, let’s grind better coffee next time.

 

🐼

Pay attention to your startup and invest the time in it. See you next time. See.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today? Today, we’re grinding ways to get customers for your startup.

 

🐼

Wait, Florin, so you actually need to find ways to get customers for your startup? So they are not coming just like that?

 

🐿

Oh, no, sorry, I’m wrong. This must be the wrong episode. Actually, you just have to build it and they will come.

 

🐼

Okay, let me refresh.

 

🐿

It’s okay. You just have to finish working on the product and then you’ll be super successful without any work. Spoil.

 

🐼

A lot of it. If you listen until the end, you will learn from Florin how to buy a Lamborghini because that’s what I hope to learn from this episode of Florin, so no pressure.

 

🐿

Disclaimer, that won’t happen.

 

🐼

Okay, maybe a small purple Lamborghini.

 

🐿

Okay, we’ll get to that.

 

🐼

Okay, now, on a serious note, Florin, let’s say you know me, I’m a tech person. Together with a friend, we built a really awesome product that solves a really important problem. So we have this product built in a strong way. It’s a nice product, easy to use, it works perfect. Now what?

 

🐿

That’s nice. Well, if you were to tell me, because at all these things I need to know, like your particular use case or what you’re going to try to use it for or how many customers you need to get. So in your opinion, how many customers or users would you need to get?

 

🐼

Let’s say I just build a product based on a problem that I have. A couple of my friends are having that problem and I actually need, I don’t know, I think in the beginning I need, let’s say, 3,000 users, 10K.

 

🐿

Yeah, that’s a lot. Everybody would like to have those numbers, right?

 

🐼

You’re smiling so I shouldn’t start at those numbers?

 

🐿

No, I don’t think so. Basically because you don’t have an existing customer base. You don’t have paying customers, right?

 

🐼

Well, I have my friends that are using the product and they are telling me that they are willing to pay for it, but not paying.

 

🐿

All right. So then we should start from, let’s say, the first 25 users. How do we get the first 25 users? It depends. If it’s users or customers, maybe the first time around it’s 25 users. Then you have 50 users, and then you will need to focus on getting 50 customers, and then move on from that to 100 customers to 1,000 customers, and then sky is the limit depending on the app.

 

🐼

So this is very interesting. to swing. So you’re telling me that actually the first users who are using my product, but they are not paying for it, I can’t consider them customer. So I don’t actually validate you that I can sell my product.

 

🐿

Yeah, exactly. You don’t even know the usage. How often will they use the product? Will they use it daily? Will they use it on a weekly basis? Are they going to drop using it after three months into the app? After three months, maybe don’t offer enough value and they will just stop using it. So all of these things need to be taken into account. So that’s why maybe first you need users to actually use the product and then to start getting customers. Once you see that users actually like it.

 

🐼

Okay, so those 50 initial paying customers.

 

🐿

I think we can make a whole episode about it. I think that in different stages, we can make different episodes and just talk on an individual episode level on how to get those. But normally, if you want to get customers, you should start with things like… Actually, nobody knows the answers to that. But for the first 25, what I can tell you is that you can definitely go to LinkedIn, to networking meetings, to book clubs if you’re selling something related to books and authors. You can go to coffee shops if you’re selling something related to coffee or that industry. So it really depends on where you can find the most people who are passionate about the subject you’re talking about.

 

🐼

Can we call them some direct sales? It’s actually investing, I guess you invest a lot of time for this.

 

🐿

Yeah, you would invest a lot of time for this. So the first 25 customers, you could even acquire them easily I mean, get them easily to join your startup, but it would be a lot of wasted time because you have to spend a lot of time with them to get a lot of learning so that you can build a better product so that you can attract the first 50 customers. So you need to be able to move from 25 to 50, and then you need to start making those people to actually pay for the product, which is a whole different thing, and you need different things for this. But in the first case, if you want to get customers, the best way would be to go where your customers are and just basically invite them over for coffee, tea, or beer, or whatever, and just discuss about the problems like we talked in the validation episodes, right?

 

🐼

Yeah. So if you want to listen that, just go listen the validation episode and then maybe get back to this or listen this and then go and listen that episode also. Okay. So that’s one way of actually acquiring some customers initially. Now we know that actually as you grow, you need to increase the numbers. But maybe in a future episode, we can discuss, as you said, how you can get your first, I don’t know, 25, 50, 100, and so on.

 

🐿

Yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting to see how you can do it step by step. I mean, step by step is the best way, especially if this is your first startup, or if it’s a startup that has only one product. When you have more products, maybe it’s going to be much easier to get customers for all of the products than it is for when you have just one company with one product. But if you’re a company with one company with one product, then you definitely need to go through those steps. Otherwise, there’s ways to get customers. There are lots of ways.

 

🐼

Another way is that I hear a lot of it. I make a blog, I write content about it, and everyone will pay for my product that I advertise on my landing page or blog.

 

🐿

This is like the biggest myth that’s been popping around everywhere on podcasts and videos, even online training programs. A lot of people will tell other people that, Hey, you have a startup so you need to start blogging. So it’s like blogging about what? Even better, how often will you blog? Because a lot of people are like, Okay, so you’ve built a startup, you will create two blog articles this month and you’ll be successful. And I will go to those people and I’ll be like, Damn son, teach me how to do that. Because I really don’t know anybody who’s ever done this. And it sounds so far fetched. I mean, this could work if you have an audience like if you’re Rihanna and you have 100 followers on Twitter, then you’re definitely going to write a blog post and people are going to buy. But we’re not talking about Rihanna here, we’re talking about a startup that’s basically starting up and starting from scratch. It doesn’t have following and stuff like that. So if you don’t have following, then you shouldn’t focus your energies on writing two very great blog posts that nobody will ever read.

 

🐿

Because what it turns out is, if you have a blog post, it’s the same as having a product. For a blog to be read by people, it needs to get to people. So how will you get that blog post to people?

 

🐼

Seo. I pay an expert to do SEO for it.

 

🐿

That’s a perfect way to waste money.

 

🐼

And you’ll be paying an SEO expert to bring me sales?

 

🐿

Yeah. Well, there are multiple aspects of this because, for example, you can pay the SEO expert to drive sales, but the SEO expert will drive traffic to the site and a lot of people will come and see the site, read the content and the stuff you offer. But your conversion rate optimization is busted, then you don’t have product market fit and then nobody will buy and you will instantly place the blame on the SEO guy for your insuccess, but it’s not his fault, it’s your fault because you don’t have validation and you didn’t reach the steps until you get 100 paying customers. So until you do that, that’s what you need to do. You don’t need to go and do SEO on a blog because you don’t really know what you’re doing. Now, how you could use that, the SEO guy and the SEO stuff, and maybe a lot of content, maybe 100 or 200 pages on the site, is to actually use it to get traffic and then make pop ups and stuff for the people visiting so that they start subscribing to a place where you teach them about the solution you’ve created.

 

🐼

Nice. So you actually grind them to say like that.

 

🐿

Yeah, exactly. That’s good.

 

🐼

They’re paying for your product.

 

🐿

Exactly. You don’t really want to go directly into sales. What I’ve seen other teams doing is actually they’ve used the SEO guys to drive leads for the sales team, and then nobody was successful and it wasn’t the fault of the sales team or the SEO guy because there wasn’t a process for the sales team to follow because the product couldn’t be sold because the product wasn’t buyable. So it’s not the salesperson’s fault that nobody will buy the product. So that’s why founders in the early stages, they should be the ones doing the sales, the SEO and doing everything because they need to get a working model first. That’s why we call them MVPs. I mean, it’s a working model, but it’s like a working model for the whole business, not just for the product. So when you have a working model that’s done by the founders, then you can start scaling the team, adding in experts for SEO, adding bloggers, writers, salespeople, and other marketing stuff.

 

🐼

The next one, and I see it quite often. I have the user persona that I assume I made it for my startup, so I know who’s my target audience. I have money and I go on Facebook and try to target that persona with quotes, to say like that. I invest money in Facebook ads, or Google ads, or YouTube ads, or whatever ads.

 

🐿

It really depends on the type of business. If you’re in a market where there is not a very well perceived notion that people need your product, you shouldn’t do sales on Facebook and Google. You shouldn’t do ads on Google and Facebook. On the other hand, if you’re starting a saloon or maybe a car shop, an auto shop, then you would definitely want to try to do ads and Facebook ads and Google ads and stuff like that because it would directly help you increase your sales because people already know that you’re one of the guys in town who does that. So obviously they will be interested in trying your service, especially if it’s close to them and for other related matters. But if it’s like a real innovation, you won’t get your real innovation being bought and purchased by other people by doing these ads, especially in the first stages of the serve. You might get to this after you’ve completely validated and obtain product market fit. But pre product market fit, you should usually stay away from ads. Now, there’s a lot of people that say you should go for ads and somebody was successful, but nobody was successful and they were just churning out money and their investors should basically punish them.

 

🐼

Okay, I’m assuming for a certain stage, as you said, probably this makes sense because the cost are so well optimized that you can actually are making money from.

 

🐿

Those ads. Exactly. And you have so many metrics in place that make the whole thing to make sense for your business.

 

🐼

Actually, regarding the metrics, and I will deviate a little bit from making money, but actually, what metric would you suggest to actually look? Is it like the amount of money that I’m making every month? The total amount of money that I made?

 

🐿

It’s the money that you’ve earned per customer versus how much it costs you to bring that customer in.

 

🐼

Okay. Should I look, I don’t know, month over month, how much that customer brings me?

 

🐿

You should look at an individual level and have every user… This is the best case scenario, right? Where you have every user, you know exactly the source that brought you that user. So if it was paid ads or if it was SEO, if it was SEO, if it was content, or social media or email marketing, or I know influencer stuff. So how did you get that user? How did you get that customer? Then that customer ended up paying now, how much money did they spend with your company? And that’s like the total lifetime value. That’s the lifetime value, how much time the customer spent with the company and paying the products of the company. So basically you would have lifetime value of maybe $300 or $1,000 or something like that. And then you need to place this and see how much money it costs you to bring one of those people. And if you have lifetime value of $100, because that’s the case for a lot of startups, especially in the early stages, you have $100 lifetime value and you pay $200 to bring users and you have conversion rates. So basically you actually need to spend $200 because before you can bring somebody to pay and the average amount that somebody will pay you is $100, then you’re busting $100 per customer.

 

🐿

Every single time you bring a new customer, you have huge losses. So that’s easily going to want to reflect poorly on every report that you make.

 

🐼

So if I understand correctly, I need to pay attention how much money each customer brings me, how much it costs me, and I need to do this per channel to say like that. Now, what that channel would be, we can see also because we currently discuss about ads, content marketing, or that SEO specialist. But in the end it cost me because if I pay him or her $1,000 and brings me a user who give me $100. So I spent a lot of wasted money from.

 

🐿

This perspective. Exactly. So they may even bring you a lot of traffic, but none of that traffic converts to paying customer, then it doesn’t really matter that they’ve managed to do their job. It still won’t help you because that channel doesn’t work for your business. And this is the thing. There are lots of businesses. I started an online store at one point. I only did SEO. I didn’t do anything else. Nothing. We didn’t even have Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and stuff like that. And we were making money because we were on Google for every single item that we’ve had inside the store. And we’ve made money from day one when we had the products and we got indexed by Google because people were already searching for that stuff. We were on the first page and they entered and they bought and everybody was happy. So our cost to acquire those customers was like very cheap because initially we spent some time creating the content, but then once it was created, we didn’t spend any more time and money on the content to keep it running. Now, when you do ads, you need to constantly pay for ads.

 

🐿

But with SEO, you pay once and then you can start getting lots of results. Of course, it depends a lot on many different aspectsthat we don’t have time to discuss on a single podcast, but that’s what we’ve done and it worked. But I’m telling you, for other businesses, they will do SEO, they will do it as well as with it, and it will not work for them. So it really depends on a business to business case. And that’s why usually when you have growth hackers in your team and people who are oriented on growth, they will try to identify channels that work for your startup. Not all channels will work. Maybe you will have only one channel that will work and then you will spend five years not being able to find another channel that will work. So there are multiple types of channels. A channel means a way to get a customer like SEO or driving traffic via social media, email marketing or Google ads. But it might not work for your particular startup. So I’ve seen startups that only had success, real success, once they did TV ads. And you’re saying, TV ads?

 

🐿

Who does TV ads? And they were successful only with TV ads. So that was their biggest engine of growth for their company, the TV ads. And don’t expect this. I wouldn’t do this, ever. But they’ve done it and it worked.

 

🐼

I would do it if I make enough money to buy a Lamborghini.

 

🐿

Definitely. But you would have to place the price of maybe 30 Lamborghinis to actually find a working model even for that channel.

 

🐼

Speaking about growth hackers, I know that at the end of episode, you have a surprise for our listeners, like a code that will give them access to a couple of marketing hacks on a very nice platform.

 

🐿

Yeah, actually, they should just read the description inside the video, like the description of the podcast. So the description of the podcast and they will find the link towards the platform and also the code that will give them access to 151 hacks to be used to grow your startup. So it’s super interesting because you’ve got a lot of different ideas on what to try for all the kinds of channels that you would ever think of. So ways to get in touch with potential partners, way to get more customers, ways to be awesome on social media and attract attention, ways to do advertising with very little budget spend. And it’s a super great collection of 151 hacks.

 

🐼

What I think is nice to mention is that they’re actually validated. So they were used and not written.

 

🐿

Yeah, that’s true. Basically, you will learn from startups actually apply them. And some of them we’ve applied ourselves and we’re successful using those methods. So you get stuff from Zappier, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Neil Patel. Then you get a lot of stuff from other agencies and all sorts of different companies who are successful using those methods. And we tell you exactly how much success they had and how they’ve done it.

 

🐼

You mentioned at some point about influencers. I will make the subject a little bit more broad to say like that. So I would call them affiliation. Should I use affiliation as a startup? And if so, when?

 

🐿

After product market fit, as always. But there’s also a way to use influencers before the product market fit, and you can use it as an engine to drive product market fit, basically. So it’s really pretty broad. Affiliate marketing is pretty broad. There are many types of affiliates. So even like influencer marketing, it could very well be a affiliation, but not like a classic affiliate marketer. So your influencer might be an affiliate marketer, might be your affiliate marketer, might be the affiliate marketer of a third party who worked with you, or the influencer might be somebody that you actually end up partnering up with on a real partnership level, not through a platform that divides commissions. So it’s really tricky to define this. Maybe we should have a whole episode just on this subject because I know that influencer marketing is very popular these days.

 

🐼

And everyone is an influencer.

 

🐿

Yeah, and everyone. Everybody is an influencer. But you can definitely use influencers before product market fit. If you, for example, use them to drive hype towards a landing page that talks about your launch event. So if you prepare a launch event and a product launch formula, I think that we keep mentioning the product launch formula on the podcast, but if you do that, then you can be insanely successful if you have people driving other people towards your launch. That’s basically how we launched squarely SEO. So we’ve done 100 people who got tickets to our event or launch event. We got them ourselves. And one of our influencers, who is also an investor, brought us 300 people. So we’ve managed to gather 100. And because this guy was an influencer and he was super popular, he brought 300 people who ended up using the product, given us feedback. And then after we launched the stable version, they bought the product.

 

🐼

So I think this is very important to have someone from that industry, from that problem space, who’s an authority there. If it recommends you.

 

🐿

Then you’re awesome. I agree. Actually, when you’re looking at an influencer like we did, we already knew that he was a very big authority in that field and especially in that country in Germany. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked. I mean, if we just took a random blogger or a random YouTubers, it might not have worked. He was an authority. So I know that there are YouTubers who are authorities. Now, those are the YouTubers that you need to target. I may get, I know, 1,000 or 10,000 views on a video, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to be the perfect channel to promote your product, right? So you need to figure out if that’s the right audience and if that audience would think that that person is an authority in the field because otherwise it just won’t work.

 

🐼

I completely agree on this. But I know you said that we were discussing in another episode about affiliation, influencer marketing and everything. But if you would be, let’s say, to name one affiliation platform, let’s say I definitely need to do affiliation marketing for my startup, I’m in that position. Now, should I build my own affiliation platform? I don’t know. Should I go somewhere to do this? What would you recommend in this space? I know how to.

 

🐿

Recommend this because we’ve done three completely different types. So we’ve completely built our custom affiliation platform. Then we’ve used the paid affiliation platform where we pay a monthly subscription so that they give us access to their system so that we can invite affiliates who will join our program, which is a hybrid between building a custom thing and going to a marketplace where they have affiliates. And we’ve also went to a marketplace that has affiliates. So what I can tell you is that usually the marketplaces that have affiliates are actually the ones that actually work. So if you go to the AveneGate affiliate network, or if you go to ShareA sale, their affiliate network, they are usually very hard to understand. You need to spend a lot of time researching and finding out how those things work. But once you do, they will actually bring you people. And if you have some validation for the product, they will bring you customers. It depends, of course, on a lot of things. Sometimes they will bring you lots of customers and you make a lot of money. Otherwise, they will just bring you some customers. So there’s not guaranteed recipe for success.

 

🐿

It depends on a lot of things. Even like being on share sale, you need to know how to convince affiliates to join your program. So then you need the product market fit between your product and the affiliates because you’re basically telling your affiliates to invest time and money into your products and it’s like almost the same as getting customers. So you need to make sure that everything looks good for the affiliates and to do validation with affiliates because otherwise they will not love your program anyway.

 

🐼

Yeah, because in the end, if you have an awesome product with an awesome affiliation program, but they’re in the same place, nobody knows about them, then it comes the question, do I promote the affiliation program? Do I promote my product? I think the take away, it’s actually that there is no silver bullet. So actually it depends a lot on what stage you are with your product and with your startup. And for this, you need to apply.

 

🐿

Different.

 

🐼

Strategies to call them like this. But I don’t know, do you think there will be something else that we should mention, or you should pay attention as a founder when you try to find ways to acquire customers.

 

🐿

Yes. O ne of the most helpful things that I’ve ever studied was a thing called what’s happening inside your business, like who are the key players, what’s required to do something related to your business? F or example, of course, I will give my example with Squirly. In order to deliver our software as a service that’s also a plug in, we usually go and tackle the plug in side. In our case, we will look at… Okay, so somebody will take the plug in. Once they get the plug in, they will go to our software as a service. Awesome. So so what do we do? Well, who’s the customer? Well, the customer is business people, small business owners that’s like 66 % of our whole market. And basically these business people, they go to different events, they listen to different podcasts, they go to different meetings, they hang out somewhere, maybe they read different magazines, and those are your acquisition channels. So if you’re thinking about ways to get customers, think about how you can get in front of those people who you know will buy your product by using the things that you know about them. So you need to do a lot of customer profiling.

