Andrew: [00:00] Before we get started, I got to thank my sponsors who have been so good to me and helping me build up this business. And I also want you to know that all my sponsors are trying to reach people like you. Because you’re an influencer. You’re somebody who other people trust, who other people listen to on these subjects. So, let me share with you the three sponsors. And if anyone you know needs anything they can help out with, I hope you recommend one of these guys. First is Rich W.P.
If you or anyone else goes to Rich W.P. dot com, you can get a theme that’s fully customizable, that’s actually right out of the box looks beautiful, and gives you all the features that you need, and all the functionality that you need in a word-press website. But you can customize it and make it your own. So, check out Rich W.P. dot com. Second sponsor is Grasshopper. And I’ve known the people at Grasshopper for a long time. Beyond giving you a robust phone system, you just bring your own phone, and.
And they give you everything else, from extensions so that your customers can reach you, or the sales department, or the other department. They give you all those, all those features. And you can manage them all online from their website, grasshopper.com. But, because I love those guys so much, and because I know how much they love entrepreneurs, beyond offering them this phone service. I know they’ve got this, this relationship with entrepreneurs that they built up over the years.
I’ve offered any entrepreneur who’s listening to mixergy.com, who wants to have a phone conversation with me that lasts about half an hour, talk about your business. I’ll do whatever I can to help out. Several of you have taken me up on this. I had one actually earlier today that I thought was very fruitful. The guy left the conversation with a lot of valuable notes. I’m opening it up to anything that you need related to business. And I’m gonna try to take up as many of these calls that I can in the next, say, month or so.
So, send me. Send me an email. Or reach me on my contact form. And I’ll do what I can. Thank you, Grasshopper, for making that possible. Thirdly, I want to thank shopify.com. You guys know Shopify as the place where you go if you want to create an online store. In seconds, you can. You can start with them. Within five minutes, I had an online store, with inventory, with items, with a, with accepting credit cards. What else was there? There was another cool thing. Oh. You don’t have to keep inventory yourself.
They’ll give you companies. They’ll introduce you to companies, and work really well with them, that will ship, that will do the fulfilment for you, including Amazon. So, top companies are working with them. You can set up a store with them very quickly. Check out shopify.com. Or, again, if you know somebody who wants to set up an e-commerce site, a store online, tell them to check out shopify.com. Here’s the interview.
Interviewee:[15:00] We have a tool that sort of automates these different testing machines from round the world that simply loathe to pay with Internet Explorer to see how much time it takes to load. Then compile them together and then we can estimate how fast it is and also how fast it will be with optimizations and all. That is interesting. So that process of integrating is not 100% fail safe. So it can take 5 minutes or longer sending those reports to people. But it is an automatic process and it gives really good idea to people.
Andrew: And Michael who I mentioned earlier says he is a freelance search marketer and is in search engine optimization. We see icon finder in the chat-room saying that Google will reward faster websites. It is a new factor in search engine optimization. So it means you get more traffic from Google because they value speedy sites more than slower sites. OK.
Interviewee: [16:00] Yeah.
Andrew: I think we got a one last question just from _ because they have been so supportive of our work here at _. So I want to make sure to take as many of his questions as possible. Is this more enterprise level where you start at $100,000 or it is just something that starts at $99? What is the pricing like on this?
Interviewee: Yeah. The pricing is based on memory. We start off at $7,000. So for a smaller site, you are looking at about $3,000[US]. And then we scale up typically to under $50,000[US].
Andrew: And it is a one time payment.
Interviewee: Correct. So yeah, we are very affordable for businesses. But yeah we have aimed the product pricing, the feature _ and the support clearly at businesses rather than consumers that is important. Because you can’t be all things to all people.
Andrew: [17:13] OK. It is interesting that we got so many more questions here in the chat-room than I expected. I thought I quickly breeze through what you do and get to the good part about how we all can make money, how we can make sales. But I think there is a lot of interest here in speeding up websites partially because Google has been spearheading this and they have been talking a lot about it. And where Google goes the rest of the internet follows.