 

🐿

But in the case of the plug in, for example, it’s a lot easier because in order to have a WordPress site, you usually need to have a developer. So then we can basically think, where do we find developers? Because if we get a developer, the developer will get us customers. So where do developers hang out? What do they do? Do they go to meetings? Do they attend different events, conferences? Do they listen to podcasts? They read different blogs. They read a magazine. Do they have favorite places to hang out? Maybe it’s not Twitter, maybe it’s Discord, or maybe it’s Facebook and not LinkedIn because nobody uses LinkedIn because everybody wants to recruit you if you’re a developer. So it depends on a lot of things. Then once you have a developer, you need hosting. So you need to go to hosting companies and think about how do I find hosting companies? Where do they spend their time? What do they look at? And this is the thing. You want to get in front of your customer. There are multiple ways to think about getting customers by actually thinking, how can I get in front of my ideal customer, which is a fancy way of saying, who’s the dude that’s going to buy my stuff?

 

🐿

And basically, once you know that, once you have that profile, then you can go and see how you can get in front of that particular person. And if you have multiple persons, then you definitely need to think how you can reach all of those individuals. And in order to reach them, you need to figure out where they spend time, what do they read, what do they listen to, what do they watch. And once you know this, and who do they listen to? Because as you said with authority, who do they listen to? And once you have this figured out, you can figure out a lot of ways to get customers for your startup.

 

🐼

Yeah, I think it’s a very good advice. And it should be the take away, I think, of this episode.

 

🐿

Yeah, definitely. Because this solves the problem of should I do ads? Well, if your customer doesn’t spend time googling stuff every day, then you shouldn’t do ads because they won’t see your ad because they’re not actively searching for solutions. But if you’re a car repair store or something like that, and you know that people are usually searching for how do I repair my car in this particular area, or I need to find an Indian restaurant in Los Angeles, then you can definitely do ads. But if it doesn’t make sense for your customer because the customer won’t look there, then it also doesn’t make sense for your business. So this basically replies to, Okay, so you’ve talked about many different channels. Now, how do I find out which channels I should tackle first? Well, think about the customer and think about how you can get in front of that customer, and that will be your first thing.

 

🐼

Yeah, because I think there is a point in which it makes sense to do a product hunt campaign. It makes sense, I don’t know, to do Facebook ads if you’re at a certain level. Definitely. If you’re an e-commerce website, probably it makes sense to do Google ads or SEO for the products because people will buy that product and will search for that product. I think there are a lot of ways in which you can do this. It’s very important to apply the right strategy at the.

 

🐿

Right time. Yeah, exactly, at the right time. Even if you’ve done some super hyper localized campaign where you attracted a lot of people that you need to attract and they came to your site. It only makes sense that you would start Facebook ads and Google ads to those people because you know that there’s already interest from their part and maybe you can reach out to them later by ads or invite them to your email list so that you can reach them via ads and email as well. And that’s how you will get customers using these methods. And you can even do this in the early stages before validation, basically, because you know that they’ve already had interest, they didn’t decide to do anything, maybe not bring them to buy a product, but maybe get them to, I don’t know, download an eBook, get their email address, get some contacts, download the report or download the course, get them signed up for something. And then you can This will be your users and they are genuine users that you’ve reached via ads, and you will also get something out of that. So it won’t be wasted money.

 

🐼

And I was just thinking now, and I think we can make a whole episode at least about should I start local? Should I start international from the beginning? Do I focus on a market, conquer it, and go international? Do I apply the Facebook model? I think there can be a lot of discussion around this also.

 

🐿

Yeah, that’s actually very interesting because Facebook at first, they didn’t even want to go to other different states. They just wanted to stay in one state and that’s it.

 

🐼

Yeah. So I think there can be an entire discussion about this. When it makes sense to go wild from the beginning or start small and then conquer that market and go to the next one and so on and so on. Because, for example, I just thinking it might be at some point, you white label your solution, you do all these stuff.

 

🐿

But again, it depends a lot on the… Yeah, definitely. You can also white label the solution. And that’s a way to get customers. And you can get tons of customers by using that method.

 

🐼

Any other thoughts?

 

🐿

Well, I think that there’s going to be other thoughts on the other episodes. I was just thinking now that I didn’t talk anything about partnerships, right? Yeah. Did we mention partnerships?

 

🐼

No. It’s sad only that you could do some partnership, but I think we should go a little bit into them.

 

🐿

Yeah, so partnerships. The best way to think about them is now that you know what your customers, your ideal customers are looking at and how it can get in front of them, you need to think, who are those individuals that already have the interest of my people, of my ideal customers? So who are they? And if you can identify them, then start offering different types of partnerships to those people because they already have your audience. Maybe they’re selling other kinds of products that make sense for them. Maybe they have an email list with all your ideal customers. Does it make sense to build your own email list? Maybe. But those guys already have the email list with all your ideal customers. So why not reach out to them and tell them, Hey, we can do an email blast together and we can split the commissions that we get out of all the sales. And that’s a great starting point. And then we can definitely do an episode only about this.

 

🐼

I think you can call this a hack. And I think that material that they find on the education cloud about those hacks definitely can be applied in different.

 

🐿

Stages of a startup. Yes, we basically call them hacks because it’s a very neat idea that was tested and it was basically decomposed. So it was put together by somebody, but then it was decomposed and explained every bit of it, how it works and why it worked. And that’s what you’ll find inside the education cloud if you click the link and you get the code.

 

🐼

So don’t forget, click on the link in the description, enter the code found in the description, and you will get access for free actually, right?

 

🐿

Yeah, to the whole thing. So to all of the hacks, to all of the great.

 

🐼

Marketing ideas. Awesome. I really hope that you found this helpful. At least for me, I think I’m closer to buy.

 

🐿

That Lamborghini. Yeah, because of the TV ads.

 

🐼

Actually, if I will manage to buy a Lamborghini from TV ads, I would definitely come back and make an episode about how I made ads.

 

🐿

That would be nice. That would actually be nice. This was a light roast of everything that we’ve discussed according to ways to get customers. But then that would be a really heavy roast, a very dark roast on how you got a Lamborghini by doing TV ads.

 

🐼

Now, seriously, try to apply the right strategy for the time that you are at and let us know if you want to hear us talking about other methods that work for us or for other people that we know. Do this in our Facebook group.

 

🐿

You can join the Facebook group by going to startupespresso. Live and you will find the link to the Facebook group on top of the site.

 

🐼

And if we are enough, maybe we’ll convince Florin to tell us how we can buy.

 

🐿

A Lamborghini. Yeah.

 

🐼

Speak to you next.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?

 

🐼

Hey, Florin, back to our validation series. And for the listeners, if you just drop to this episode and you’re new to the series, to get more context, listen to our episode with interest validation. Continuing from there, Florian, now, if you remember, I had that list with 300 mothers which are interested in my idea of doing a medical app for getting advice for your kids. Now, I’m a software developer. I know that I need to talk with people. Everybody’s telling me, talk with your customers, with your possible customers. But I know to write code, that’s easy for me. Now, I know from your five phase validation method that in the next one, which is the current one that we are talking in the episode, I need to put questions to these.

 

🐿

People. yeah. And I guess you’re asking, what should I ask?

 

🐼

Yeah, because I’m not comfortable with asking and even more asking the right questions.

 

🐿

Yeah, that’s the key here because you could ask any question that you want, but some of them will lead you to false positives. Some of them will lead you on a very dark path that you will never recover from. Some questions, if you ask them, you will get fun responses, fun replies. You will feel good about having a conversation, and then you go home and you’ve learned nothing. So the idea is how can you ask questions in such way that you will validate true intent of that certain customer and their true desires? And people, they can never tell you what they want or what they need. They can never say that. They can never place it into words because if they could do that, then you would be out of a job as a business developer or as an entrepreneur because if they could realize what they need, they would build it themselves. But you build it for them to serve them because you find better ways of helping them out with the problem that they have. They can’t do it themselves. That’s why they can never tell you, Well, you know what I would like?

 

🐿

I would like this. And then you just go and build that and you’re super successful. Because if it were that easy, everybody would be super successful.

 

🐼

I totally agree with this. So can you give me some specific example? What should I ask those person from my list?

 

🐿

Yeah. So the people from your list, they signed up because they had a specific problem that they need solving, or they have a certain need that is currently unfulfilled. In your case, there’s a bunch of parents who don’t know exactly where they should find really solid advice related to how they raise their children or how they offer them any medical assistance in cases of fever or other or other problems that they might experience. Of course, everybody knows that they would go to the internet to look for advice, but you shouldn’t be so cocky about thinking that all of those mothers go to the internet to seek out advice because many mothers these days, they know that internet advice is crap and they don’t believe it anymore. So in order to get out of your own head and really start seeing what’s out there in the world and you already have 300 people that you could ask questions, these are the questions you should be asking. What do you think about problem? Now in your case.

 

🐼

That would be, what do you think about the mothers which are not finding validated medical advice for their kids?

 

🐿

Yeah. And if you think about it more, you could even formulate it in such way that, what do you think about getting medical advice for your children?

 

🐼

Okay.

 

🐿

What do you think about this? How often do you interact with this need of knowing how to get medical advice for your children? How often do you feel that you need this? Have you ever talked to other people about receiving medical advice for your children or helping them out or anything that’s related to this stuff? So this is usually why I just say have you talked to other people about problem? Because it all depends on the problem that you’ve identified and that they can relate to. Then there’s also, are you actively looking for a solution to bypass the problem? In this case, in getting medical advice, one of the solutions may be to look out to the internet to see blogs and forums and personal ideas. Or another way to bypass it, you could learn from the mothers, would be that instead of going to the doctor themselves, they would just rather ask a friend who’s also a mother and who recently went and sort out medical advice.

 

🐼

Basically, I need to see what is their opinion about the problem, how often do they get the problem, if there are other mothers that they are talking about with this person about the problem, so other person, mothers or something like that. I f they have some a shortcut that helped them to currently solve with the codes, the problem that bypassing that you’re referring at.

 

🐿

Yeah, because your clients will always be very creative, even if you believe that or not. They will always have different ideas that they have on how they can bypass the problem. Because as humans, this is what we tend to do. Instead of facing something that heads on when we can’t do that, we just think, What’s the shortest route to take? How can we bypass this? How can we skip around? How can we bend these rules to get to the certain thing that we need? And if you ask them, you will get so much great and valuable insight which can totally shape the next steps of you building your business.

 

🐼

Let’s say I pull these questions. I have valuable feedback that I have it in notes written now.

 

🐿

Are.

 

🐼

There any other questions that you would advise me and also the listeners that they can ask?

 

🐿

Yeah. Now, these are also very important and some of them might be even more important than the other ones because two of these questions will validate the magnitude of the problem. Does it keep you up at night?

 

🐼

What does it mean if it keeps you up at night?

 

🐿

Do you always find yourself thinking that you need faster, greater, or cheaper, or maybe on the spot, like, if I need this right now, I need to get this right now. Do you often find yourself thinking about it? So as a mother, if you have certain issues, something scares you about your child’s health, how do you relate to that? So let’s say that your child has a fever right now. Can you really sleep that night? What would you like to happen? Just listen to the answers. You don’t have to imply any answer, but maybe the answers that you will hear is like, No, I really can’t sleep at night. Because in this case, it might actually be this. It might be literally that they can’t sleep at night thinking about how they can get the medical advice. So that’s why in some countries there are hot lines on which you can call to solve this problem. And you should know if it keeps them up at night. And if it does, and they usually find themselves thinking about solving this problem, then you’ve got a very clear market. And now there’s another one that’s important.

 

🐿

Is it one of your top three problems right now?

 

🐼

Okay, so if the problem is now in the top of priorities that I need to solve. Yeah.

 

🐿

And for you, it might make sense because your target customer has recently just become a mother and that completely changed her life. It changed, especially if it’s for the first time, it completely changed her life and disrupted her day to day life and everything like that. So you might have a really huge chance of being in her top three problems.

 

🐼

Right now. If each of the problem is not in the top three problems that my user are having, should I found the top three? Basically, what are the problems more important than the one that I’m trying to solve in order to get the entire context?

 

🐿

Especially if you know that this is the target market that you need to serve, then maybe you will not work on your 10th idea, the idea that’s ranking only on the 10th position in their heads. Maybe you can find a third or a second problem that they always have, and maybe you can focus on finding solutions to that other problem which is in the top three.

 

🐼

Actually, it’s interesting because with this question, I might focus on the problem that I’m trying to solve, which is a small problem for them, but seeing that the majority of the users that I’m trying to serve are actually having another problem that I didn’t know about, but just asking them what are their top three problems right now that they’re trying to solve and I actually found a better problem to solve.

 

🐼

This.

 

🐿

Might be very good for you. If you ever go and find this type of information, you are working on something that’s ranked only on the 10th position, but you’ve also stumbled on something that’s one of their top three problems right now, maybe you should build what’s in the top three problems because you already have 300 people interested for which you will solve a really interesting thing and that might lead you to a much faster route to you receiving money in your bank account.

 

🐼

Interesting. Does it matter for me if anyone else tried to solve that problem? Should I ask this?

 

🐿

Yes. This will yield a lot of valuable data, so it will not necessarily tell you if there’s a direct competitor, but there are many direct competitors and you should totally look out for indirect competitors. Even if the only piece of information you will get is, Yeah, so the way I’m solving this right now is through an Excel file because it’s usually Excel files. But there may be some other thing that you have never thought about which will give you so much valuable information into your market and how they think and how they relate to the problem that it will totally help you build a better business and a better product for those customers. And the question is, to ask them is, is there anyone out there trying to solve this for you right now? And trust me, if there is, your customers will know about them. So when you pitch to investors, you will always say, No, we have no competition. We have never had competitors. There are no competitors. We are the only smart guys in this room. Only we thought about doing this.

 

🐼

And outside of this room, not only the smart guys in this room.

 

🐿

Yeah. Your customers will know them. And if your customers don’t know them, that’s even better for you. And that’s something that you could totally brag about to your investors because then you would clearly show them that your customers are unaware of any other solutions, which is a really great point to be at because… Let’s see, for example, we went into the social media space with my company because we’ve realized that nobody knew what the buffer was or what the hood suite was. And we were like, Is that even possible? Because those guys have been around for as long as the internet has been around and there are still people who don’t know about them. And that creates a very interesting opportunity. So our user base, they never knew what the buffer was, what the hood suite was, they never knew about Meet Edgar or a lot of the platforms that we know about. They were completely blind to all of those solutions. And when we came with our solution, it was a first for them.

 

🐼

Okay, that’s really nice because actually they had the problem, but they didn’t know that someone already solved it for them because they didn’t reach them. So the opportunity for you there was to reach them faster and actually.

 

🐿

Be.

 

🐼

The first.

 

🐿

It’s really good to find a market where there isn’t any Uber yet because this is the thing. And the ride sharing thing, you have Uber and blah, blah, blah and others and you will not necessarily want to compete because everybody knows them and it’s hard. But if you go to a market where actually the customers, they don’t know who else is trying to solve this for them, that’s a huge opportunity for you to grab all of those customers because you can be a lot faster than they are.

 

🐼

Interesting. Any other ideas of what should I ask the people from my list?

 

🐿

Yeah. Is this the problem, getting medical advice in this case? Is it something that you started thinking about every waking hour, or every day, or every week, or every month, or every year? And according to this answer, you might have an idea on how your retention will look like. Because if this is something that they think about in every waking hour, then you’ll have huge retention. If it’s something like an app that reminds you to make certain checks to your car which only occur once a year, then that app will not have a lot of retention unless you have a huge fleet of cars.

 

🐼

Interesting. Actually, the answer to this question will impact also the product.

 

🐿

Yeah, it.

 

🐼

Will definitely impact the product. Because, for example, in this example that they will do the check up every year, it might be a solution to just create a reminder for them that they will pay to be reminded every year that they need to do that check up.

 

🐿

Exactly. And the only ones who will pay for this are those who have this problem every year at different dates for different assets.

 

🐼

Yeah, because if I’m trying for this person to build an app that try to get them every hour to check this, they won’t do it because it’s not something that they’re thinking about hourly.

 

🐿

Yeah.

 

🐼

Interesting.

 

🐿

Now that you will have answers for all of these questions that you’ve just asked.

 

🐼

I was just thinking now that I might be in the position which I have basically a lot of answers, but it’s blurry. I’m thinking a little bit like, okay, I need to process all this feedback in order to see if the problem is more clear for me or if it’s actually getting more confusing.

 

🐿

And trust me on this, it can actually become a lot more confusing. So you usually, it becomes much clearer. But we’ve recently stumbled upon a case building one of our products where it actually became a lot more confusing after getting all the answers because instead of getting one problem that we needed to solve, according to different use cases and types of customers that we’ve interviewed, we actually stumbled upon about four different products. So instead of building a product, we could now build four different products and all of them would work, hypothetically.

 

🐼

How would I know that the problem is well defined and I can move on? Is there something that I can check? Can I?

 

🐿

Yeah. It’s actually what we’ve also used in the confusing case to define different problems, different types of customers, and different possible solutions is like for each group, let’s say that in your case is just one group to simplify the discussion. Let’s say there is just one group. The idea is do all of them feel it? Do all of them feel that problem, feel that need? And do they feel completely different things about the problem? Because maybe all of them feel the need or the problem, but all of them think completely differently about all of the other aspects that you’ve just asked. So if all of them feel like they need medical advice, but all of them are telling you completely different things, then maybe it’s not very clear for you at the moment. It could be clearer, maybe it could be clearer, but maybe it will also be confusing. So you really need to think about that and keep it in mind whenever you’re thinking about building the solution. Because if everybody relates to the problem in the same way, that’s like your golden ticket. Because then it’s easy. Otherwise, you might have a really solid problem that you should fix, but maybe the solution will not be one solution.

 

🐿

Maybe there will be five solutions, or maybe the solution will have to be presented in very different ways to very different people.

 

🐼

Let’s assume that for this specific group, the problem is clear for all of them. They feel the same. What would you advise me to do?

 

🐿

I would advise you to move on to the next phase.

 

🐿

Okay. So the next phase will be really thinking about coming up with a solution. But we can still discuss about one more thing here. You could even ask them if there’s one thing you could change about the way you, in your case, get medical advice, especially if some of them already get medical advice in some form or another. If there’s one thing you could change about the way you get medical advice, what would it be? And this is the best question to ask in an already defined market or in a crowded market because the answer to this will give you insight into the solution that you should build.

 

🐼

It’s interesting because we started in the first phase with the interest, we validated that. Then with all these questions that you were telling me about, I defined more clear the problem. But now also you’re helping me how to ask the users so that they give me valuable feedback that will actually transform in features that I might not have even thought about them.

 

🐿

Exactly.

 

🐼

Yeah. I’m using my future customers to help me build the solution for them and not me trying to guess the features that they would need.

 

🐼

Exactly. Now, about the solution, I think we will discuss in another episode in which we’ll move to the next phase also. But if you think there are some ideas that we should share with the people because I’m thinking, for example, that we were saying that we should ask them, we should discuss with them. And probably since we’re doing the startup Express podcast, it would be nice when you discuss with them to buy them a coffee.

 

🐿

Buy them a coffee, definitely. Like you said, you could even go ahead and buy us a coffee. If you go to our website, you can see the Buy Me a Coffee link and you could also buy me a coffee for doing all of these great episodes for you, free of cost.