Interviewee: I follow a lot about this. My version of the way Google is going. I mean clearly from Google’s perspective. Google’s all about the web. And they have put a lot of effort into making sure we have got _ that are all connected by the web. So that is really exciting. So you can imagine the websites are slower then the Google’s search engine, the work it is has to do in the background just to index these sites. It has to wait a lot longer. So clearly, if everyone’s sites were faster then Google could have less machines following the work. And then also for folks like Google and Microsoft and the bigger companies. For those who have ads on our pages that link them back to these _, _. The faster our pages are and the faster the very infrastructure of the internet is that means you can do more launches. They can serve better ads to you that are more relevant. I give the example that I am sitting here in Wellington, New Zealand. Now if I come to your web-page and you have got a page on say dogs for example. With the right kind of speeds on the internet, you have got the ad provider on the dog link page. Sure you would go back instead of analyze who I am and find out _% of dog food in my local super market and be able to present that to me. More relevant ads, more relevant information. So faster internet we are going to see better. It is not just click more pages but what we put on those pages that will be more relevant for people. So that is really exciting and it is also very scary. Few months from now not much money will be made spending this on _ all the time. But yes it is clearly a very interesting thing.
Andrew: OK. KC Allen is asking, do you have any case studies on your website about how much faster you can improve rankings. Check out the website. There are lot of interesting case studies and if there is anything else that you want to know, _ to comment or email him and I know who is going to respond quickly because you did to me.
Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And you guys know what we do here. We interview Internet entrepreneurs about how they built their business. We want to learn from them, so that we can bring back what we learn from them and apply it to our own businesses. And today I’ve got an entrepreneur who fills two, two requests of yours. The audience keeps asking me for lots of things. But here are two big ones. They say they want to hear from entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley, and even outside of the US. And you, of course, Ed? Ed, where? Where in the world are you?
Interviewee: [02:52] So, I’m. I’m right down the other side of the world in New Zealand.
Andrew: [02:59] In New Zealand? And then up?
Interviewee: [03:01] And. And, by the way. We should tell you that, partially becaue of this distance, we have kind of a bad connection. But we practiced a little bit. And we’re gonna make sure not to step on each other’s toes here. But, you know, this is. This is what it is here. Mixergy isn’t like CNBC. We’re reaching out to people in, in an interesting new way using, using Skype, in an interesting new way, in a scrappy way, I should say. And the second thing that people keep asking me for is sales. We know how to build great technology. We’re creative in this space. But we, I think, lack, and what the audience keeps telling me what they want to know more of is how to make sales. And that’s why I invited Ed Robinson here on Mixergy. He is the CEO and founder of Optimize. And he has sold to some of the big guys, including. Ed, can you give a few names of the companies you’ve sold to?
Andrew: [03:44] Yeah. Sure. So, we say our company is about a year old. And we’ve sold to about. We’ve got about a hundred customers so far. I think close to a hundred. And some of the big guys include Google, Fidelity National Financial, you know Raytheon. And these are sort of Fortune 500’s. And then some of the Global 500’s as well, like [inaudible] and River Island. And we’ve also got Microsoft, who were using our product on chipwin.microsoft.com. So, that’s really exciting to us as well. I. I think one of the key things, like a lot of Silicon Valley companies. We’re able to sell over the web worldwide. I guess one of the differences is that we’re doing it from another country, which certainly stacks some of the odds against you.
Interviewee: [04:32] All right. And what is Optimize? And, by the way, I should tell you that we’re gonna. We’re gonna give you a description here. But I really urge people who are listening to us, especially in the recorded version, to go check out their website. Because you personally are in a video that explains what your company does so well, that I think the rest of us can learn about how to, how to express what our businesses do just by watching your video. But, for now. What does? What does the site do? What does the company do?
Andrew: [04:56] Yes. So, we’ve got a very simple to understand product …
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Interviewee: Yes. So we’ve got a very simple to understand product. We have a software product that you simply download, put on to your Web server, and it will immediately double the speed of your website, reduce the page load time by 50%. That kind of gives you several benefits. First of all, it makes people click more pages. It’s kind of quite a common sense to understand. You know how you watch the nightly news o you watch TV, and the ads come on. So, we use TiVo and we sort of always fast forward through the ads. So, we do everything that we can not to watch commercials on TV. Yet, we’ll get out from our server and walk over to the computer, sit down, and you’re typing people’s Web page addresses, and we’re inviting that marketing message into our lives.
Now, anything that you can do to make sure that more pages are being delivered to a person who has come to you for a message, is really, really powerful. It tends to increase the conversion rights and just a dozens that you can do. So, we’re in the business of making websites faster which means people click more pages, do more business with you, and at the same time, that reduces data traffic and cause to deliver that service as well.
Andrew: Let me see if I understand this, because Google has a big campaign to speed up the Web. I’m looking at Web pages, they load up in maybe three seconds right now. If you, guys, help us increase the speed, maybe they’ll load up in a second and half. Is that small difference in time – we’re talking seconds now, we’re not talking minutes – is it important? In fact, more importantly, what importance does it have?
Interviewee: There’s a couple of things. Number one, if your pages are loading in three seconds from around the world, then you’re really fast, and so that’s looking pretty good. But, if you’re one of the big guys, as Google found, if they can shave off half a second of time, then that can mean 20% more traffic for them. That’s the effect for company like Google on their own sites. Now, many companies that aren’t optimized to the same extent as Google, those pages are loading in five or 10 or 15 seconds. Especially if you’re looking at them from, say, outside the US, you’re looking that from the UK or from Asia or from, where I live, down somewhere near Australia, those pages load a lot longer. No one likes sitting there and waiting and waiting to watch pages load.
A really good example, I think of, is if you think you’re doing traveling, maybe you’re traveling to Japan, and you look at, say, Tokyo hotels. Go to Google and you go type Tokyo hotels search. Google will give you a list of like a thousand different hotels. As you click on those and load them, if they load too slowly, those hotel homepages, you’ll simply just going to turn it off and turn away.
So, what we’ve got is a way just for people to, especially, fix those problems. I guess, one of the powerful things about our solution is that you instantly load the product on the Web server, and instantly, the pages are faster. But you’re absolutely right, there’s a lot of pressure from folks like Google and some of the big players to say, “Hey, let’s speed up the Web. Let’s make it so admissive and so instantly on that it will replace the TV and replace everything else in your life as a primary source of information.”
Andrew: OK. So, what you’re saying is that there’s a measurable improvement in traffic, in engagement, in sales when you speed up websites. Even when we’re talking about a few seconds, even when we’re talking about, in the case of Google, half a second, you said, they see 20% more traffic. So, how are you, guys, doing it? I like that it’s easy and I understand that because you make it easy, you’re able to get more customers. But how, specifically, are you, guys, doing it? By the way, for anyone who is listening and is wondering when are we going to get to the learning to find out how we can sell to the big companies. I’m going to get to it, I just want to make sure that we understand that’s business.
So, how do you, guys, do it?
Interviewee: So, first of all, if your pages are loading in three seconds, I think, that’s good enough, that you’re better than 75% of other people on the Internet. I think, a really realistic goal for people is four seconds. If you can have your pages like in four seconds from around the world, and that’s really, really fast, and that’s good. So how are we doing it? We, accidentally, have been to that phase of technology that, I guess, it turns complex pages into simple pages. One of the challenges, as a Skype phone call that showing today, we have a problem called network license. The further you are away from a source, you know, the longer the distance that these electronic signals have to magically travel around, our product will reduce that bit of network license by taking up a Web page with lots of things on it and turn it into a Web page with fewer things on it. So, without changing the way stuff looks or how it behaves, we just simplify what happens underneath it.