 

🐼

Yeah, but remember, it’s important to talk with your future customers and in these interactions to be sincere with them in order to try to solve their problem and not sell them something that won’t help them.

 

🐿

Yeah. And actually, in one of my presentations, I didn’t even touch upon this aspect, but now that you’ve started mentioning the importance of being honest and really getting to meet the people, meet them for coffee or tea. As I always say, never alcohol, never anything to do with alcohol, or otherwise you will ruin all of the results that you get from this test. But if you do get them to a nice cafe or tea place or tea house, sit down with the people, be honest, ask your questions. Don’t try to get them to buy into your idea. This is not the place for that. This is not the face for it. And most definitely, since you have a one on one interaction, try to see their body language, try to pick up their interest by thinking about it, and try to see the look in their eyes when you ask them different questions. Try to see how passionate they are about giving you their answers. Try to see if they’re like, I don’t know. I’m in medical advice, man. You ask me if I try to talk to anybody about it, I mean, why would I?

 

🐿

It’s not that interesting. You know what I mean? If you already get this, you should write this down. You should keep a note that even though the person did reply to this question, they weren’t very interested in replying to this question. They were bored. Or maybe if I ask a certain question like, Does it keep you up at night and you see a huge glow in the eyes? Oh, my God. It really keeps me up at night. I can’t stop thinking about anything else. This is what I need.

 

🐼

So unspoken feedback.

 

🐿

Yeah, unspoken feedback. You need to look at different queues like body language. Even from their posture, you can see if they’re interested in the discussion that you’re having, or if they’re just laid back and don’t care, then maybe they don’t care about you solving the problem either, or maybe they’re just tired. So sometimes you can also have that. But if they’re really passionate about the problem and this need and they really want a solution, you will learn that from their body language, from eye contact, from other things. And because you need eye contact and you need the body language, you should also try to inspire as much honesty as you can and not be like one of those shady salesman who try to get you to buy something that you don’t need. So you really need to make them feel very confident in talking about this to you, I mean with you. But to do this, the best way to do it is through honesty.

 

🐼

What I also saw in the interaction that I had with my customers in the previous startup was that it’s important to follow up and to thank them. Just saying them, your feedback was very valuable and that feedback actually got to this part of the product. Thank you for that. Because in this way you will be loyalty with them and you will get them as customers for a longer period of time.

 

🐿

Exactly. And even if you don’t have anything built yet, sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. But if you don’t, then you can tell them that you’ve just gained valuable insight from this interaction and you’re super happy and hope that if it’s the case in the future, that you can definitely talk to them about this again. And they will usually say yes, of course. And then you have their permission to contact them later on when you have your wire frames and your product. And these people will keep talking to you about this problem because you’ve shown genuine interest in their problems, in their need, and in their lives. And if you’re not sure about any of this, just read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s one of the best books to read and it will definitely change your life, especially if you’re trying to pursue a life business. That’s what you need to know to inspire honesty, to get honest feedback and to be honest with people and really understand how you can win people to your side. And it’s not very hard to do. Just letting people know that you’ve gained valuable insight in their time was very valuable to you.

 

🐿

That will make them super excited, super happy. And next time you will call them, they will answer and they can’t wait to meet up with you again.

 

🐼

And I think with all these valuable feedback that I got with your help, we can in a next episode to move to the next phase since you are talking about product and wire frames. So e are now in a position in which I think we can move to the next phase that we will discuss in the next episode. But until there, if it’s something that you would still like to mention, or if not, we can continue the discussion on our Facebook group, Startup Express. So drop there your ideas about how you think about these questions. If there are other questions which work great for you.

 

🐿

We can actually do maybe many episodes, but at least one episode where I can mention a book or two on asking questions because I’ve actually found an amazing book on how to ask questions to get the answers that we’ve just talked about in this episode. And that’s one of the best books. If I were ever to write a book, I would have written that book. But if I would have written it, it wouldn’t be that good. So the author made a terrific job at writing the best book on how you can ask questions that will be helpful for customer development. I’ve never read anything like it.

 

🐼

That sounds great. We should do an episode.

 

🐿

Yeah.

 

🐼

Totally. Okay. Talk to you next.

 

🐿

Time, guys. Until the.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?

 

🐼

Florin, remember in the discussion that we had after we recording the episode with the hip menu acquisition by Food Panda, you were saying that you should never give up and keep doing your best in this startup world. Could you give more details about this? Because I think it would be valuable for our listeners to understand this.

 

🐿

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Actually, I had this conversation with a very dear friend of mine, and she was like, I’m not sure because sometimes it feels like you should just give up. But instead, sometimes it’s like the people who don’t give up, they win. Why is that? I was like, you know the problem with giving up is it’s like you’re on a path to achieving something, something that’s absolutely impressive or unnatural or disruptive, and you know that you can get there. But then there’s going to be a lot of problems, a lot of drawbacks, a lot of things that will make you fall down. Startup life is like roller coaster ride. You go up and then you go down. When you go down, you feel like giving up. And sometimes, if you really want to achieve the end goal, you will never give up. You should never give up because you need to understand that something bad happened to you and that’s why you want to give up. You don’t want to give up because of other reasons. You just want to give up because you feel that you’ve lost so much speed, so much velocity that you will never get to reach the top players in that industry or in that race or in whatever you are trying to compete in because you feel that now they have an advantage because you’ve just had a disadvantage and that makes you want to give up.

 

🐼

The idea would be that even if you close the startup or don’t do anything about it, you don’t have the what if. So to be sure that you tried what you wanted to. So there is no regrets, no what if I would have tried that, if I would have done that. You know, like, to don’t miss things that you felt that you could do it, but you didn’t do it because I don’t or some reasons.

 

🐿

That should be a good end when you’re 100 % convinced that you cannot do this, and this is not related to moments where it was hard.

 

🐼

I won’t enter that market because I’m sure that there is already the other competitor who has the entire market, so most probably I won’t be able to get them.

 

🐿

That’s also not true. You need to understand that if you go into a race and you go full speed, so you try to be the fastest racer in that race, or you try to be the best fighter. Think of Luffy and Son Goku from Anyways and other stuff like that who are always super obsessed about giving their all, training harder, doing better things, really struggling to reach those objectives. It’s like you got to be like that. And why is that? Because you should think about the fact that you were unlucky. You’ve had a drawback. Something held you back from achieving something. But if you don’t give up and you continue doing your best, you go full limit, full throttle. You go like a maniac, like an obsessed person, and you keep going and keep pushing towards those goals. The funny part is your competitors are also people. They are also companies. They will have problems. So by the moment that they have a problem and they start falling back, you will go up in full speed and then they will go behind you and you will be in the front and now you’ve overtaken them and you have the first position.

 

🐿

I’ve seen this over and over again in business. I’ve seen it in my business. I’ve seen it in other businesses. Even the food Panda, because that was the idea. The food Panda in the hip menu example. As I’ve said, there was no chance to compete with those guys, but you can go full throttle and then food Panda will close hip menu and all of a sudden you’re the second biggest player in the market and now you have a total chance of overtaking food Panda and conquering all of the market.

 

🐼

Yeah, because if we have to discuss a year ago, there is no way for some other app to conquer the food delivery market in closed. And actually, one year later, it happened this and now.

 

🐿

This.

 

🐼

App that I think didn’t exist at that point. It didn’t even exist.

 

🐿

I know for certain that nobody that I know has ever heard.

 

🐼

Of them. And that’s actually now our favorite app. So I think…

 

🐿

And it’s something that used, I guess, like with young people inclusion, everybody just uses that now. And the food pandemic is slowly becoming irrelevant because of what they’ve done. So the guys from YouTube, they went full throttle. They went like maniacs. They were building something that they never should have built, but they wanted to build it because it was their passion. And now they’ve had a great opportunity because their competitor had a drawback.

 

🐼

And with a little bit of with a little bit of pinch of salt to say like that, well, if there is obvious that it’s not problem, no problem that you’re solving or something like that, you should stop because that’s the obvious thing to do. But in situation in which you felt that you don’t have any chance, but you know that that’s a real problem and you have a passion to solve that.

 

🐿

This is interesting to point out in the episode. So basically what you’re saying, quit if it’s for the right reasons. You can’t get any traction, what you’re building is wrong, you’re not solving a real problem.

 

🐼

You don’t have passion anymore for that. You have other things that you felt more important to dedicate your time.

 

🐿

Yeah, that’s a good reason to quit. But the fact that you have a competitor and the competitor seems to be doing better than you are, that’s a bad reason to quit because they will fail. They will have points of failure as well. And if you really have everything else, you can get traction, you can get people to sign up for your app, you have passion for what you’re building. You see that you can validate stuff, you see that you can help real people with real problems. Even though the competitor exists now, it doesn’t mean that they will exist a couple of years from now on.

 

🐼

Or that they won’t make a stupid move and annoy everyone in the market.

 

🐿

Exactly. T hat happens a lot. I can even give you an example with Formula One. T here was this kid in the last season, 2019, he was at the Toro Rosso team in Formula One. Now he managed to get Red Bull because of some impressive stuff that he’s done. He started with the Toro Rosso is still a team of Red Bull, for those of you who don’t know. Those are the lame cars that they have where they don’t have that much equipment, they don’t have the best things there. And this kid, he gave his all in a race that didn’t make sense because in that race, no matter who won, the championship was already decided. All of the places were decided. You couldn’t get more points than that. But he gave it his all and he ended up in top three of the race because two Ferraris crashed into one another. Another Mercedes got pulled out of the race because of other reasons. And a lot of things happened to his competitors that made him become the superstar of that race and that will earn him a spot to the big team of Red Bull.

 

🐼

So the answer would be always do your best, no matter the environment, let’s say like that. Do your best and sometimes you’ll be the right person at the right moment. Because I think the right person at the right moment are those who are doing their best, no matter the circumstances.

 

🐿

But if you’re doing nothing with your life, you will never be able to become the right person at the right time because you’re nowhere to be found. And then destiny cannot choose you.

 

🐼

Give us example, if you have, of reasons that you feel that would be…

 

🐿

That would be good for the theme of discussion today. And even if you have your own examples of moments when you’ve done this, you went full throttle and that led you to a win because the others started having drawbacks, give us those examples. If we really like them and if we really like them and we really think that they’re exactly what we’ve been discussing in this episode, we are going to mention all of those examples in a future episode on Startup Espresso.

 

🐼

Yeah. So drop a message on the Facebook group and let’s continue the discussion there.

 

🐿

Yeah. And if you don’t know where the Facebook group is, just do a Google search for Startup Espresso and you will either land yourself on the group or if not on the website, then you will see the group on the website.

 

🐼

Talk to you there.

 

🐿

Yeah. Definitely send us those.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?

 

🐼

Florin, should we grind today some thought about validation? Because everyone is talking about it. And you gave me a few minutes ago some good example of books and people that are talking about it. Maybe you can say them again for our listeners.

 

🐿

Yeah, definitely. So we have great people like Eric Riis, Steve Blank, Ash Mayura, and a bunch of other guys have written some very interesting ideas on how to validate, on actually why you need to validate everything that goes on into the process of planning your brand new business, the brand new business that you are trying to launch. And instead of going and building something that nobody wants, they all teach you that you should validate every little thing, every little aspect. And this has created a very huge market for getting people to understand how they could do those validations. Because everybody asks me at conferences, at events, they ask me, Okay, so we get it, we need to validate, but how is validation done? How do you do validation? I need to validate this really small piece of my business model. How do I go about validating this exact part? And at all the events that I’ve been to, nobody could actually tell you how to do that type of validation. Everybody’s like, Well, learn about customer development. And you could learn about customer development. There are great books on customer development and learning what people would need from your business, what type of business they would need, what problem they need solving and other stuff like that.

 

🐿

But it still doesn’t help you how do you validate this sales channel? How do you validate this pricing model? How do you validate this price point? How do you validate X, Y, and Z? And we are going to do a small series on Startup Espresso just for you, just to let you know how you can validate every little thing. So each episode will be a type of validation that you could do and how to do it, because you already know the why from these amazing experts and these amazing authors. And now from Startup Espresso, you will learn how to validate each small thing because you know why you need to do it and now you will see how you can do it.

 

🐼

Since we’re talking of validation, because we’re also in the process of validating what is interesting for you, please let us know on our Facebook group on Startup Express if you think that this content is valuable for you, what ideas would you like to listen for us? Because there is still a validation from our side also about what content we should bring to you so it’s most useful. A ctually, this came up from the experience that I had together with my co founders. We were all technical persons, which was hard for us to validate because it’s easy to write code because it’s only you and computer.

 

🐿

Yeah, and you’re happy because you’re working on something that feels real.

 

🐼

Nobody tells you that it’s not okay what you’re doing because you think that everybody wants that product. Validating, it takes you out of your comfort zone because you will need to discuss with people. You will need to understand that maybe you assume something which is not actually like that. I think it’s this first episode, we should focus on this part with validating if the problem is real. I think you call it interest validation.

 

🐿

Am I right? Yeah, I call it interest validation. Why? You basically want to validate the fact that there is or there is not any interest in the type of thing that you are trying to build. You see, I use the word type of thing. So it’s not like this thing specifically, this type of thing. I’m thinking about doing something in this space that would look something like this, this, or that, and I’m not sure which one of them I want to build as a final product. I have some ideas on how those should look like, but I’m actually trying to see if I could get anybody interested in trying out one of those products. So I shouldn’t build anything if I don’t validate that there’s an interest in using something that I’m planning to build.

 

🐼

Does it actually need to be interest from other people or I can start that it’s interest for me? Because I’m thinking a little bit. Look, for example, when we try to build the medical advice app, the interest from our side was to build something that would help us. Because, for example, in that situation, we are using a lot of text messages with some friend of us, which was doctors, to get medical advice. At least for me, there was interest to build that because it would have been useful for me. Now, can I consider this some interest validation?

 

🐿

You see, this is why I actually like talking to you on all of these podcast and in real life when we’re just randomly talking about random stuff, because we can get to really impressive things and really impressive details. Yeah, well, what you just said, that’s the best reason you should be building your startup when you had the problem and you are trying to solve it. Now, there is one small thing here. You should do that, but you should also make certain by doing interest validation that there are tons of other people in this world who have the same problem that you are already trying to solve. That’s the best point that you could get to with building a startup when you want it because you had a problem, you’re trying to build it, but then make sure that you find at least 1,000 or a million people who also have the same problem and want that thing done for them?

 

🐼

Okay. So in order to find them, I actually need to know who they are, right? And where to look after them. Because it’s not enough to come to and tell you, Florin, I know there are like a thousand of people interested in this.

 

🐿

Yeah, I would instantly go and say, How do you know that? Can you show me any details, any research that you are 100 % sure that those thousand people exist in the world? Because if you can show me a list, it means that you already have some idea on how you would target them and sell them your product. But if you don’t know and you just think that there are a thousand or a million people in the world, then I’m really not interested in discussing this further because it’s very clear that you haven’t done any interest validation.

 

🐼

Okay, so let’s go a step further then. And I will tell you that, hey, Florine, I have a thousand mothers which are on this Facebook group where I drop this landing page that promise a medical advice for kids and 300 of them sign up. Is that some interest validation?

 

🐿

Well, yes, because you give me a very concrete number. There’s like a thousand people and you got 30 % sign ups. It’s really good.

 

🐼

With the promise of having an app that will allow them to get medical advice for their kids.

 

🐿

That’s a great example of how you could be doing this.

 

🐼

I somehow validated a little bit the interest. Now I should move further with the validation, right? I shouldn’t just start building the product because it’s not enough validated.

 

🐿

No, you shouldn’t build the product yet. You should move to other ideas. First, you’re not very sure if they would actually do something more with the app. You should see this is a very good example that you would get signups, but you shouldn’t start building it because you don’t know if this is going to go further along. Further along, maybe you need to validate some other things. You have validated the interest from a standpoint of signups, but would they use it every day, for example? How often do they have this problem and there are other steps that you need to validate.

 

🐼

You said that how often would they have this problem. So actually, I think I rushed up the things a little bit. So even if I have those signed up, I should still validate more that they actually have the problem and they need to talk with somebody about their kids for medical purposes. Exactly. So I should stay more in that Facebook group, maybe, from which I got the sign ups and look what they are complaining about, what they are discussing about there.

 

🐿

I have a couple of ideas on how you can do validation and customer development. And the next point would be to start taking the people who signed up, who had the interest of using, to get them on to a couple of interviews, to a series of interviews. And if you want, we can make another.

 

🐼

Episode in.

 

🐿

Which to discuss about. In which to discuss about, you’ve already got this, what are the next steps that you need to validate? And then we can move on to the next steps because there are still a couple of things to discuss at this step right here because you had a very clear example of how you could find people for the app that you’re trying to build, and it’s a really good example. But there are other examples of how you could do interest validation. So if you want to do this, you’ve instantly thought about Facebook groups. But then you can also think about forums because maybe there are some markets or areas of a certain market where people still use forums. You can even see, like you said, Facebook groups. Then you can see comments on blog posts and get a lot of details from the comments on different blog posts. If they are about parenting, maybe you can see on a lot of different sites, a lot of people have different comments. Maybe from those comments you can extract the idea that they would need medical advice from somebody who would help them as parents with their kids.

 

🐼

I think that what you just told me here is that if I’m a good developer and I want to build a product, I should not build a product that I think is doing something. But first, I should look, I don’t know, on Google, on Twitter, on forums, or all these channels that.

 

🐿

You.

 

🐼

Told me about for actual problems that people are complaining about and start making notes about it. I see on Quora that somebody’s complaining about, I don’t know, how hard is to find good viewers for your games, for example.

 

🐿

Definitely.

 

🐼

I continue after that. I’m looking, okay, let’s see on Twitter forums what the people are complaining about regarding game reviews or something like that. I’m looking about the existing players in the market that are trying to solve this, what other complaints are about it? If it’s a mobile app, I don’t know. I look on the app store on Google Play to see are people complaining always about something?

 

🐿

Yeah. You can even look at search queries. On Google, if you see there’s a lot of search queries, a lot of people searching for, how do I get reviews for my game? How can you get your game reviewed? How can you get professional reviewers for a game? Or other search queries that all of them imply that the solution would be to have a service that offers you people to review your games, then if that’s what the startup you’re trying to build, then that’s a great way to validate interest because let’s say that I would think about, yeah, so I’m going to make this community where you just sign up as a company and then you have a whole bunch of people reviewing your games and I’m going to make this access very easy to you and I’m going to totally disrupt this market. And if that’s the case, then it’s awesome because by what we’ve just discussed, you’ve discussed about that on Quora, and then me with the search queries and with the other places where you can validate interest, we could definitely see that there is interest in the market and there would be a lot of people searching for ways in which they can get reviews for their game.

 

🐿

So if I come along and build a platform for that, I’m going to get tons of signups and that’s what the data shows me. So that’s my very initial research. I usually call this in my five step customer development program, I call this phase zero, because this is the first thing that you need to get. Will there be anybody interested in what I’m trying to build? And this is an easy way and a bulletproof way to see if there’s interest.