Andrew: Can you give me an example?
Interviewee: Yes. So, most Web pages will have, say, ten Java script files powering them, and maybe like half a dozen CSS style sheet files, and also a bunch of images. Now, our product, dynamically, in real time, optimizes the page, takes all of the Java script files, and merges them into a single file. It does the same thing with style sheets, it merges those into a single file.
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Interviewee: …we have a problem called that the further you are away from a source, you know, the longer the distance that these electronic signals have to magically travel around. And our product will reduce that effective network latency by taking a web page with lots of things on it and turning it into a web page with fewer things on it. So without changing the way stuff looks or how it behaves we just simplify what happens underneath it.
Andrew: Can you give me an example?
Interviewee: Yeah. So most web pages will have say, ten Java script files powering them and maybe like half a dozen CSS style sheet files and also a bunch of images. Now our product dynamically in real time, optimizes the page, takes all of the Java script files and merges them into a single file. And then it does the same thing with style sheets, merges those into a single file. And then all of the different images on a page, it will stitch together into what’s called an image mosaic. So what this means to the web page is it looks exactly the same but it’s got far fewer things driving it. So it means a faster web page. And typically we can reduce the load times by 50%.
Andrew: Okay. So if I’m understanding this right, when you’re talking all the pictures on my web site, if I’m using your service, and creating them into an image mosaic, the user now has to load up one image instead of a handful of images. And then in the portion of the page that…and then the page itself knows which portion of this mosaic to show in each section of the page, right?
Interviewee: Yeah, the wonderful thing is that from the end user’s perspective you don’t have to do anything. To the browser, the page looks exactly the same, it just loads quicker. For the businesses buying our product and putting it on their servers, they don’t have to get a whole lot of developers to make changes to websites and hand optimize and spend a lot of money and things like that. They put the product on and turn it on. So that’s the key thing: that all of this optimization that happens is kind of like tuning a car. Suddenly you get better engine performance and better miles per gallon from it. So that’s basically how it works. There’s a lot more information on our website but I think the key thing, and this as we start talking about selling to the big guys, I think probably the really key point…we have a product that speeds up your website. That’s what it does. That’s all it does. And for some people, they don’t want that. Some people say, “Well, my website’s fast enough.” But you know, the world is a huge place and there are a lot of people who are looking for a solution like that. And it’s a huge market out there.
Andrew: And what we’re seeing is more and more people are recognizing the importance of having a faster website. In fact here, let me read some of what people here are saying in the comments who are watching us live. Michael is saying, “I’m addicted to website performance and optimization.” And Michael, I’d love to know where you’re working so if you could add that to the chat room I’ll read that too. Chris Dritt is asking how is the software speeding things up and we talked about that. Let’s see. Monocat says that he put a test on his site and he was told that he’d know in five minutes. It’s been 20; he wants me to ask you what’s a typical turnaround? So it seems like he entered his site into your website – into some field on your site so that you guys can test his site for speed and he hasn’t heard back. Is that right?
Interviewee: Yeah, it sounds like it. So anyone here…I can’t answer that question while I’m doing the video but you’re welcome to email me and it’s ed.robinson@aptimize.com. And I answer every email that people send me unless you’re trying to sell me cheap Viagra or something like that. And I get quite a few of those.
Andrew: What I’m learning from Monocat is that you guys will tell web owners how fast their site is and then whether you guys can help them improve their speed.