 

🐼

And since you call this the phase zero in the five phases program that we discuss about, to move to the next phase, I assume there is the outcome of this interest, which might be that, yes, there is interest. No, there is no interest. Now, if yes, I think it’s obvious to move to the next thing and maybe we’ll discuss in another episode about this. But if not, what should I do?

 

🐿

Yeah, you should, if not, then you should go and try something else.

 

🐼

Because I think here is the complicated part for you to understand that there is not a need for what you’re trying to build.

 

🐿

Yeah, it’s interesting to discuss about this, really, because if you’re doing something in a very classic or interesting market, then you will find search queries for it. But if you’re building something that’s so disruptive and so alien and so wow and so blue ocean, you will not see Google search queries for that because it’s way too new and people didn’t even think that they have that problem yet.

 

🐼

Yeah, here I wanted to get because I’m thinking now if there would have been Google when Henry Ford was leaving, I think that if he would look at Google queries, he wouldn’t have find a lot of interest for cars in that period.

 

🐿

Yeah, I agree. And that’s why you should look at it like, maybe people in that age, in that period, would have been looking on Google for stuff like, how can I get there faster?

 

🐼

Exactly.

 

🐿

And if you can validate this interest, so it’s not like I want a faster horse, but I want to go from A to B faster, then you could build a whole bunch of products. You could build airplanes, cars, trains, anything that could get you from A to B but faster because that’s what you are looking for. And if you understand this small detail, then you can go back to everything that me and Paul discussed about today and think about searching on forums, on Facebook groups after this small tiny details. Do you want something done faster, better with more customer service, with a hands on experience or with white gloves? Hands on experiences when somebody helps you, like hands on to set something up. Or maybe you want a white glove service when you don’t even have a headache with setting things up because you paid the company to make all the set up for you. And there’s a lot of these very interesting details that could end up with you having a very successful company.

 

🐼

And since we were mentioning the Facebook group, let’s continue the discussion there on our startup expression Facebook group. And since we’re speaking about the interest, let us know there if there is interest from you on these topics and let us know also how you validated your idea and the need that you’re trying to solve.

 

🐿

Yeah, that’s great. And if you make something really interesting, so other than the queries, the Facebook groups, the forums, whatever we discuss today, if you have any other super great example, we can totally do an episode about it as well and mention you and mention you as the source of that amazing piece of content.

 

🐼

Yeah, that sounds great. And I think that’s all for.

 

🐿

Today, right? Yeah, that’s all for today’s episode.

 

🐼

Talk to you on our Facebook group.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?

 

🐼

So, Florin, we are back after quite a while.

 

🐿

Yeah, definitely.

 

🐼

What do you want to grind today and what we should discuss about since we’re back? I would like to be a little bit mean. What do you think if we roast a little bit how Food Panda acquired the Cloosh based hip menu startup.

 

🐿

Yeah, I think that we need to be mean, green, and obscene with this episode.

 

🐼

Yeah, because it was easy for us to order food at the office, and now it’s not anymore. So they hurt us personally.

 

🐿

Oh, yeah, that was really personal, to be honest. It was my top used app on the phone.

 

🐼

Don’t mess.

 

🐿

With our food. Yeah, and don’t mess with sushi, got it? You can’t ever mess with that.

 

🐼

And group ordering sushi because actually it all started from group ordering, which is funny.

 

🐿

I guess that was right for most cases, but in my case, I really liked using the app even just for myself.

 

🐼

So should we give a little bit of background for the listeners to know? Yeah, we should. There was that awesome startup, Hip Manual, which made a great app from a US perspective for food ordering.

 

🐿

They had a really great menu and they were really hip.

 

🐼

In the specific of the closed market, they had an awesome feature which was group ordering, which allows you to group order food. Each one pay for his part or her part. So it was very easy to order food at the office.

 

🐿

Yeah, and you could easily share the links so that everybody could contribute and collaborate on the final tab that was being ordered.

 

🐼

Yeah. And after that, they got appealing for Food Panda, which acquired them.

 

🐿

Yeah. I guess everybody that I know was like, man, that was such a smart move because now if you want to order food in close, you will either go to Food Panda or you would go to Hip menu. But the company that owns both is the biggest winner in the market. And everybody was like, man, that was a genius move because right now you can’t even compete with these guys because they’ve got the best players in town. They have both of them, they’re theirs and nobody else with or they’re using any other app for ordering food. And they won the game. They had a huge monopoly on this thing and it was impossible to compete with those guys. And everybody was like, yeah, let’s applaud them. That was a smart move. Come on.

 

🐼

Yeah, actually. Moving a little bit forward, it came first of December last year when they closed Hitman.

 

🐿

Yeah, it was worse than Disney acquiring Star Wars.

 

🐼

And now I think from a smart person, you would think that, okay, they closed the old app, but they would have taken that awesome features and the group ordering, which every user loved it, in the new app. And what happened?

 

🐿

So what happened was they’ve completely deleted everything. So they purchased the best technology with the best user experience with the best set of features that were fully validated in the Romanian market, and they’ve just deleted it. They’ve deleted everything that they’ve actually acquired, and the story goes a bit further to everything that they’ve deleted and we’re stupid about it. But the idea is that they’ve completely shut down Hip menu and nobody could use it from that day forward.

 

🐼

And this would, from point of view, acceptable if their mobile app would have been at least that good enough.

 

🐿

But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. There was nothing good that you could do in the app. You didn’t know how to look at your bills.

 

🐼

I’m laughing because Florin actually loved the UX of the foodpanda app.

 

🐿

Yeah, I guess it’s really hard for me to love UX because I usually have a lot of stuff to complain about when I see a new app, and I can really tell you what I don’t like about it because I dislike a lot of things, but I actually did like Hip menu. They messing this up was the most stupid thing that I’ve ever seen.

 

🐼

Looking a little bit back at first of December, it was funny because on the social media, on everywhere, all the users were annoyed by this fact that they couldn’t group order anymore. It happened something interesting that the company started to cancel orders. The restaurants wasn’t happy. Basically, they annoyed anyone.

 

🐿

They’ve annoyed their customers and they’ve annoyed the partners that they had. So all of the restaurants because the orders went down because they decided to close hip menu.

 

🐼

And here comes the funny part from my point of view, which was a third player in the market that no one knew about, what I’m eating, Eurka Moning in the Romanian. And given the fact that everyone was annoyed of Food Panda and in all these noise, these third competitors started to gain visibility. It was funny because they were not gaining visibility from a marketing campaign or something like that. It was just people that saying, Look, try this alternative.

 

🐿

Basically, the idiot company that has done that, that made the acquisition. So as I said in the beginning of the episode, they’ve basically managed to have a monopoly over the whole market and nobody was able to compete with them. But then they shot themselves in the foot and they’ve killed half of their business and now they’ve made an entry point for other players to get into their freaking market. They’ve paid a lot of money to get and they’ve destroyed it and said, Yeah, let’s have new contenders because we won the game. We want it to be challenging for us again. And these guys came along and because everybody was complaining, they had zero resistance to joining this new thing that was out in town.

 

🐼

Going a little bit more general, do you think you should keep an eye on the users of your competitors if they are, for example, annoyed by something or something like that, and you would go after them?

 

🐿

Well, I guess it depends. I would go after them if something is as stupid as foodpanda destroying hip menu. Yeah, if that’s the case, definitely, because it’s pretty clear that they will never recover from that mistake. But if it’s like my competitor has a certain bug and I know that that bug can be fixed in about a month, there’s no point in me going after the users because I’ll be just distracting myself from my work on my own startup to go after the competitors that have bugs in their platforms and it’s not really useful. But even in my case, there was a moment when there was this competitor, they had a lifetime access to their SEO tool and because they’ve seen us doing monthly subscriptions, they immediately copied our model and they’ve annoyed all of their users and we went after their users because we convinced them that if they don’t want to pay monthly, R was the best option. And since they hated the other guy so much, they jumped ship over to our solution. So that was pretty profitable for us. And it was nice to see the trend in how stupid our competitors get and use that to our advantage.

 

🐿

But I think that this is even more of an advantage to anybody who was trying to get in the game of food ordering because they’ve done the worst mistake that you could possibly do. And it’s like, either you were Yochim An Nk or another startup, or Glovo, because Glovo didn’t have a chance on the market and Glovo started exploding as well after Food Panda shot themselves in the leg. It’s like, okay, so it’s a free for all. Let’s all join. Let’s all build food ordering apps now because there’s a huge market. It was already tested, validated and proven to make a lot of money.

 

🐼

Yeah. And it’s also funny from another point of view because I’m remembering in that period seeing a lot of advertised for take away on billboards on the road and something like that. I didn’t install the app because, as you said, there was this already.

 

🐿

But.

 

🐼

With that move, I installed the app because I needed some alternative.

 

🐿

It was Exactly. They’ve basically turned something that their competitors had and wasn’t working for the competitors into something that the competitors had, and it started working amazingly well because they’ve ruined their own business.

 

🐼

What I think it went also even more bad for them was the fact that their customer support was so such awful in that period. T hey were.

 

🐿

Just.

 

🐼

Giving plain template messages for all these complaints.

 

🐿

Yeah, and in most cases, they didn’t even reply to the support messages. They were getting huge, tons of support messages, and they were not prepared for that. It’s like they were so stupid and arrogant that they thought they could close Hib menu and there would be no drawbacks from doing that. And they weren’t prepared. They should have been super prepared to answer everything because the one thing that you want to never do to your users is to make them feel invisible.

 

🐼

I totally agree. Just by the way, you know that we are always saying that we are not your lawyers, not your consultants. We don’t have any interest in this new food ordering app in EUTC. But the funny part is that we were so angry on Food Panda that we needed to…

 

🐿

Well, actually, I almost had an interest in this because I’ve realized what huge market they’ve opened. I was discussing with a couple of friends that we should totally get into food ordering because you can have the worst app and you will win just because Food Panda did that to themselves. But yeah.

 

🐼

I hope that I will get some free vouchers if you will at some point go into this.

 

🐿

Oh, yeah, definitely. No, I will not do group ordering, but this was the moment. An amazing opportunity created by a competitor who could no longer hold their ego inside.

 

🐼

So I think the lesson here would be to listen to your users and if they’re complaining about something, do something in that matter.

 

🐿

And if you do manage to ever make an acquisition as big as that one, keep both companies alive.

 

🐼

And F oot Panda, please don’t block us. We already deleted the app, so it’s useful for you.

 

🐿

And you’ve totally become irrelevant now.

 

🐼

See you guys. See.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today? I know. Let’s grind the seasonality of business.

 

🐼

And since it’s the period in which everybody’s back to work, back to school, back from holidays, back to a co working space.

 

🐿

Back to a co working space, back to running around after investors, trying to stress them all day long. Hey, man, can you invest in my business? In my business.

 

🐼

Back to seeing money pouring in from the clients because finally they have money to spend. Or do they have money to spend after their holidays?

 

🐿

I think they don’t. How are their budgets actually after the holidays? I guess all this money goes spent on Lamborghinis and martinis and stuff like that.

 

🐼

I really hope to be a good month, but probably we can talk in, or if we remember in a future episode about how good this month was or not, and we could say that we are back to Startup Express because also we took…

 

🐿

Yeah, we’re finally back. We’re doing this right now.

 

🐼

Yeah. So seasonality of business.

 

🐿

What does that even mean? I mean, such a fancy word.

 

🐼

Well, if you’re in the fashion industry, it’s easy. In the winter, you sell winter clothes. In the summer, you sell.

 

🐿

Summer stuff like, I know, sleepers.

 

🐼

Yeah, I want to say bikini, but…

 

🐿

You can sell that all the time.

 

🐼

So how this relate to startups?

 

🐿

Well, it can relate in lots of ways. I mean, if your startup is based on, I know, let’s say the wedding season, then summer is awesome for you. But if you’re a software service business like my business, then somewhere is horrible because basically everybody is on vacations or getting married or attending weddings and nobody cares about their business and they don’t want to invest in software. So there you have it.

 

🐼

So can we frame it to say that in this episode, we will talk about seasonality as period of times in which sales spike or go down based on some events or some time intervals from the year?

 

🐿

Yeah. And as we’re grinding that, we can also get into the fact that you can actually think about each season and each month in order to come up with new ideas for how to sell more products and how to move more products on the market.

 

🐼

Would you think to a specific example?

 

🐿

Yeah. Usually in Q4 because you have October, which is Halloween, then you have Thanksgiving, then you have Black Friday, then you have Cyber Monday, and then you have Christmas and everything related to Christmas, you can basically create a lot of sales events with a lot of offers. Usually, it doesn’t even depend if you’re a tech startup or not because you can just create a lot of new ideas for new launches just based on Q4 and all the events around Q4.

 

🐼

Even if for some startups, this means that they don’t… So for example, if my startup doesn’t have anything to do with… I don’t know, maybe Black Friday is not the best example, but let’s say I’m a small CRM startup company that offers CRM for medium companies and it’s Valentine’s Day. Do you think I could run a promotion of Valentine’s Day or I shouldn’t because I don’t have anything to do with it?

 

🐿

Definitely. You could totally run even different types of promotions.

 

🐼

How would you see, for example, in this situation, a good promotion?

 

🐿

Let’s try boring promotion first.

 

🐼

A boring one?

 

🐿

Yeah, a really boring promotion.

 

🐼

Do you have an example.

 

🐿

In mind? Yeah, something that anybody could do. Hey, you know what? 50 % off. You see that in your inbox as you open Gmail and you have 50 % off our Valentine’s offer. And then you open it and you see that the CRM has like 20 % or maybe 50 % if you buy the yearly plan. And that’s like the boring offer that you can do.

 

🐼

Wait, so you made me to open the email by promising me 50 % off?

 

🐿

Yeah. Because it was related to Valentine’s Day and you’re currently thinking about Valentine’s Day, or you’re getting other content about Valentine’s Day from other providers, so then you’re more likely to also open my email if I also talk about Valentine’s Day.

 

🐼

Okay. And why is this a boring promotion?

 

🐿

Well, because you didn’t really get creative about it. You just offered some discount without making a deeper connection between your product, your audience, and the event like Valentine’s Day. But you could basically turn this around. You could even have the subject of the email saying something bold like, We don’t like a lot of people, but we do love you. Here’s our Valentine’s promotion.

 

🐼

I think in the first example, I would spend money on chocolate and wine and not on that CRM. But in the second one, I think I might give it a thought to your promotion.

 

🐿

I know, right? Or if you don’t want to make this about your company, you could do it something like, Here’s a fun love story between your customers and your company. And in this case, I don’t talk about myself, I talk about my customers and their customers. And they’ll be even more interested in hearing what I have to say about the promotion because maybe I give some very creative content on how they can use the CRM to make their customers fall in love with them.

 

🐼

Basically, it’s very important to be creative and stand out because everybody is doing promotion in that period. I guess that if you run promotions in that time frame, you need to be more creative than just running a promotion in the middle of the month without any relevance.

 

🐿

I agree. I totally agree. And especially as you’ve said, a lot of people will be doing promotions during that period. So you have to be creative about it because even if I’m not going to get an email from another CRM company, I will get emails from other people doing Valentine’s Day stuff. So basically then I don’t compete with other CRMs. I compete with other people who have Valentine’s Day offers, which can be anything from Apple to a dating site to everything that could make a Valentine’s promotion.

 

🐼

To the restaurant from your neighborhood.

 

🐿

Definitely. And we do have restaurants. I do get offers from restaurants on Valentine’s Day for couples or for married couples, and they target their audience according to different specifics, but they also make it about Valentine’s Day.

 

🐼

It’s not something that you definitely need by Valentine’s Day because, for example, if I need to take an Uber on the Valentine’s Day, I’m happy that they offer, I don’t know, 10 % off because either way I would have taken that Uber.

 

🐿

Yeah, I agree. I agree. T hey can build more loyalty with such an offer.

 

🐼

That’s interesting. I’m thinking a little bit now on the other side. Okay, you have this promotion on Valentine’s. Let’s say you have a spike in sale, you have a promotion of Black Friday, you have a spike in sale. But can it be seasonality in which you have a down period of sales?

 

🐿

Yeah. Like you have in the summer, as I’ve said, if you’re selling to a very business to business audience and you’re trying to make sales and sales events during the summer, well, they’ll be gone on business trips or they’ll be gone on vacations. They won’t be at the office. And even those who are at the office, they’re already planning a lot of other stuff or they’re busy because it’s just them at the office and other coworkers. So basically they have a lot bigger volume of work that they need to get done in that period. So they will completely ignore your offers. But this is for the case when you sell to a B2B audience. However, if you are like the steam marketplace that sells PC games, well, they have their huge promotions during the summer because students, pupils, young adults, and I know people who are super young, they’ll be on vacation from school, from the university, they’ll be on vacation from their jobs, and they will have a lot of time to play games. And that’s when people, and you can see this on their forums, that’s when they go wild and they buy a lot of games, even 20 games.

 

🐿

They only get to play one of those games, but they buy during the summer promotion because the promotion is huge and it’s perfect timing.

 

🐼

So it’s very important for you to know what are your seasons in your business, say like that. Buy the classical one at Valentine’s Day, Black Friday.

 

🐿

Yeah, definitely. Because even if I make a lot of sales this month, it doesn’t mean that you with your business could replicate the success. Maybe in your case, your audience is much more likely to buy during another season.

 

🐼

Talking about seasons, I think if we refer only to sales, it’s not the most 100 % accurate to say like that because I think we need to look at it also from a cost perspective because definitely if I don’t get so much revenue, I need to budget some money for that period. For example, for the summer in which I’m not selling, it might be wise.

 

🐿

Yeah, interesting. So instead of discussing about how you can make more money and get a spike in sales, you can actually use the idea of seasonality of business to prepare for periods when you will have less money.

 

🐼

Yeah, because as we know, everyone, cash flow is important. So you can also look at this from a cash flow perspective.

 

🐿

Yeah, this is a very valid point.

 

🐼

And I think also, if we go a little bit even back to say like that on the tech startups, you might plan some other activities. For example, if you’re not doing sales because your customers are on holiday, I’m trying to think what you could do. An example would be, for example, doing some actual development?

 

🐿

Yeah, that would be a good idea.

 

🐼

Because you can focus on building new features, trying them out, maybe. I don’t know. Would you try or launch it during the summer for validating, so for testing it? Or when everybody’s…

 

🐿

I would only release it for testing it because I’d get fewer users. And if something goes amiss, then they can tell me and we’re going to fix it. And very few people are going to see that we’ve made a mistake because everybody else was on vacation.

 

🐼

So good plan would sound like a soft launch during the summer when everyone is in vacation to see if there are bugs, there are issues with the with the feature and then doing…

 

🐿

And you don’t announce it to anybody. So only if people find it, then it’s good for them. They can fill in the bug request and everything, but you don’t launch it. You don’t plan it. You don’t talk about it to anybody.