Interviewee: And this is something…this is actually an interesting thing. We reached out and talked to a lot of people in the performance community and we sort of hooked into a network…there are networks of measurement machines, computers, around the world that will measure how fast your website is. And so a lot of people think that they’ve got a fast website. We’ve got a way for them just to type in their website address, dub, dub, dub and then your email address and then we have a tool that sort of automates these different testing machines from around the world that simply load your page with Internet Explorer and see how long it takes to load and then kind of compiles it together and then we can estimate from there how fast it is and also how fast it will be with optimization turned on. So, that’s really interesting and typically their prices obviously automating these machines around the world
Andrew: T
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Andrew: …I’d love to hear what you guys say back and forth. Now, I want to move on to the second part here. You’ve got a great product here and you’re at the right time with this product because, as I say, the movement is towards more speed. But the big question is how do you sell it? A lot of us have great products, a lot of us have great ideas, a lot of us are in the market but we can’t reach the customers that we want to sell to.
Interviewee: I don’t know the answer to that. That is one approach. And we certainly got some big customers. I think more important to us is that people are delighted with your business. Because quite a powerful thing that we do. Look how about we connect you with some other customers. And you can then ask them.
Andrew: If I right now say to you that I am not sure I want _ to work with you guys, I am little bit nervous. You will connect me with Microsoft or one of your other customers or give me one of your other customers or give me their phone numbers without you on the phone so that I cam call them up without you on the phone so that I cam make sure if it is OK so that the whole business is closed up.
Interviewee: Yes.
Andrew: I like that.
Interviewee: You don’t need huge customers. You just need people who are delighted and who will actually talk about that. And you can see the power of that as a tool.
Andrew: One more question about this section of the interview about how to sell Fortune 500 Companies over the web. I have noticed certain some companies that become your Evangelist. Has Google become your Evangelist? Have they told all their people they should work with you? Has Microsoft become your Evangelist?
Interviewee: I am not sure about that. I have not quite figured that out yet. But certainly we have so. I will put in _ websites, _ that are certainly hugely powerful. One type of technology that we are very very successful with is Share point. And a lot of marketers recommend our product for share-point sites. And for some reason our product just works really well at spreading up share points, markets of share points _. So there seem to be lot of references from Microsoft for that which is why your point _.
Andrew: And share point is huge for them. So there are lots of people who are using share-point if you have proven your worth on share-point, you can tap into a huge potential customer base.
Interviewee: Perfect. Yeah. And it is always a good feeling when you can speed up someone’s share-point site or website as well. The people are really grateful for that.
Andrew: Michael who I mentioned earlier in the chat-room, actually created a report on your website for _ which I am eager to see after the interview is over. I like this chat-room. They are right. They kept pushing me to have a better chat-room. So, we can have a real conversation here. One that is different from Justin TV chat-room or _ chat and I can see it is paying up for me. The conversation _ is more helpful here. 1st point is don’t try _ you don’t try to sell anonymously. People buy from people and you want to be open about who you are. 2nd point
Interviewee: Sorry Andrew, I want to elaborate about that. allow me to talk about things. You are a good listener.
Andrew: That is why we have you here.
Interviewee: So what we did right at the beginning. We did not worry too much about building up automatic _ systems and things like that. We jut connected with people. We e-mailed everyone we knew. Anyone approaching our website, we offered to just talk to them. To help them with any questions that they had. A lot of people don’t want to talk. They just want to come in and kick the tires and leave. But yeah people buy from people. And I think that is very very important. You should only be in the business of selling _ if you love hateful people. So we are walking over each other again.
Andrew: I remember few of us back in the late 90s who were starting up internet companies. Started out with the fantasy that you can sell online without ever talking to a human being again. It would just all happen anonymously. And I remember my friend _ build a business that was eventually worth over a billion dollars. Her goal was to automate the whole process. So that you can sign up for her newsletters online, you can buy ads to reach her newsletter customers online. So that the whole thing would be just automated like a huge machine. And it turned out that it did not work that way. That the big customers did want to talk the real human being. Like the small customers want to talk to the real human being. The partners like me who are just starting out want to talk to the real human being. And so you are right. From back then, we learned the lesson that holds true till today. People don’t buy from machines, they buy from people which is unfortunate for us because we want to automate the whole process.
I could understand somebody in our audience right now having a great idea, building it out, sweating and working and spending money to build it out, and then saying, “Okay, this needs to go to the big companies. They’re the ones who have the money. They’re the ones who have the capacity and the need for this business, for the products that I’m building. How do I get to them? How do I even open their door?”
Well, before we started, you sent me a list of five things, five tips that you have for entrepreneurs and any business online that wants to sell to a big Fortune 500 company. You also sent me another list of five things to avoid, and I want to go through that five—both those fives—and explain them. The first thing, how to sell over the web to Fortune 500 companies. The first point you sent me is, “Define simply what your product is.”
Interviewee: So here’s how I pitch our product: We’re a software product. You download it, put it on your webserver. It will immediately double the speed of your website with no code changes and no extra hardware, and that’s all it does. And so that’s very simple for people to understand, and some people will say to you, “I’m a fireman. I don’t need this.” But then other people will say, “I’m in the Marketing department for a company,” or the IT, and so you can see how simple it is.
Now, we sell to small businesses to really big businesses. The real difference for the, say, Fortune 500 or Global 1,000, I guess there’s two key differences. Number one, the purchase cycles will be longer because, if it’s like $3,000 or more, they have to go through a purchase order process.
Second of all, you’re dealing with people who are typically part of a hierarchy, so you need to understand what goals that they have personally, so that you can know that in speeding up their website for them, they are going to be fulfilling their goals and probably getting a promotion from doing it.
I think defining a product simply, and especially finding something that enterprises, you know is going to be appealing to them, is very, very important.
Andrew: Let me ask you a few questions about that because the guys who wrote the book “Made to Stick” talked about, I think it was, the curse of too much information, which means that when you know so much about your product that you can build it out and build a company around it, you often know too much about it to explain it simply to somebody on the outside.
So what I’d like to know is how hard was it, or what process did you go through to simplify your message so that you can communicate what your business does as easily as you just did. It wasn’t as easy as, “We’re building it, this is all it is, BAM, right there.”
Interviewee: I haven’t read the book that you’re talking about, but that’s exactly…It probably took us six months to get to that message.
Andrew: Let me just clear this up because to me, it always seems like it comes in easily, but I know that there’s lot more time. I want to make sure that the transcribers and the person listening to us here, you’re saying six months just to come up with that simple message?
Interviewee: Just to clarify, we weren’t all just sitting in a room for six months trying to think about it, but the interesting this is that you come up with an idea and you should continually iterate on that idea. And that’s what we did.
The message that we have—which is “Double your website speed—no code changes, no extra hardware,”—that probably took about six months to get there and even then, I’m not very happy with it, like it sounds too much like an infomercial. But it takes a lot of work to be able to explain yourself simply.
Andrew: Do you have an example of one of your previous statements that was more of a head-scratcher that sent you back to the office to think it through?
Interviewee: You know, I can’t even remember it, but we renamed our product three times. So we started off and just internally, it was called the “Resource Converter,” because it merges things together. Then, when we launched, we had the name “Page Optimizer,” which we had for six months and then we recently renamed that to “Website Accelerator,” which more clearly defines what it is that we do.
Andrew: And the website name is Aptimize, with an “A”.
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Interviewee: Yes, that’s like optimize, but with an A, because we’re application optimization dot-com.
Andrew: OK. What process did you go through? I don’t want to spend too much time on this one point, but I’m curious enough to ask a couple of follow-up questions here. What process did you go through to whittle down your message to that short message that you said. Let me see, I just heard it once, actually, a couple of times here in this interview, let me see if I remember it well enough to communicate about you. “Double your website’s speed without changing any of the code.” That was double your website’s speed plus something else without changing a line of code. What was it?
Interviewee: Yes. So, double your website’s speed, no code changes, no extra hardware.
Andrew: Yes. So, I got it. It’s a really good message. So, how did you get down to that message?