 

🐼

And when they’re back from holiday, you just announce them that, Hey, we have a cool new feature that you can try it out.

 

🐿

Or you do a product launch around that feature if it’s a more impressive feature. Then you can actually spend a lot of time, especially in quarter four, to talk about new features and to make launch events for all the changes that you’ve made during the summer, which is a really great thing actually, because you can do a lot of development during the summer. You can test it without any stress. And then once people get back to work, you can really start promoting it and working on the promotion side of things. And then you use the way that time passes to your advantage.

 

🐼

And repeat the cycle because…

 

🐿

Yeah, and repeat the cycle next year. And I guess this makes planning a lot easier than anything else you could do.

 

🐼

Nice. So basically we talk about sales and seasonality, cost and cash flow and seasonality, but also we’re looking now it influence the planning and feature development.

 

🐿

Yeah, and the product lifecycle.

 

🐼

That’s really interesting. Also, I’m thinking a little bit now, so if, for example, you look at your analytics, would it be wise how to call it? So to also take in consideration this part? Because otherwise, I might look that I didn’t have any people on the website this month or it dropped.

 

🐿

Definitely. Yeah, it also affects that, especially in terms of terms of usage, how many people have actually engaged with the platform. You could find out that during summer, maybe nobody engages with the platform or very few people do. One other thing that you could see, and I noticed from the time when we had a website builder platform, it was very interesting for us because we got a lot of engagement during the winter holiday. And that was pretty weird because everybody tells you like, come on, man, you’re going to launch website builder on Christmas. How’s that going to work? Everybody’s with their families, everybody’s doing yada yada yada, and then you have the New Year and yada yada yada, and nobody will want to create blogs and websites and spend their time and stuff like that. Well, as it turns out, it was the only period when they thought they had actual time to try out the website builder tool and see if they like it. Because they were on vacation, they had nothing better to do and they were curious about it. So they said, Okay, now I finally have a lot of time, let’s do this.

 

🐿

And we had a lot of usage during the winter season and we didn’t prepare for this. And we had a lot of support request and we were like, Really? And that lesson was learned after a while.

 

🐼

So I think since you didn’t have people to do support, you don’t have a side builder actually now, right?

 

🐿

Yeah, it wasn’t related to that. But during the next years, we actually planned for this and we knew that, okay, we’re going to take our own vacation before the winter holidays. And then during the winter holidays, we would actually be on support. We would work on, I know, fixing issues, seeing how their sites load and doing a lot of optimizations during the winter season, which is weird because nobody does that. But we had to because that’s what the customers wanted.

 

🐼

Nice. Also, it came to my mind now that I saw actually one or two promotions of some businesses that somehow tried to steal the stars. So to be the first. Basically, instead of Black Friday, they made a Black Friday promotion one week earlier. What do you think about this and what’s your thought about this? Because you assume that people have the money, so you want to be the first who make them to spend them. Even if it’s like I make a Black Friday win one week before the actual Black Friday.

 

🐿

This is crazy. Okay, so, dear audience, Paul has basically just created the most important topic of discussion for today’s episode, because what you’re saying is perfectly, perfectly true. And if you plan a Halloween campaign, and this is what a lot of interns and new people who have started with our company have asked me, if we have to do a Halloween campaign, when will we do it? Because Halloween is on the 31st of October, right? Yeah. So when do we do the.

 

🐼

Campaign? well, one week before… Prepare it or launch it?

 

🐿

No, launch it. We don’t talk about.

 

🐼

Preparation, just launch it. During the Halloween, right? Because it’s the Halloween campaign.

 

🐿

Yeah, that’s wrong because people will be out celebrating Halloween and they will not pay attention to the Halloween promotion. So basically what the textbooks, so to call them, would say would be do your promotion for Halloween one week before. But because that’s what people generally think about doing, everybody’s doing their promotion one week before. So you’ll have a lot of competition. And now very smart marketers, they actually start the promotion two weeks before so that they’re ahead of everybody else with the promotion. Because otherwise it’s exactly as you’ve said it. If I start my promotion one week before, but I have three other people who sell products on Halloween and they started two weeks before, my customers bought from the other three retailers and they don’t have any cash left to buy my offer.

 

🐼

When it comes out. So if I’m doing it even after Halloween, they don’t have any more money because they spent it also on the Halloween day. Exactly. Interesting. I actually thought it was weird a little bit seeing it with so much time before, but from what you’re saying, it makes sense.

 

🐿

Yeah, man, it’s so weird. I’ve actually learned this lesson from a couple of internet marketers who are selling informational products on the web. And they were telling me like, no, if you want to do the promotion, you have to run it before everybody else because otherwise people won’t have any more money on their credit cards. And this can lead to something that’s even crazier. And this does not happen for every single industry. But you could test it out just to see if it makes sense for your own business. And the thing to test, and I also know this from these internet marketers, is if you want to have a promotion or you want to drive conversions or message your customers, because in the Lin business canvas, the business canvas that you have for your startup, you know that you have the relationship channels. So you have the relationship channels and email push notifications, messages to your Facebook group where you have your customers and you try to push an offer out or just make sure that people reach your pricing page during a certain period so that you drive conversions during one point in the month.

 

🐿

So you basically have an event when you want to drive your conversions, when you want to get as many people as possible to start buying the product. Now, when will you do it? Will you do it at the beginning of the month, in the middle of the month, or at the end of the month? And you can test this out for yourself, but one of the best ideas is to do it in the middle of the month, because that’s when usually people get paid on.

 

🐼

Their credit card. When they are receiving their salaries and.

 

🐿

Their money. Exactly. That’s when they receive the salary. And because people get so many emails, so many push notifications, so many things with sales during any given month, they receive the salary. If you make them buy too late, they will already have spent the money on something else. And then you will have to wait another month until these people can actually buy a rougher. This is something to test out.

 

🐼

Let us know on our Facebook group how this went. So if you do an experiment like this, because actually for me, this is the new for… I always thought that the best period would be at the beginning of the month, but actually it might be that they don’t have too many money left in their spending budget because…

 

🐼

Exactly.

 

🐿

Interesting. And this is something that I guess is different from country to country, but we’re on international market and it’s what we’ve seen on all of the countries where we sell our products. So it seems a bit important to know when people are actually receiving their paychecks.

 

🐼

Also, since we’re talking about this part and budgets, sorry, I would like to ask you another question regarding seasonality. So for example, would you consider a season, a budget period of a big company? So if I’m selling to big companies that have yearly budgets, can I somehow relate this to seasonality?

 

🐿

Yeah. And I only know this from other people who have told me that they do this. I haven’t actually sold using this to enterprises. The only sales to enterprises were occasional and those customers reached out to us so we didn’t have anything planned for outreach. But for people who have sold to enterprises and they did do outreach, they actually use this because they were trying to sell in the periods when they knew those companies were creating the budgets. And they had to be exactly during that time frame. So it’s about three months when they create the budgets and when they allocate the resources and stuff like that. And if you don’t go into that window, no matter how much the persons that you know in that company want to buy a product, they will refuse to buy it because they can’t get the buying of other people inside the business. And then you have to wait for a whole new year to make the sale.

 

🐼

And I think another important period, it’s also at the end of the budgeted period, because if they still have budget left, they need to spend it on something. So I think you could give it a try also at the end of the last quarter, for example. Because if I’m, I don’t know, the marketing responsible at this company, I still have a few thousand bucks in the budget, I will lose them if I don’t spend them on something. And if you come to me and you’re selling your SEO.

 

🐿

Tools.

 

🐼

I will spend them because otherwise, I need to give them back.

 

🐿

Yeah, I agree. And maybe you’ve always wanted to do something related to SEO and it wasn’t the time. So now that you have this, why not spend it?

 

🐼

And I think you can link it, for example, with the Halloween since it’s almost in appropriate period of…

 

🐿

Yeah. All right. So we’ve actually covered a lot of ideas around the seasonality of business.

 

🐼

And sometimes of podcast because we also… If you look at it, it might be that we had the first season, then we took.

 

🐿

A.

 

🐼

Holiday in which actually we work a lot on our businesses, but now we are back.

 

🐿

We’ve basically taken a break from doing the podcast because we knew that you guys were on vacation and that you weren’t listening to us. And what did we do? We did development.

 

🐼

Now, since we’re back with the new seasons, you would like us to let us know what subjects would you like. Don’t forget about the Facebook group that we have on our startup Espresso Facebook page. We work on our newly website that will be soon.

 

🐿

The best part is that if you’re typing startup Espresso on Google, you will find our Twitter account, you will find our website, which is startupespresso. Live, and you can find the website and from the website you can find everything else, including the sponsorship panel where you can sponsor new episodes because our coffee isn’t cheap. And because it’s their best presser, we do drink a lot of coffee to create this podcast.

 

🐼

And also the hosting and hopefully more coffee.

 

🐿

Yeah, more coffee. I guess it’s always more coffee.

 

🐼

With us. I was thinking at a new grinder that we broke it last week, but definitely more coffee because we can solve it with the grinder part.

 

🐿

Yeah, we broke that. That grinder was awesome. It helped us create our intro sound and that was a great piece of technology. It will be dearly missed.

 

🐼

That’s in the history of the podcast. A lso, we are happy to let you know that now you can listen us on Spotify, on Apple, basically everything.

 

🐿

Yeah, I was a teacher and I guess everything else.

 

🐼

So don’t forget, buy us a coffee.

 

🐿

Yeah, buy us a coffee and don’t forget, we’re not your consultants.

 

🐼

We’re not your lawyers.

 

🐿

And we’re not.

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?

 

🐼

We are grinding financials and how to be more disciplined as a founder. Florin, why do you think that it’s important for a founder to track cost, expenses, revenue streams, basically to track these toughs?

 

🐿

Well, in my experience, people don’t really like tracking anything, and they’re basically very happy to rely on blind luck. And it’s like if I’m tracking something and seeing that something goes wrong, that’s bad. And I want to get that feeling that everything is going good. And I think this is one of the main reasons why people don’t track anything.

 

🐼

Okay, so basically if I’m a founder that I have a lot of money, I don’t track some costs because if I have money to pay them, I don’t want to know and to see how much money I spend on coffee, for example, for the office.

 

🐿

Exactly. You do have the money right now and that’s all that matters.

 

🐼

Okay.

 

🐿

It’s a really great pitfall that I guess a lot of founders fall into, especially founders that have been funded by investors. They fall into this trap of not tracking anything and they basically have no idea if they’re generating cash or wasting cash.

 

🐼

Do you think that usually founder think at cost and revenue streams initially when thinking about their startup, or it’s just something that at some point I might get to if I have the time?

 

🐿

It’s not easy to answer this question.

 

🐼

Why?

 

🐿

Because most founders, they do think about costs and revenue streams in the initial planning phase when they write down their business model, especially because they need to present that to investors. But then they either go bootstrapped or they get actual financing. And after this step in their process, they no longer track costs and revenue streams because they’re all in the business plan. So why would I bother with them on an ongoing basis? So I guess the biggest problem comes from funders who quit studying these metrics after actually starting out with their own money or with money from investment.

 

🐼

I would be curious, so those who listen us, just drop us a message in the group because if would be to ask yourself now, do you know on what your money go on a monthly basis? Let’s say top three cost and top three revenue streams for your startup. I would be really curious. I don’t know about you, but I would be curious to see how much of our listeners actually know which are their top three expenses on a monthly basis.

 

🐿

Yeah, I agree. And it should be something… For me, it would be interesting to see that you know the specifics, so you know the exact cost. You don’t know the group of costs, but you know the exact cost where you spend most of your money.

 

🐼

Because, for example, in our situation, I remembering that as to technical founders, we didn’t have no tracking at all of expenses, of revenues. Basically, we didn’t have at least an Excel file in which to put the total cost that we have each month. I remember that basically in the first year, we didn’t have nothing. In the second year, we started just with a simple Excel sheet in which we had the revenue on one column and the cost on other column, but only as totals. No budget, no nothing. Next year, we compared our revenue with the previous year, so it was a little bit better. A ctually, we start doing budgets for the cost and I will get immediately to this part. How was in your situation?

 

🐿

I wasn’t allowed to make such oversight. Basically, when I first started my first startup, I had a guy, he was a financial officer at Microsoft in Seattle, and he was advising our startup, trying to help us get investments and stuff like that. At one point he said, Dude, do you guys really want investments? Then you have to learn what’s inside this Excel sheet. If you don’t know that, don’t even bother asking for my help again.

 

🐼

Actually, I didn’t formulate the question quite well. The idea was Excel was in your situation the best friend also at the beginning or was some other tool?

 

🐿

Obviously Excel. It had all of these guys formulas inside and we tracked cash flow, churn rate, growth, subscriptions, lifetime value, all of that stuff inside this Excel file. So it was a super huge Excel file. It took me a while to fully understand it. It was quite complicated for me as a first time entrepreneur. It was way too much because I had no training in finance and this was even before I made some studies into business administration, got a mini MBA and stuff like that. So basically all of this was completely new for me.

 

🐼

So I think a nice takeaway from here would be that if you’re at very beginning or you don’t have no financial education, just initially talk with somebody about this to get some help.

 

🐿

It doesn’t really matter where you are. There’s going to be finance guys who organize events in your city. Try to find these business events where they talk about finance and how you can grow your business purely based on financial data. Go to those seminars or join some webinars on this. Find a couple of courses and lectures on Corsera and you will find a lot of knowledge. And this is something you need as an entrepreneur.

 

🐼

You said about revenue streams, about lifetime value and all these parts. So all of us know that the business model canvas is the most common, if not one of the common tools for the startup founders. How do you think is this related to cost? Does this help the founders to think at the cost from the beginning? Does it not? So initially I’m looking at the business model canvas. Is this part that I’m focusing on or is it ignored?

 

🐿

I think everybody ignores that part. It’s just like those last few steps in your BMC in your business model canvas that you need to complete. And people just do it because they need to complete that part. But nobody actually knows what’s going on inside revenue streams and cost structure. I can give an example. So most of the funders at these events that I go to and I mentor, I ask them about their cost structures and everybody’s like, We’re going to have hosting costs. I’m like, Yes, of course you will have hosting costs. You guys do stuff based on a freaking cloud and you have servers. Yes, everybody knows that. But what about your real costs? Taxes, salaries, office space, internet provider, rent, exactly.

 

🐼

Your time?

 

🐿

Yeah.

 

🐼

Because I think this is one of the most important costs that the founders don’t take into account, their time. I remember for us, we were working a lot. I mean, a lot. We were like, when we’re leaving at two, three in the night from the office and just doing development. A ctually, we had this discussion with a friend of mine who’s a manager in a big company. He was like, What are your costs? I was like, Zero.

 

🐿

We.

 

🐼

Were staying in a friend’s office, so we didn’t have cost with this. We have our own laptops. We didn’t pay Internet because it was from there. It was like, Really? No cost? I was like, No, I didn’t pay nothing this month. Zero money. I don’t have any cost. I was like, Okay, let’s see. Two developers. Let’s say on average, you work 200 hours per month, 400 hours, or I don’t know how the development hour is now in different parts, but let’s say, or a few bucks, it was like, This is your cost.

 

🐿

Yeah. yeah. It’s actually something that nobody really takes into account because when you start out, you think that you will have the drive to keep it going forever on that a cost structure where everything is free except your own time. And then you’ll get to one point where you will figure out that you can no longer do that because you will be overburned and you will simply not function properly. And in that case, basically, you will no longer have the opportunity to pay the costs. And that’s when your business tanks. So yeah, I think it’s really nice. And I think that a lot of people don’t really think about this.

 

🐼

Yeah, because in the end, it’s the most important thing that you have and you actually invested in.

 

🐿

Yeah, and you need to think about it as an investment that has to stop at one point because you can’t drag it on for two years. You may do it for one year, maybe, maybe one year and a half, but you will not be able to push through two years of doing the same 16 hours a day work days. It’s crazy. I’ve done that, so I know, and it’s crazy. And years after that, you will sometimes regret the decisions because you’ll be too tired. You will see that you could have done a lot of other things in that time to earn more money or to develop another business. There’s a cost of opportunity attached to that. So time costs a lot.

 

🐼

Cost of opportunity. Can you detail a little bit more here for who’s not very familiar with it?

 

🐿

Let’s say that you have a startup doing something, I know, food ordering or whatever, you dedicate shit tons of hours to it. You do 16 hours a day gigs to keep that so called business going. It’s not really a business, but you think it’s a business. And you do this for one year, it doesn’t work. And then you will have a revelation after doing that that maybe in that time, in those 16 hours a day for one year, you could have worked a lot of different things which would have gotten your next business funded. Now, this is the cost of opportunity because you’ve basically wasted a lot of time, but that time could equal, I know, $100,000. Maybe you would have made $100,000 which you now don’t have because you’ve spent it all on the defective business.

 

🐼

Continuing on this idea, I think there is another cost that people should be aware and should track it, and it’s the cost of acquisition.

 

🐿

This is the problem with the time because I know a lot of founders, I know myself because I’ve done this, my co founder has done this, and a couple of people working for us have done that. It’s like, Yeah, you know what? Our marketing doesn’t cost a thing, man, because we are doing that nonstop and we’re basically acquiring so many users and we do that all of that, we do it for free. Yes, but how much does your salary cost? How much does the salary of those employees cost? Get it all together, add all of the taxes, all of the relevant taxes, then add the office space, the coffee they drink at the office, the other benefits that they have, plug in how many hours they work on that free marketing, and then see how much cost is associated in your business with keeping those engines going.

 

🐼

And besides this, just think in those hours that you invest in these marketing campaigns, how much money you could have done by thinking at the strategy of the company. Actually, Florin is enjoying the coffee too much now.

 

🐿

Yeah, this is really good coffee, man. What did you get us today?

 

🐼

It’s the latest Equador from Square Mile. Those guys from London are making a great coffee. Actually, we’re not paid by them, so we just enjoyed their coffee.

 

🐿

We aren’t paid yet.

 

🐼

Yeah, but if you want to buy us a coffee, just go to buy us a coffee.

 

🐿

Yeah, go to the website, startupespresso. Live, and you will find the link there because we’re good at user experience.

 

🐼

And stuff. Now, seriously, on that part, just think of that part, the hours that you investing in doing email template for the marketing campaign, you could have spent those hours as a founder thinking at the strategy and the direction of the company. So the cost of opportunity here is, again…

 

🐿

Yeah, it’s pretty large.

 

🐼

On that part. Yeah. For us, in our example, you were saying you hear about the hours that you invested in marketing. So for us, we’re at a point in which we did the invoices in Excel because we were bootstrapped and we didn’t pay for the software tool for the invoicing.

 

🐿

And then we just… That’s actually great because a lot of founders, they will go and get expensive tools like $50 a month tools where they make one invoice and that’s just wasted money. Excel is probably better.

 

🐼

I would like at some point in the episode to get back to this part of different tools that could cost and you may be replace them by something else which is free in the beginning. But in our situation, we were in a point in which we saw that we are doing recurring invoices. A ctually, when we were looking at the time that we spent doing certain things during the day, we saw that there is some part that we were investing in doing ourselves, the invoices in Excel. Then we outsource it to a company, but we saw that it’s even good from a cost perspective for us just to pay a software that is doing recurring invoicing. In our situation, we are using something which is specific to Romania, given the fact that we are selling only on the local market. But maybe do you know something which is internationally that you could recommend for the people, for example?

 

🐿

Yeah, there’s Fresh books. They suck at customer service, I will give them that. But luckily, I don’t really need their customer service too often because their platform is good. This is a great recommendation. But yeah, we’ve been using FreshBooks for a while for the Oasis. Actually, it’s.

 

🐼

Pretty good. You open this subject and I think would be so customer support. I f you want to do it properly, I think you have a lot of cost there because it takes you some money. Even if you have a really awesome product.

 

🐿

Look, I don’t want to be one of those finance douchbag gurus that says it’s not a cost, it’s an investment. But most of the times it is an investment. We could make a whole episode about how to deliver customer service, but the idea is that in our case anyway, we grew a lot in the first two years only because we were the best in our market at customer service.

 

🐼

More about the customer service and how to do it properly, probably in the next episode.

 

🐿

In our case, it was definitely an investment. It helped us grow, even though we did spend a lot of time doing customer service. And also customer service will help you create a much better product if you do it ight? If you do it right. So basically it’s a cost that helps your product become better. It helps your sales get better and it helps word of mouth to go around related to your company. So if you do it right, you can make money out of it. Otherwise, it’s just an annoying cost which you will want to outsource to India like Microsoft does.

 

🐼

Hosting. How do you think about hosting from a cost perspective? Should you invest a lot in it? Because in my opinion as a tech person, I think you have, for example, with Azure from Microsoft, with AWS from Amazon, or with a Heroku, for example, you could go with very cheap. I think these parts in which you pay on demand on how much you use, it’s really nice in the beginning. It’s not really nice. Why? Because you can’t predict it?

 

🐿

Yeah.

 

🐼

You can’t predict it. But you can.

 

🐿

Budget it. Yeah, but on Azure, you can have costs just randomly because Microsoft says it’s a bug and then you will end up paying thousands of dollars during a month. And there are other companies doing this practices. So it’s not only that one. There are a lot more companies doing this thing from my discussions with other founders. So you shouldn’t really rely on that because you need to make sure that they don’t open up a lot of unused inventory just because they want to hit their revenue targets for the month or their cash flow targets for the month. Now, I think that you should buy, especially if you’re just starting out, you don’t really have customers. You won’t have customers in the next few months because, let’s be honest, you want to really rocket marketing. And it’s much better if you just use a couple of very cheap hosting solutions, cheap but very reliable, like you have in Germany, and then you can start pretty good machine with €30 and it’s all you need. And it’s a lot better than cloud architecture and stuff like that. For example, we were on Azure Plus on Microsoft’s BISPARC program or whatever that was, and we had $60,000 of hosting from Azure, and it was more painful to use.

 

🐿

It got us distracted from building the actual product, and we learned about cloud management and other stuff that we’ve never, ever used. Then we switched back to our very cheap Hetsner servers and we kept offering that service for hundreds of thousands of sites and we didn’t really care. It was a lot better choice for us.

 

🐼

Building on this part with budgeting and stuff, for example, let’s take some scenarios. Let’s say a very early startup that is working to validate the idea, a startup that is somewhere in trying to get to the product market feet, and a startup in, let’s say, some growth phase. The initial one, what do you think should budget a lot? I think that it should budget a lot on development and on the market research, actually the customer interviews and everything.

 

🐿

We tend to disagree on this episode. Actually, I would only budget for customer interviews, no development whatsoever.

 

🐼

I’m the tech person, so I still want some money for the developers.

 

🐿

True. You’re going to get stuck in market research, my friend. Yeah, so just market research. If you really want a great piece of advice, all of you people listening to the podcast, I found out that when developing tech products, you can actually even white label license technology at first. Basically, you can have your product built by other companies and then just sell it under your brand. This is done a lot in retail and a lot of the products that you buy on a daily basis. Don’t worry, it’s completely done in tech. I’ve recently found out a lot of ideas and a lot of companies making tens of millions in annual recurring revenue and they are basically white labeling everything and you will not know that those solutions come from them. And it’s really amazing what you can do. If you don’t build the product, you just validate. And once you validate it, then you go and build your own product and actually do the thing. I know it’s a really big shift in perspective. I’m not sure if you can do it across any industry, but if you can, this is the best solution. This is the best idea for validating businesses.

 

🐼

Okay. Because actually, so how I was thinking was to build something, test it, iterate, test, iterate. The building was part of the validation, but to validate with some small iteration like…

 

🐼

I’ve done that. Small MVPs.

 

🐿

It takes a lot of energy. It distract a lot. I found that to be very, very ineffective. It was for our case anyway. It was completely ineffective. That was not a great solution for us.

 

🐼

Let us know if you have experience on these parts, how you did it and if it works or not.

 

🐿

Join our Facebook group and let us know what you think about us. If you would go strictly on market research at first, or if you would try to develop as much as possible while also being lean.

 

🐼

As in a lean startup? Yeah, exactly. Like iterating a lot. A startup that, for example, has the initial revenue and it’s somewhere hitting the product market feet here.

 

🐿

By the way, did I tell you… Sorry for digressing, but did I tell you that at one point we spent like… This was in another business, another startup that I never really got off the ground. It’s another story. But the thing is that we were trying to build a digital literary circle where people could get on the platform, they could write their poems, their novels, and then other people would read them. And we’ve basically spent three weeks trying to develop the platform, and then a couple more weeks in which we didn’t work so intensely on this. We didn’t build anything. It was horrible. We didn’t have anything to show for it. And then in one weekend, I singlehandedly built all of that thing using Body Press in WordPress. All of it. All of our plans, all of our sketches for the MVP, all of it built in Body Press in one weekend.

 

🐼

So yeah. No, actually, it’s first time on a telling me this.

 

🐼

Really nice. So I think that, yeah, we sidetracked a little bit, but I think it’s okay. So here I think it’s very important the background because, for example, in my situation as a tech founder, it would have been more easier to build that stuff from a technical perspective. In your situation, for example, you actually hacked the product, let’s say like that, didn’t develop it, but actually build the product with some existing tools there.

 

🐿

Yeah, exactly. You can totally hack it together. You just want to show people that something is made and something works. Once you know that it works and you start to reach product market fit, then you can go in full developer mode and really start doing that because you will know that you will earn a lot of money which will help you develop the product.

 

🐼

Yeah, because I think it’s very important to know that what to build is what the customers want, what the users want, because the development costs a lot.

 

🐼

And you don’t want to develop something based on some hypothesis that you didn’t actually test them.

 

🐼

Yeah. i learned this on my skin.

 

🐿

Me too. I’ve learned it on my skin, on my own actually, after I’ve built two successful products. The third one that I’ve built was completely unsuccessful because I’ve done exactly this. I had the hypothesis, I thought that I tested it right, I didn’t. Then I’ve built a lot of stuff which took a lot of years, a lot of developers, and we didn’t get anywhere with the product. So yeah, that was a huge burn. That was really bad for cash flow.

 

🐼

So to join the other two examples that we initially said that we’ll discuss them differently. So there would be that invest a lot in market research and customer development, then at some point start to move easily by building the product and growing the product.

 

🐿

Yeah, it’s not nice. Funders usually don’t really want to talk to customers because it’s hard, because it’s out of their comfort zone, because they think that the customers will say that their baby is ugly and other stuff like that. This is my startup, this is my baby, this is my child. I put a lot of passion into this. And then the customer walks in and says that he doesn’t need that or that the product isn’t good. And you don’t really want to hear that about your passion project. And that’s why a lot of people are super afraid of getting out there and talking.

 

🐼

To customers. And even more if you invested a lot in developing it.

 

🐿

Yeah, like two years.

 

🐼

But, man, it was only our time. We didn’t pay no one.

 

🐿

No, actually, I did.

 

🐼

So in our situation, we’re two developers that we invest a lot of time. Yeah, and I think we started with financials and we got to some disagreements in this episode.

 

🐿

Yeah, I guess so.

 

🐼

If there would be a take away that you would suggest to our listeners, like on budgeting and looking at their financials, what that would be?

 

🐿

It’s so interesting. You really need to know what goes into cash flow and especially to plot out recurring revenue, how it keeps growing because in the first few months you will see that you have recurring revenue and it’s annoying because it grows so slow. But it’s like a snowball effect. The more you get into it, the more you acquire customers who are paying on a monthly basis, the more money you will earn overall. So in nine months you could be earning a lot of money, even though during the first three months you see that there’s not a lot of revenue coming out from that. And if the lifetime of a customer, so the time that he spends with your company, with your subscriptions is huge, then that snowball is only going to get larger. Then you need to know how that’s going to be affected by churn because some of the people on your subscriptions, they will quit their subscriptions and that will negatively affect the snowball that’s building up. That’s what you really need to know. And really make a lot of plans in Excel and see how these numbers go and how they grow from month to month.

 

🐿

Try to place churn there, try to place growth, try to place a lot of numbers. It will help you really predict what’s going to actually go in your business. And the fact that I’ve predicted a lot of things in my business, like we have multiple products across multiple industries, and it’s really helped me in a lot of the moments where we had problems or where we had huge success, I’ve foreseen it because I kept using this model. Nothing really surprises me a lot because I always know what’s going on, so I know what to expect. When you come something bad happens, I’m like, Yeah, I’m sorry this happened. This is it, but I predicted it. It’s not a big deal. I have back ups, like five back ups for this situation. So if backup one fails, I have backup two. Then if backup two fails, I have backup three. And I have multiple versions of the files where I keep the costs and the revenues. So if something bad, like super bad happens, I have the other sheet in the Excel file or in the Google Drive spreadsheet, and I will know what to expect. If one of my founders or one of my investors asks me, Okay, so if that’s going to go bad, what’s going to happen to the business?

 

🐿

I have the other Excel file. I will show them the other Excel file, and most of the times it will work. This is something that I actually learned from one of my investors. You need to be very good at predicting this stuff because otherwise you will not have credibility of your employees, of your investors. And that’s why I really started to be prepared. Now, a lot of things have gone poorly, have gone badly, but I was always prepared for them. And this is incredible. I know a lot of founders who weren’t prepared for anything, and then they suffered a lot just because they couldn’t deal with the problem that appeared. And other ideas are to follow Noah Kagan from AppSumo. He has a lot of great ideas on how to think about unit sales, how to structure unit sales, and how to prepare for selling more units of your product. And I think that his methods, he even sends you an Excel file in one of his blog articles. I think he does a really great job at helping you plan the sales and the sales targets that you are going to make. When we had the most success, it was in those periods where we had actual sales targets.

 

🐿

Now, because we’ve done a lot of stuff lately in the last year, we didn’t really measure those sales targets as well as we used to. And that has taken our business on the wrong path because we didn’t do that. And now that’s what we’re getting back to. So that’s also super important.

 

🐼

Actually, getting back to the Excel that I started with. Actually, our latest version and what we added to it is basically the revenue target.

 

🐿

Oh.

 

🐼

Nice. Basically. Revenue target and besides revenue target, a profit target.

 

🐿

Because.

 

🐼

That was also what we were looking at. I was laughing at some point. I don’t know if you heard me because I wanted to say that as there are the PowerPoint founders which have a backup slide prepared for every question, I think there are the real founders that actually have, as you say, another Excel sheet for a bad or for good scenario and they are prepared with real numbers, with validated data and not just some PowerPoint with three billion dollar market that I’ll take 1 % and we’ll.

 

🐿

Be happy. See, we can agree. I totally agree with this.

 

🐼

Actually, if we take 1 %, we have enough money for the coffee. From my perspective, I think just keep an eye on your cost, keep an eye on your development costs, on your hosting, on your marketing, on the development. Don’t develop it unless you’re sure that it will bring value to our users and invest and budget a lot for customer support because doing it properly will not only save you money, but probably bring you money from our customers.

 

🐿

Yeah, and sales targets.

 

🐼

That’s really cool. Budget money for bad periods of time. I think the budget time for this episode.

 

🐿

Is almost done. It’s not on the train.

 

🐼

It’s all folks. Don’t forget, we’re not your consultants.

 

🐿

We’re not your lawyers.

 

🐼

And we’re not your financial advisors. But we.

 

🐿

Are not.

 

🐼

We will accept the coffee, so buy us a coffee and join our Facebook group for more discussions.

 

🐿

Yes, and talk to your CFO. He will definitely like to buy us a coffee for the great non advice, non consultancy and non legal advice that we’ve given you in this episode.

 

🐼

See.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today? Today we are getting to the essence of SEO and content marketing for startups.

 

🐼

Seo and content marketing for startups. So are you referring here how I should buy or hire an SEO expert or how I should develop SEO skills, or what are you referring to it?

 

🐿

Well, with today’s technology, you can actually do a lot of things on your own and without spending way too much time browsing forums or blogs to learn about SEO and also how to do content marketing. So you can do a lot of these things. You can do them on your own. And especially if you’re on a founder’s budget, then you will want to keep that money for yourself and not hire an expert who charges you $4,000 per month to do your SEO.

 

🐼

And how it’s happening, I guess, in SEO world, and you can confirm if it’s like this or not, you never are 100 % about the results. So you might pay an expert and actually.

 

🐿

Like.

 

🐼

Losing some money or a part of them without the expected results.

 

🐿

Yeah. And basically, you won’t get the results, as you said. And the thing is that you’re basically sabotaging yourself by doing this, because when somebody starts working with you on SEO, they will ask you the following, what are your keywords? What keywords do you want me to rank you for? And you don’t know your keywords because you’re a startup. You haven’t done a lot of research. You don’t know how to do that research. So even if you had some ideas of what your keywords might be, if they just start blindly optimizing content for you and pages for you and getting you ranked for the wrong keywords on Google, that will not help you because it might not help you get traffic. Or if you get traffic, you get traffic from the wrong people, so you won’t bring the relevant visitors to your websites. And since you are most probably trying to do a lean startup, you should also do lean SEO.

 

🐼

Actually, if I’m looking back a little bit, I’m thinking that with our startup initially, like with the first doctor, actually, we didn’t invest at all in SEO. I think in the first year, we didn’t even thought or know what are that keywords and invested in keywords research. Why do you think it’s important for a founder to invest in keyword research?

 

🐿

I guess that investing in keyword research is the best thing you can do as a startup founder, even if you will not want to do SEO ever. Because by identifying the way that your potential consumers or your potential customers search on the web, you can find a lot of ideas for problems that they are trying to solve and for the kinds of solutions that they are looking for online. So you can actually get a huge kickstart on your marketing campaigns and your marketing programs just by figuring out their shopping behaviors and their research behaviors. Because if you understand that, then you can create amazing campaigns for your audience.

 

🐼

Let’s say a little bit on this part with the keyword research. So if I’m a founder with less or more experience, how would you recommend me to start doing the keyword research? What tools should I use? Where should I go or where should I start?

 

🐿

Well, without trying to do any shameless promotion here, you should actually go to Squorley SEO and you should definitely do that because it has a free version and there are a lot of things on the free version. But the idea is that if you will look at the 14 days journey to better ranking, you will find all the information that you need for starting out with SEO, even if you will choose not to do SEO because it won’t make sense for your industry. But just by knowing all of the details there, you will know exactly how to look at keywords because most founders that I know, they don’t know how to do a keyword research because they don’t know that they should look at direct keyword one, direct keyword 2, direct keyword three, and direct keyword 4. And they don’t know when they should choose these types of levels for the keyword research they do. And they also don’t know when to do indirect keywords. Usually, you would use content marketing when you’re targeting indirect keywords, and you could use the other levels of keyword when you’re trying to look for something very specific. In case you would have a very complex tool for social media, let’s say, you would basically have your first keywords like social media tools or social media management, which is the obvious choice, right?

 

🐼

Yeah. Actually, in this part, with these 40 days, I remember that I started using it on the e-commerce platform that I’m trying to launch it. Maybe if you agree, we can try to take this as an experiment. Basically… With the e-commerce platform? Exactly. F or the audience, what I’m trying to do is to build the e-commerce website for the Romanian market that sells natural products and healthy products. H ow do you start with this or with these 40 days? W here it starts me? Because the audience, I guess, they didn’t try it.

 

🐿

Yeah. Well, you just have to go. Each day has different recipe and you just have to read the instructions and then do what it tells you to do. Because it will walk you through everything that you need to do to research great keywords for your online store. Because it will take you from the idea of online stores for natural products to ideas like a certain type of product like natural teas, organic products, bio products, stuff like that.

 

🐼

Coffee since we’re making coffee, we’re doing a podcast.

 

🐿

Organic coffee, natural coffee, stuff like that. Yeah, definitely. And then you could find out from those 14 days, you could find out how to expand the portfolio of keywords that you are optimizing for, so that when people are searching for anything related to your e-commerce store, they will find the products from your e-commerce store and not from the e-commerce stores of your competitors.

 

🐼

I think a lot of the struggle, at least for the technical founders regarding these keywords and once you know them, is the other part in which actually you need to somehow build a web page or the content to write that content for that keyword. Remember in my example, for example, with First Doctor, what we did, we just took a template from an HTML template that we edited for our landing page, and we didn’t just put there our features, basically, of the app. Starting from these keywords, should I look to how to write the content or should there be an intermediate re steps in this?

 

🐿

You should even try to find keywords for your features. A lot of really smart things in SEO is if you have an app, you would try to find keywords for the app itself and then have a landing page for your app using that main keyword. But then you would also need other landing pages. Each landing page presents one of your features, and for that feature, you actually do keyword research.

 

🐼

For example, if I have a doctor appointment app, what keyword do you think I should start with, for example?

 

🐿

Finding a doctor, contacting a doctor.

 

🐼

This would be the keyword 1.

 

🐿

Keyword, the first level is the thing that best describes the app itself. And then keyword 2 would be the features.

 

🐼

Okay, so let’s say I have a feature that you can make an appointment by just talking with Alexa, for example. All right.

 

🐿

Well, you would have to see if people search for any kinds of keywords related to that. For example, if people search on Google for things like Alexa appointment apps.

 

🐼

Okay. And basically should I have different landing pages for all these keywords?

 

🐿

Definitely. You always want to match the keyword to a very specific landing page that has that exact keyword written on it. And even if you would try to do Google ads, for example, Google also wants this on its advertising platform. So if you’re targeting a keyword, that keyword needs to appear in the content of the page to which you take the visitor who clicked on the ad because otherwise it would give you a bad score. And if they see that you don’t update the landing page, they can even ban your account, your Google ads account. So we’ve learned that from a Google specialist who’s actually working at Google for the ads part. And we were like, Yeah, we didn’t know that. We thought that this was only for SEO. We didn’t know that it impacts advertising as well, but it does.

 

🐼

Okay. I actually didn’t know this, to be honest.