Interviewee: OK. So, this was just probably a couple of us bouncing things backwards and forwards. So, we didn’t have a big PR company or advertising bureau or anything like that. It was just us, just bouncing things backwards and forwards. I think, the probably one thing that we did was make sure it sounds…you can see how our product can be quite scientific. Like you could think that we reduced price like about 50% and things like that. But we use the word “double,” and double is quite important because it’s quite an emotive word. And that’s quite important to me that, at the end of the day, the company is all about people. It’s about helping your business reach people and customers quicker. So, double is a good word because we know about science, we’re about the process of people. But really, I can’t explain it much more than that, but one that we just sort of bounce it around, and I guess, it took about six months to get to that.
Andrew: Sorry, we said we’d be stepping on each other, and there we go, we did it. What we’re you going to say?
Interviewee: I think the simple you can make a message and the simpler you can make your business and the product, the simpler you can make your pricing, the better. You’re also inundated with information these days and there’s so much stuff [xx] in complexity that the simpler things are, the better.
Andrew: OK. All right. Let’s go on to the second point. The second point is clearly define
what the value is.
Interviewee: Yes. I know a lot of companies selling e-collaboration solutions that allow people to commit closer and do things like that.
Andrew: You’re saying they’re [xx]
Interviewee: It’s very hard to understand…
Andrew: You’re very jargon response to what does this do.
Interviewee: Yes. Those things don’t click to me. So, there are some really good solutions like that. But I think, if I think of your audience here, if people really desperate to build a business and to get ahead, then a lot of us [xx] and look for things that have very, very clear value to people. Again, it won’t appeal to everyone, but it will be simple to understand. So, our product reduces your data [xx] costs and causes the clicks per user, and it will also reduce the number of Web servers that you need or infrastructure that you need to run your website.
So, that doesn’t appeal to everyone, not everyone wants that, but it’s very simple to understand. I mean, when you’re selling under the width, the tough thing and the powerful thing. So, the powerful thing is that you had the ability to reach a huge number of people, much bigger than…I remember reading once, if you’ve got a physical bookshop, you know, sitting in whatever city you are on, you kind of go to a radius of about 50 miles of people that you can reach. That’s how far people will drive to come to Andrew’s Bookstore. But then, if you’re on the Web, clearly, you’ve got the reach of the entire globe.
Now, the downside of that, the challenge with that, is that people have a much shorter attention span. For a physical bookshop, if you drive in 50 miles, you’re going to buy something because you’re in the shop, you spend that investment. But on the Web, people will come in and out very, very quickly, so you’ve got to capture them with these simple messages and be able to explain your product and your service very, very simply. So, yes, that’s the second thing, clearly define what your value is. So you’ve got your product very, very simple and you’ve got the value proposition very, very simple. Then, for those massive amount of people that come on, they can very quickly sort of decide yes or no.
Andrew: Was it a process to also clearly define the value for you? Or, did you know exactly what it was going to be? Did you find yourself sharing too much information for a long time before you narrowed it down to this? Or, did you know, “This is what we’re building our company [xx] that’s our clear value preposition.”
Interviewee: Yes. I think we had a very clear vision there. It does take a while to articulate it and actually quite an interesting thing to do is to have other people repeat it back to you. Just as we sit here and I’ll listen to you describe what our product is, if you ask your friends or colleagues, “Can you describe my business to me?” Then you’ll see the reason I should pay for what sticks and what doesn’t.
Andrew: OK. All right. Number three, using old school sales model, what do you mean by an old school sales model?
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Interviewee: And then for those massive amount of people that come in, they can very quickly decide yes or no.
Andrew: Was it a process to also clearly define the value for you or did you know exactly what it was going to be? Did you find yourself sharing too much information for a long time before you narrowed it down to this? Or did you know, “This is what we’re building our company to solve and that’s our clear value proposition?”