 

🐿

I’ve learned it last week because I know SEO, but I didn’t really know a lot about advertising, but it seems that they apply the same rules to advertising as well.

 

🐼

Interesting, really nice. In term of SEO and content marketing, as a founder, would you recommend me to start with a certain platform? Should I build my website from scratch? Should I use, I don’t know, WordPress or some platform?

 

🐿

You should use something custom for the web app. For the web version of your app, you should use something custom. But for the website itself, you should definitely use WordPress because there are a lot of plug ins and a lot of customizations that you can make which are very specific to WordPress and which will get you ranked higher. You have a lot of tools that will help you with conversion rate optimization, a lot of tools that will help you with social media, a lot of tools that will help you with email marketing, and all these are built for WordPress. And because you have a WordPress site, it’s much easier to use all of these tools because you don’t have to invest so much time in getting everything started and everything going because most of them are done automatically because they use the WordPress system. Otherwise, you have to work a lot on integrations and integrations can go wrong and.

 

🐼

A lot of different aspects. Yeah, actually, totally. Regarding this part with the WordPress, for example, in my experience with this e-commerce, basically a struggle that I have is the part in which currently there are a lot of pages and it’s quite hard for me to follow them and to see on what to focus on, what to rank it now, what to rank it later. At the moment, I feel that a lot of pages and it’s hard for me to follow what page is for which keyword optimized.

 

🐿

That makes a lot of sense, actually. Most of the people that I know, they struggle exactly with this part. I mean, especially e-commerce owners where you have a lot of products on the e-commerce side. You will know if you want if you want to do something today, what are you going to work on? But if you start using the focus pages framework where you actually focus on a couple of pages at a time, you will know exactly what to do with those pages to rank them higher on Google, and then you can move on to another set of pages. So for example, you can take a set of five pages with some of the most important products. They may be your most popular products on the e-commerce store, and you’ve seen that you can make really great sales with those products because a lot of people who come to your page, they actually buy the product. Those are the first pages that you will want to rank high on Google. So let’s say that you have a very special syrup or a cream or something like that, then you can optimize it, get it on the first page of Google by following a lot of different steps.

 

🐿

It’s not really that hard these days to follow the steps because Google has made SEO a lot more accessible and easy for people. Because there are a lot of ranking factors that are now very transparent and very public. You need to have this, this, this, this, that, and it’s a list of about 54 factors that you can directly influence to make Google rank your pages higher and to see more quality on the page. And if you actually work on those ranking factors for these first five pages, you will rank these first five pages and then you can move on to other five pages from your side. So in your case, you can make five products first. You will make all of them be really good because it takes a lot of time and a lot of work to get this to a very good state. And then once they are ranked, you can move on to the next ones. Because if they are not ranked, then it means that you need to change the content on the pages. You may need to change the keywords that you’re targeting for the pages. You may need to change the pages themselves.

 

🐿

Sometimes you need to make a lot of adjustments to the content because one ranking factor is, even though you have to write a lot of words on the page, sometimes because you write a lot of words, you make the text super boring. So the person that lands on the product page, they will instantly bounce off and go to another website because your site was boring. So in this case, for example, in squarely SEO and in our focus pages section, we have a thing that says, Okay, write 1,000 words on this page to get a good score from our platform. But you also need to make sure that once you make this change, people will spend an average of at least two minutes on the page. So there are two major points that you need to get straight in order for us to say that you’ve done a great job at that particular point because we want to make sure that you have long content, but that the long content is engaging and keeps people browsing through the page. Otherwise, you haven’t really done anything useful. Google looks at how much time people spend on your pages.

 

🐿

If Google sees that a lot of people come to your page, then they bounce off, they will give you a lower score and you will fall down in rankings.

 

🐼

I think there might be some people that are not familiar with the bounce off concept.

 

🐿

Yeah. So a bounce happens when somebody enters your page and then they immediately close your page. They hit X in the browser and they leave your page for good.

 

🐼

Okay. And I think this is, for example, if you use the wrong keyword and they don’t find what they search for or it’s boring, as you say. Okay. If I understand correctly, basically, what should I do initially is to write the long content, so let’s say the 1,000 words content, and then in the following days or following week to look at the average time. Because if something is not okay regarding the average time, I should change something there.

 

🐿

Yeah, you can do that, but you need to make sure that you get enough traffic to the page. That’s also something that you should be looking at because if you’re not getting enough traffic, there isn’t a lot of potential for that average to get modified.

 

🐼

Basically I optimize this page, I move the focus to say like that to the next one. I think if I’m correct, this part with the focus pages, you introduce it in S 4, right? You are the first.

 

🐿

Yeah, we’ve introduced it in the latest version. We are basically the only ones on the market capable of offering this feature because it looks at over 54 ranking factors to give you the results and to give you the optimizations that you still need to do. The really hard part was that this is not like general advice. This looks at each of your pages. You have five pages, each of them have different statistics and you can’t treat all of them the same. Our platform will actually show you how you need to treat each page and how each page needs to get ranked because the way you get one page ranked won’t be the same way that you get the second page ranked because a lot of things are different from page to page.

 

🐼

I agree with this because I thought when I ranked the first one that it would be very easy for the next one. But actually, it’s easy but it takes work. You need to follow the steps but actually you can do it step by step on this.

 

🐿

Part. exactly. And you will see that you have pages on your website that are better than others. One of your pages might be 5,000 words long and it might have amazing engagement on the page. You will have a low bounce rate. People spend a lot of time on your page. You get a lot of clicks. Even when people see that page on the search engines, they have a very high chance of clicking on your listing to go to that page. And that’s super fine. But this is just like the first page. On the second page, you may have shorter content with worse engagement metrics. People don’t spend time on the page and they don’t click it when they see it on the Google search engine. Then you have two pages, but the work you need to do on them is completely different from page to page.

 

🐼

Regarding this part, should I take the website as a whole or should I treat some pages as some groups to say like that, that the user might go from one to another in order to keep the bounce off lower? Because for example, I might use a page only for a certain campaign, and I think we will get immediately to these parts, like to have dedicated landing pages for a campaign.

 

🐿

Well, it depends a lot on what you want to do because you can have a couple of pages on your website that are meant specifically for something like Google ads campaign or something that you just want to distribute very fast to social media, but it doesn’t really hold value for your overall SEO strategy and for your search engine strategy for the website. So in some cases, you will have a piece of news that is very relevant. A lot of people would share it on social media and it would become viral instantly. But that wouldn’t really be good for somebody searching for a certain keyword on a search engine. So in that case, you will want to make sure that people from search engines will not go to that page because it wasn’t intended for this use case. And in that case, you can set a lot of visibility settings to off. Of course, if you’re using Squirly, if you’re not using Squirly, you can just go to the source code and insert stuff like no follow and no index to the page and even exclude that page from your site map. And then Google will not care about that page.

 

🐿

That will not go to the overall calculations that they make in order to rank your site better. And then you would obtain a page that’s great for ads and social media and it’s not visible for SEO. We actually do this a lot. So if you go to our blog, we have some pretty long articles that are packed with a lot of information. Those are made for SEO purposes. But then we have articles that are just about our company, our latest releases, because we release a lot of products, a lot of new versions, a lot of updates for a lot of things. We talk about this because our audience is interested. But somebody could search on a search engine for, I know, like a social media tool, they wouldn’t really want to know about an update that we’ve done to Squirly Social. Because it’s really not interesting for somebody.

 

🐼

Searching on a search engine. I totally agree on this.

 

🐿

We make those pages invisible on search engines. We use them in the blog, you can find them in the feeds, but you will not find them on search engines because it would provide a bad user experience for the person searching for that particular thing.

 

🐼

Basically, if I have a page on the website that I’m using it as a landing for an announcement that I’m sending to my mail list of registered users, it probably would be a good idea to not have that page indexed by Google.

 

🐿

Yes.

 

🐼

Exactly. Because most probably it won’t have the menu of the website or things like that. It will be just to inform the users on this part.

 

🐿

It’s actually very good.

 

🐼

I would go a little bit back to some scenarios, for example, because I think it’s interesting to see how would you apply this CIO strategy and content marketing. For example, the app for eLearning platform for pharmacies that provide content for any pharmacies on a B2C level.

 

🐿

Okay, on a B2C level.

 

🐼

Exactly. How would you tackle this?

 

🐿

Well, I would need to know a bit more information. Are the pages supposed to be found on search engines?

 

🐼

Let’s say each course from the platform has a free episode that basically describe what’s happening there. Preview, that’s text, and a small video.

 

🐿

Well, it depends on how you want to target that page. So if it’s something like online courses for pharmacists and that’s your keyword, then it’s very good. You have a direct keyword and you have a direct landing page that covers exactly that specific topic. However, if you would see that there is a lot of interest for skincare product education, let’s say that would be something that people search for on the web, you could actually make a blog post that is supposed to get people to convert to your online courses, but they would initially inform the user on ways in which they can educate themselves about skincare and treating skin conditions.

 

🐼

Basically, we get back to that part in which you said that probably you can also have keywords for features. B asically, I could use this part with the blog post to describe a feature in the app, for example.

 

🐿

Exactly. Yeah. Even if you would search for something like… Let’s say that you have a coffee shop. The basic thing is to look for coffee shops in London, for example. But maybe you don’t want to do coffee shops in London because there are a lot of them. Maybe you can find something interesting like the best ways to identify if… I know the coffee you just bought is actually quality coffee. Maybe you can find a keyword for people who search how to identify the quality of coffee. I know if people search for that because I haven’t done a keyword research. But you could look for these kinds of keywords and they are very indirect. They don’t directly apply to your business because your business doesn’t test the quality of different coffees because you don’t have a tester for that. If you would build Rx 8 engine, then you would do compression test and stuff like that because those engines are unreliable.

 

🐼

I guess I didn’t repair your car yet.

 

🐿

No, I just bought a new engine. But yeah, as a coffee shop, I’m not selling testers for the quality of coffee, but I could teach you how to look at the quality of the coffee. ook at quality in coffee. And then you would probably be inclined to come and buy from my coffee shop because we are actually experts in the way that we sell coffee and the way that we make coffee. We grind coffee and everything related to it.

 

🐼

Should I start this part with thinking on the SEO strategy and on the content market strategy when in the life of a startup to select that? Once I have the product, when I try to validate the idea and to search for the initial interest.

 

🐿

A lot of people are doing this to find the initial interest. You can actually Because you don’t really know the product yet at this point, so you don’t really have a feature set with clear keywords. That’s when you can actually use content marketing. A lot of startups are actually doing this because they’re providing content to the desired user, even though they don’t have a very clear solution of what to offer to that customer. And then you write articles about something that’s quite indirect, and then when they come to your article, you may have conversion elements that are stating the value proposition that you’re currently trying to test. So by making great content and optimizing it, you are getting people to those pages. And once they are on the pages, you can see if they are interested in the unique value proposition that you’re trying to offer.

 

🐼

And probably bringing the right people since you’re using the correct keywords. Otherwise, the results might be not so accurate.

 

🐿

Yeah, and you can even test different audiences. So if, for example, for your store, you might see at one point that people looking for organic products are much more probable to be interested in your whole value proposition than people who just try to search for specialty coffee or specialty tea. That’s something that you might see from this experiment where you experiment with different content types and content marketing to get the right people to your site and then to see which of those people actually want to interact with the value proposition that you offer.

 

🐼

Maybe testing the value proposition on different blog posts, for example, I see which makes more interest of users and this turn longer again. Interesting. I didn’t thought that me as a tech founder, for example, I could do my own SEO for a startup.

 

🐿

Yeah, you can actually do it. I guess it’s even easier for tech founders to do SEO because a lot of aspects around SEO are pretty much technical. You already have an advantage over everybody else and you see things based on numbers. And sometimes SEO is a numbers game, so that might also be used to your advantage. Also, if you know how to look at metrics, because as I’ve said, you need to look at a lot of engagement metrics on the page, how much people spend on the page, how many words there are, how they perform according to different content lens that you’ve tested, and you can run experiments. And actually, as a tech founder, you might be much better suited with doing SEO.

 

🐼

If there were to be to recommend two, three sources for documenting about SEO and content marketing for an early founder, where would you recommend to go?

 

🐿

That’s a great question. On guides. C o, the platform is still active. I’m very surprised by this because they actually failed as a startup a long time ago. But the guides that they have on that site are still very relevant and very good. At one point, one of the first content marketing strategies that I’ve ever done was based on some of the guides that you can find on guides. C o. Most of them are very well written and you can get a lot of ideas on how to get started. Other than that, it’s pretty hard with SEO. I can’t honestly recommend other places, maybe the most blocked and stuff about SEO written by HubSpot. But other than that, I can’t really recommend because a lot of people in this industry sadly present details which are either fake or they’re not very accurately presented and they lead to a lot of complications.

 

🐼

On your blog, you also, on Squarespace, you have some content there, right? Yeah. This got me to the next question. We talked about where I should find or look for information. What do you think or what tools should I start with?

 

🐿

For what? For SEO?

 

🐼

For SEO. Let’s say I have… I installed a WordPress website, I add a theme on it because it’s cheap, I can find a free one and it’s fast. I would like to start make a landing page, which is optimized and one, two or two articles to test the initial hypothesis to say.

 

🐿

Well, then you just need WordPress. You can use the Elementor site builder because you can build very beautiful landing pages and they also have a free version of their app. Then you would need to have a Squirly SEO. Then you would need to have an email service provider, something like Mailchimp. Then you also need… So Squirly SEO does keyword research, auditing, search checking. It offers you focus pages. It looks at all of the ranking factors that Google looks when it takes your pages into account for ranking. So it’s like the complete counter marketing suite in SEO suite. But you could also add in, of course, Google Analytics, because if you provide great data in Google Analytics, you will already send the proper data to Google because otherwise they would guess it and they can guess it wrong. And use Google search console because it helps you make sure that Google really knows the last pages that you’ve published to the website. So in most of the cases that I’ve seen, especially with founders that don’t have a lot of experience in online marketing, they create amazing pages. They’re very good pages, but Google doesn’t know about them.

 

🐿

And the founders don’t know that Google doesn’t know about those pages. And by using search console, you can easily make sure that Google knows that you’ve published that page on the web and that it should start thinking about ranking your page.

 

🐼

From what I saw using S corley SEO, it helped me with setting up the Google Analytics integration with Google search console, which is quite easy. And the nice part, basically, it generated the site map for me also in WordPress, which is quite nice.

 

🐿

Yes. And it enriches it with images and videos as well because that’s also an important ranking factor for Google. And we actually had to do this because since 2016, we’ve been trying to identify the problems that a lot of small businesses have with doing SEO. And we thought that the problems were a bit more complicated. They weren’t. A lot of people, they’ve never used Google search console, they’ve never used Google Analytics. Google didn’t know that they had pages published on the web. We’ve redesigned the whole experience to actually do a lot more than what you would normally expect. That’s why we walk people through step by step processes to get everything they need for SEO because people actually needed this more than they needed the search checker or keyword research tool.

 

🐼

I dare now to ask you, if some of our listeners have some question regarding this, can they tackle you on our Facebook group?

 

🐿

Yeah, of course.

 

🐼

So if you have any questions regarding SEO and content marketing, just feel free and join the Startup Expressor group. And there, Floryn can guide you to other specialized group or resources.

 

🐿

Definitely. I do this a lot. You can ask absolutely everything from, Is backlink still a thing to is on page enough to do SEO? You can ask anything that you want. It’s no problem with no question. I will just answer it.

 

🐼

How can I be first on Google for awesome people?

 

🐿

I am not your lawyer.

 

🐼

We are not your consultants.

 

🐿

And I’m not going to be your SEO expert.

 

🐼

But we will give you proper advice on SEO on our Facebook group.

 

🐿

That’s something that will definitely happen. So that might be the only place where we are going to make an exception to our general rule.

 

🐼

And don’t forget, buy us a coffee.

 

🐿

Yeah, definitely go and do that. Buy us a coffee.

 

 

🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)

It’s Paul.

 

🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)

It’s Florin. What are we grinding today? Today, we’re going to talk about the types of events that entrepreneurs should go to. And then we are going to move on to founders clubs.

 

🐼

Founders club? Well, how are they different by conferences?

 

🐿

Well, they’re actually very different. They’re different from conferences. They are different from meetups. They’re different from drinkabouts and other stuff like that.

 

🐼

Let’s start by how would you define them?

 

🐿

How would I define a founder’s club?

 

🐿

Well, it’s a club.

 

🐼

I.

 

🐿

Guess that part was obvious. Founders go to it, but real founders, people who actually have a startup or are in the process of actually starting a startup, and not just people who are currently only discussing, evaluating their options or the other side of it, like just consultants, people who offer services to startups. They aren’t allowed in the founders clubs. So it’s exclusively for founders.

 

🐼

Not the events that everybody wants to go because they want to sell something to somebody else.

 

🐿

No. I wouldn’t even get the guys from Square Mile into my founder’s club, even though they make this great coffee that we’re drinking today.

 

🐼

Interesting. So if I’m a Haltech founder, I should join only a founder club that is focused on health tech?

 

🐿

No, not really. Because there’s a lot that you have in common just due to the fact that you’re a founder. You have a lot in common with other people who have started the process of founding companies.

 

🐼

You mentioned here a lot like founders. Should we all have two, three years of experience as founders or when I qualify, let’s say like that. If I’m at the beginning, I have just the idea and I know that I want to commit to a startup.

 

🐿

That depends on the club and that depends on how you want to structure the club. Because you can have, for example, a very pretentious club that’s like, you’re only allowed here after your third startup and we want to see that you’re first… That at least one of the previous startups was an exit and that’s the only way you can join us.

 

🐼

And this is due to the fact of the topics because in order for all of us to gain something, we need to be on the same level, or it is just because there are…

 

🐿

No, people need to be at the same level in order to gain value from the Founders’ Club. Because otherwise, if you want a general mixer and you want to mix with the general population, with the other founders, you can just go to the other types of events. As I’ve said, networking events, open coffees. We used to do an event called Open Connect, which had the same idea. We were meeting for breakfast, sometimes lunch. Other stuff of those types of events were Wednesdays, where people gather Wednesday for a founder’s launch and they just discuss stuff. But those events are open, anybody can join. If they see the event somewhere, they can just come in, introduce themselves, network with the startup people, and there you can have everyone or a conference where you have a lot of people who join, even employees from different companies. And it’s not really very exclusive. But if you would go to an exclusive event, you would need to get some value from it. And in order to get that real value, you would need to have people who are on the same level as you are.

 

🐼

Let’s say you convinced me and I want to join this a club. I should Google it? Healthtech Experience F ounder Club? Or how should I found it?

 

🐿

I know. I guess people should invite you to it. So you have to be invited, so people have to first know about you?

 

🐼

Okay. So the first clue to not join one if I found it on Google.

 

🐿

Well, yeah, maybe that’s for the best. Maybe that’s for the best because some of those clubs, you don’t really know what’s up with them. They’re basically marketing the club to everybody. What are they trying to get out of it? Is it some club where you go and they start selling you stuff, pitching you a couple of weird schemes? A lot of weird things could happen that way. For example, if you go to a real club like Toastmasters, you could find stuff written about it in books. It’s a public speaking club and you can find stuff about written in books. You can Google it and you can join. And that’s always a really great club. I’ve seen clubs from all over the country. I’ve even seen clubs from the United Kingdom and they were all super okay. Even some clubs from the United States, I’ve networked with a couple of people who were there. And those clubs are really good. But that’s like those masters and they have really clear policies. You can study their policies and gain trust, but otherwise you don’t really know what to expect if you go to another club where people might just be into selling stuff, not value based networking, let’s say.

 

🐼

I think in the end, these are on a certain team. For example, if I want to learn to talk better in public, I go to Toastmasters. I know clearly from the beginning that I will develop my public speaking skills on that part.

 

🐿

Did.

 

🐼

You have experience? Was your participant in some of these clubs? Did you join or did you started the founder’s club? Can you tell us?

 

🐿

I’ve actually started two Founders’ Clubs. I had a really great experience at those Masters. I was super happy about it. I met a lot of smart people there, a lot of people who became friends or really great business acquaintances and a lot of cool people. Then I said, Okay, so if this is something that brings together people who are connected by the fact that they want to speak to a lot of people, to speak to all the entire audiences, I’m trying to do this startup thing. I was trying to get my first startup off the ground and I was like, Okay, then why don’t I do this with a couple of like minded people who they want to get their own startup off the ground and let’s see what happens. I did and it was really cool. And then by the time I had the second startup, I’ve had an investment. So once you have an investment, you really need to make sure that you grow fast enough. You have good metrics to show. It’s a lot more pressure than when you’re just the guy who wants to just start something for the gist of it.

 

🐿

And basically I started the other club with other people who got funding in the same period. So we were on a very similar trajectory of growth from multiple points of view. That’s why I think that we really had a lot to learn from one another, even though each of us activated in completely different industries.

 

🐼

Basically, in this second club, the criteria was that each member had a funding. B asically, when you started the second one, you looked for people who got funded because that was the struggle that each of you had or were having similar struggles in that period.

 

🐿

Because one of us had an angel investment. Most of them had investments from accelerators, startup accelerators. T here was also one that had the funding from a research grant, a university grant, that thing. But basically, the same things were in common. All of them were somehow related to tax, so all of them could be labeled as tax startups, and all of them had outside funding.

 

🐼

The first one, how did you found the members? Was close to you or friends?

 

🐿

We actually met at an entrepreneurial event where they taught you a lot of things about business, integrity in business, how to develop your networking skills, how to pitch to investors, and a lot of things. And I think it was a very hands on experience. It was filled with workshops. We got to meet a lot of local entrepreneurs, which was a really great thing for us to see because I was at university, some of them were still in high school, the other were in the first years at the university, and we all got together and for two weeks we’ve seen a lot of things about business that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. So me and a couple of them were very united during this time. We got along very well. And then we said, we’re having different discussions between us. When I just use our time more efficiently, all of us get together because we all like each other and just start discussing about stuff, making this very exclusive club, just the four of us at the beginning. And then we’ve let other people in. We knew who were also trying to create online projects or businesses based around online projects, and we got them into our club.

 

🐿

So at one point, I think there were seven or eight people.

 

🐼

You started like four, then seven, eight. Is there a certain size or should the group decide based on their needs?

 

🐿

They should decide, but once you have more people, it becomes a lot harder to really manage the discussions and what each individual member needs from the club.

 

🐼

I think what you don’t want to or you don’t want to be in the position in which to start think for president and things like that, like hire here or something like that.

 

🐿

Yeah.

 

🐼

Definitely. Because the idea would be that each of us comes with advice and the problems that he or she has. So basically sharing ideas and learning and helping each others.

 

🐿

Yeah, exactly. Also, the other interesting was that the things that were similar in both clubs that I started was the fact that we let club members decide what they would like to learn more about. And then one of the members was supposed to hold the presentation about that topic that the others wanted to learn about. And there was also a moderator. And each week, we got to exchange roles. So we wouldn’t have the same person doing the same roles every single week. And that made things a lot more fun. And we had even secretary, this was an idea from Toastmasters that we borrowed. We had the secretary to just write down the things that were discussed. We also had an email after that with, Look, we met today. This is what we discussed. This is these are the resources we shared. And we were also doing so with presentation, resource sharing, and then Q&A’s and general networking between the founders.

 

🐼

And I think from each meeting to meeting, you are switching these roles, probably. Today I would meet tomorrow you and so on.

 

🐿

And one of the coolest things that we’ve done at the second club, this was a suggestion from one of the members, but then it became the core rule of the club, was to meet once every two weeks. And each time we meet, to be in someone else’s office. And it was so interesting.

 

🐼

Interesting about it. So let’s take it one by one. So first, you said that you decided to meet every two weeks.

 

🐿

Yeah.

 

🐼

So if I’m doing my own founder club, I should decide to meet regularly, even if I don’t have a topic to discuss about, or I should meet only when I have a topic to discuss or one of the members has a problem?

 

🐿

That’s an excellent question, Paul. That’s an excellent question. Actually, we had a rule that if you didn’t show up for a couple of meetings, you would get kicked out.

 

🐼

Interesting. So basically each member needs to be an active member.

 

🐿

Yeah. And that was super important. For example, you had a really tough period because we were all founders, we all go through very stressful periods, periods where… I can say this nicely, but shit hits the fan and you have to solve problems with your investment, solve problems with the cash flow, make crazy offers just to make cash flow, or I don’t know what, something can happen. But that’s basically three meetings. I know it’s six weeks, right?

 

🐼

Yeah. In your situation, it was every two weeks. Yeah.

 

🐿

So if you don’t join for six weeks, okay, because you need to fix those problems. But then we expect you to be present. If you’re not present after that, you’re kicked out and we let room for other people that in case you leave, we’re going to try to fill.

 

🐼

Your spot. Yeah, because if I don’t manage to come at least one to came at this, it means that it doesn’t bring value to me. So probably I should let somebody else on that part. Let’s say on a certain week you didn’t have a topic to discuss, how did you do that meeting? Was only a Q&A? Was let’s meet for a drink and that’s all? Or you try to talk about something meaningful?

 

🐿

We never met for drinks. Even though we made a lot of fun during the meetings and, oh boy, the laughs that we’ve shared, it was phenomenal. But we never actually met to drink. That was something that we completely took out of the equation because we wanted to make sure that we don’t get off topic because once you start drinking, at least somebody from the group is going to go completely off topic and talk about nonsense or just share jokes and not pay attention to anything else. We didn’t really want that. I guess that the best things that maybe share food sometimes or something like that, but never alcohol.

 

🐼

Yeah. I think this is an important thing to take out this part because when you bring alcohol to the table, it’s okay for me to have fun or something like that. But if you want to learn something and to do something meaningful, probably we should leave it out of the table. Yeah. Like us, for example, we were drinking coffee while doing the podcast.

 

🐿

Exactly. There was this really interesting TED Talk that said that the elimination period, I don’t really recall how it’s actually called in history, but the thing with Jean Jacques Roussaut and the other guys who became very smart and then we got out of the Middle Ages and started doing some really important things with our human lives, that period came to be only after people discovered that instead of meeting for beer, we can actually meet for coffee. And then people were like, Damn, we can drink coffee. Hey, man, we’re smart now that we’re drinking coffee. There was a TED Talk about it. I totally loved it. And it was true because they only used to drink beer and they never had productive conversations or anything. And then they switched to coffee. Their brain started to actually work. They became creative and then they found solutions to a lot of world problems. And I think this is important.

 

🐼

I don’t know this talk, to be honest, but maybe you share us on our Facebook page these days. So startup Express on Facebook and probably Florin will share the link there.

 

🐿

Yeah, definitely go to Startup Espresso on Facebook and I will share the link to the Ted Talk.

 

🐼

It’s revolutionary. So basically you didn’t meet just to brag about that you’re cool founders and our meeting and things like that. So basically you work.

 

🐿

No. And sometimes, I mean, what would happen if you don’t have a topic to discuss in a week? In those weeks where we really didn’t have anything to say, it was just like, Okay, man, where are you at? How’s it going? What’s been stressful lately? And then it was like group therapy, which sounds stupid if you’re not a startup founder, but then if you’re a startup founder, you really need other people to discuss things with, to see that you’re not alone in this. Because you can’t really discuss these things with your wife, with your girlfriend. You can discuss them with your friends who have never started a startup because they just don’t get it. But if you talk to other people who have been through the same problems, you can really get a ton of problems out there and sometimes you even find creative solutions from your peers and next actions and all these goals, of ool ideas that you can do to get to the next level in the startup.

 

🐼

Actually, you mentioned two really nice points here. So the first that it became a support group. So we all know that in these startups world, there are struggles and sometimes it’s hard. But on the other hand, you said that… And yeah, I agree with you. So if you’re a startup and you’re actually working at that startup, not just bragging about that you are a founder, probably in those two weeks, you have some problems that you can discuss about. But you said that if not, there is the questions, where are you at? And what I think here, and it’s important that the members of the club trust each other because otherwise, if you ask me, Where are you at? I would just brag about and probably don’t want to help me. So telling you that I’m doing so well, but probably I’m not, it would be more helpful probably to tell you that I’m struggling now to get customers and maybe I get some advice on how to do this.

 

🐿

That’s true. And that’s why the meetings and the club itself should be exclusive. Because I will tell you, in the first meetings, we didn’t really brag about stuff, but we weren’t very transparent with one another because we didn’t really know each other. I mean, we knew each other from events, but we didn’t really know each other and really know a lot of stuff about the other people in the room.

 

🐼

And how did you create this trust between you?

 

🐿

Well, since we talked about different subjects and that’s where it helped that we had speakers and topics, we’ve realized that… I guess we just started becoming friends. I know. I don’t think there’s a better way to put this, but we thought that we could genuinely speak to the other people. There were no stupid people among us, no people who were horrible people. None of them seemed shady or untrustworthy. None of them seemed the people that you would try to run away from. So basically, we’ve got to a point where we were like, Yeah, I could definitely start a company.

 

🐼

With you. None of them came to the first meeting and shared their business card?

 

🐿

No, especially because most of us at least knew each other somehow. But no, that didn’t happen. We had certain events, I mean, certain meetings where we brought people from the outside. Of course, when we brought people from the outside, we didn’t really share a lot of internal details, but after a few meetings when it was only the members of the club, we share the most private metrics regarding the startup, even stuff regarding cash flow, how the cash is doing, how much money we pay employees, a lot of things that you wouldn’t really discuss with anybody else.

 

🐼

I was actually making these jokes with the business card because in my first startup, due to some bad advice, I thought that it was a good idea to have business card from the first day. So it was really funny. So it was written CEO on my business card and I actually was doing a lot of the work together with Alex. He was the CTO, I was the CIO. And actually, we were still working on the product. So that’s the funny part with a business card.

 

🐿

But I guess it’s only natural, right? Because it’s like doing that, it’s like showing yourself that you’re actually committed to being in business. T hat’s a way, even though it’s stupid and vanity, it’s a real way that you can show yourself that you are in business and you really want to do this thing and you want to see it through.

 

🐼

Yeah, on this part also. Actually, I would like to ask you also, you said that you started two clubs. When did you decide to end the first one? Or how do you feel at some point that you need.

 

🐿

To.

 

🐼

Retire from it?

 

🐿

Every single time, there was not one particular person or two particular persons who said, Okay, guys, I’m out. The club just died on itself. So there was a point where the club just said, Yeah, we can’t do this anymore because this, this and that. And everybody came to the same conclusion at the same time. So he was never like, Okay, now we’re not Back Street Boys anymore. I’m quitting this band and I’m going to join another band or stuff like that. So it wasn’t that much of a boy band anyway.

 

🐼

Is it due to the fact that probably each of you got to a point in which…

 

🐿

Yeah, we got to different points. And I think that our journeys together ended because some of us got to a point that was way too high for the others. The others crashed their startups. Others focused on trying another project together. They then turned it into a very successful startup. But at one point they were like, Yeah, we shouldn’t really be there because we’ve got nothing to share, we’ve got nothing to do. We’re just trying this stupid idea out and we’re going to see if it works or not. But it’s not relevant for us to meet anymore for a given period of time. And the interesting thing was that even after the club closed down, we still got to do a lot of collaboration. You saw people, I became your co founder, or I started working in your startup. I no longer have a startup. You can hire me now. And it was really interesting to see. One of my investors actually called this thing like, we were trying to do the PayPal mafia. That’s what he said to me. He said all of us because we met with him one night and he said, you guys have created a PayPal mafia.

 

🐿

So you’ve done some startups remotely successful, each of them, and now you’re like the PayPal mafia. Everybody works for everybody in your group. You share resources with the others. And even though you go to other companies, you will still be together in this way.

 

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Now, I think this part is quite important to have the trust and to share knowledge and resources. But regarding these topics, what is your opinion regarding…

 

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And by the way, most of them have actually been invited to my wedding and they came and we had a really good time there. That also happened.

 

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You really became good friends.

 

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Yeah, we really became good friends. It was so weird. But while doing that, we realized that we were connected on so many levels and we’ve been together at so many different events and we’ve done so many things together that it was like, yeah, dude, we’re really good friends. Especially after a certain age, you don’t really make a lot of new friends, so this gives you a real opportunity to make great friends.

 

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I think this proves that you had the same values and were with the same belief. Regarding the topics, what’s your opinion regarding a member who just complain and complain at every meeting? It’s like, I have only problem, problem, problem, problem. I’m like.

 

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The Most of us became equally minded, so to say. All of us became jokesters and downright horrible people. The way we were talking to one another was crazy. Some people could have thought that we were just making fun of one another all day long and stuff like that. We were really, really, really bad. Then we had this new member. We were actually trying to make him become a full time member, but then he was only complaining about everything. And we’ve been gentle with him at first, but then we saw that that’s all he does. And we’ve just roasted him on and on and on again during one of the meetings. And then he never came back. We never heard from him again. But he was like, Dude, it’s way too much. It’s either you’re going to take this feedback or you’re going to get out the door. And then he got out the door.

 

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But actually, you try to convince him to change that person before just kicking.

 

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It out. Yeah. And all of us had extremely valid arguments. He didn’t want to hear them. If you don’t want to hear them, you’re wasting our time. You shouldn’t be here. And at least we had fun kicking him out.

 

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I’m also curious, do you have any knowledge of founders’ club that are created by some accelerators or some startup programs? Because I know about founders’ dinner.

 

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I don’t know about that one.

 

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Usually, let’s say accelerators or programs have a night where the founders are coming or an investor gathering all the founders.

 

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That’s a good idea, actually. I think I do have an example. I think that this was one of the first things, a catalyst to my idea of actually starting an entrepreneurial club. The guys from Startup Chili, they were super successful back in the day. I don’t know if they’re still doing that today because I haven’t been that in tune with a lot of news in this industry. But they’ve invested in people, they brought them all together, and they made sure that the founders connect one another, that all of them are very in the know regarding each other’s progress. And I’ve spoken to some of the people who have actually been inside. And once he told me the stories, I was sold. I was like, Yeah, that’s the best way to do an accelerator program. All of those startups collaborated so much. The ones that were successful became successful because they had help even from the founders who then became unsuccessful. So it was really interesting to see. And the fact that they were all brought together, that brought each of them a lot more value than if they would have just gotten some money and some mentors and stuff like that because they were doing a lot of learning together and that was super important for each of them.

 

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Regarding this part with being together, what do you think about remote startup founder clubs? Should they physically meet in a place? Because you said that in your case, you’re meeting at each one offices. So if I want to do a remote one, what do you think? Can it work?

 

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It can work. But? It can work. But you need people to be super, super filled with integrity because otherwise, if I know you and I know a lot of other people who are in the same club, I’m going to have social pressure to show up because I really know you guys. We can meet. We happen to meet at the same event. I don’t want to be the guy who was like, Just look at that, Jackass. He never showed up. He said he would. He never showed up. I hate that guy. And you don’t want to be that guy. But if it’s online, it’s very easy to ignore your emails, ignore your Facebook messages, ignore your WhatsApp messages, ignore your Telegram, ignore your Twitter. You can ignore your Google Plus, especially now that it’s dead. You can ignore your Instagram. You can ignore everything. But you can’t really ignore people in real life because that’s not polite and that’s not what you want to do in business. So you can definitely try and make this remote. It could work. There are many Masterminds, they’re called Mastermind clubs that are indeed happening online and some of them work, but I don’t think they work as well because at some point people will be too busy with something or too stressed or filled with anxiety.

 

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And then it’s very easy for them not to show up once and they start not showing up and they’ve got no social pressure. There’s nothing to switch back their behavior and they will continue doing the easy thing, which is not showing up and the whole club will die because of that. It’s going to be much harder for you to gain, like, to have retention. Quote marks again.

 

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Founders’.

 

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Retention. Yeah, founders’ retention.

 

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We didn’t talk about metrics until now, so probably when we will start to talk about metrics, also we…

 

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Yeah, we should take a founder’s retention into account, definitely. All right, Paul.

 

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I think we are almost at the end, but before closing this, if we would be in one minute to give a tutorial to a founder beginner who wants to join a founder club, what he or she should be looking at?

 

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This is a tough one. The same values as far as business goes. So they should expect that the other members have the same values, not exactly that they behave in similar ways, but that they value the same things in similar ways. Their relation to money, to how they treat customers, to how they treat employees, to how they treat their investors, to how they act when things go bad, to how they act when things go good, if they are braggers, if they brag about their metrics and who they are all day long. The things that make up the personality of the people involved, I think that’s the most important element because if the values of the group are okay and you’re satisfied with that, then you will have a really great experience. But otherwise, even though you might get some value out of the group, out of the club, you will never be satisfied with it.

 

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What I would add to this is that if I’m in a startup program, I don’t know, some pre accelerator accelerator, probably I should start to look at the people from that.

 

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Program initially. Yeah. And you can try to start the club with them and see where that leads you. Or if you’ve had a really great experience at a startup weekend or another type of event where people get together, you can start saying, Hey, we’ve had a great time playing with building startups. Why don’t we create a club together and see what it takes us? Do you agree to meet? These are going to be the meetings. This is like a mini schedule that we can make. Let’s meet and see if this works out. And most of the times it will work out.

 

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I think this is a great advice. But again, don’t forget, we are not your consultants.

 

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We are not.

 

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Your lawyers. And drop us on our Facebook or Twitter your experience with clubs or founders clubs or any meet up that you experience, even bad or good ones, and let us know what you believe about this.

 

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Yeah, do that. And also say, if you were to join a founder’s club, what are your fears regarding these sorts of clubs? And maybe you need a lot more information on a founder’s club versus a normal event and me and Paul can discuss them with you.

 

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And if you want some topics that we should talk about, just let us know. Drop us a message on our Facebook page. But also don’t forget to buy us a coffee.

 

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Yeah, buy us a coffee. Definitely do that.

 

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See you next.