Interviewee: Yeah, I think we had a very clear vision there. It does take a while to articulate it. And actually quite an interesting thing to do is to have other people repeat it back to you. Just as we sat here and I listened to you describe what the value…or what our product is. If you ask your friends and colleagues, “Can you describe my business to me?” then you see what resonates with people, what sticks and what doesn’t.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Number three. Use an old school sales model. What do you mean by an “old school sales model”?
Interviewee: Again, this is what works for us. We’re very simply…you buy your licenses or your web servers or for your application and purchase those licenses and that’s all you have to do. So we don’t try some…we don’t have ad based pricing or anything like that, just a very, very simple pricing model. And I think personally I think that’s quite important especially if you sell to those bigger companies. They’re about…they have to do purchase orders to get then and they’re about transparency of cost. So as you build your business, don’t be scared to charge money for things if they offer value. And also use a simple, kind of easy to understand sales model.
Andrew: I see, because you’re trying to communicate quickly what the cost is and calculate it easily and incorporate it into their regular…into their income statements. You don’t want to start having a price per server plus a price per user plus an additional share per hour that the site is up and all those things. You want to keep it really simple so that people know how to do the math on…
Interviewee: I think we have to remember that people are busy. They don’t really want to understand your pricing model and everything. They want to understand what it means to them. But just make it really, really simple. That’s been quite important for us is to make the product simple, the pricing simple and to make sure that we’re a simple to deal with company. And I always think of it this way. As I buy things, I typically don’t like spending money. I’m looking for ways to save money. So you’ve got to have value props that will save people money or you’ve got to make it [INAUDIBLE] simple. So yeah, sell license for us, it was about just selling licenses for servers and application. Back that up with continual improvement. Back that up with great support as well. And I think it’s the next point as well, that when you’re a small company you must…yes you have the ability to offer better support than bigger companies do. If you come and work with us we will know you by name and you’ll get people working day and night to help you get your site faster. And then you say you had a great experience there and you’ll tell all your friends. And when you’re a small company you have that opportunity to actually do that and bigger companies know that and they know that you’ll be important to them. So that can actually be quite a strength as you’re working with big companies and selling into them.
Andrew: And that was your number four: offer great support. And what kind of support do you give? Obviously you respond to emails. Do you have a phone number that goes directly to your office and not to some other company that answers your calls?
Interviewee: Yeah, in actual fact what we’re doing this week is doing a new revision of our website that will have a 1-800 number on it and have an online chat as well. And in those…we’re just starting to experiment with that because the more that we can connect with people the better. So that will be rolling out today or tomorrow which will be quite interesting. I-800 number, email…No, you go ahead.
Andrew: I was just going to say that I didn’t realize we were done…I thought we were done with this point so I was going to move on to what people were saying in the chat room. And apparently there’s a lot of buzz there about the report that you guys generate on your website. I see that Icon Finder dot net generated a report for himself and he’s showing it up online for everyone else to see and it look like you’re kind of selling them, just with the report alone.
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Andrew: …just with the report alone. And I know people who are listening to the recorded version of this interview, don’t have access to Icon Finder’s report unless he decides to add it to the comments. But you can go and just generate one for your own site. But let’s stick with this customer support. How many people do you have who answer calls and emails and soon will be on the live chat?
Interviewee: So our company is ten people in size. And so we started off really small and we got up to that size and I’m trying to keep it really small as well. And everyone is involved with customer support. And everyone’s involved with sales. We actually have…as people come in with questions or they get involved, you can quite easily be working with me, the CEO, or you may get assigned to our chief technical officer or the guy who makes the coffee. That’s a joke. We all make the coffee.
Andrew: It sounds like it’s pretty much you. The guy who makes the coffee.
Interviewee: But everyone’s involved with that and everyone’s connected and everyone understands the value of being able to help customers. And the customer questions, customer problems, customer queries they always go, for us in priority, they go above anything else. The most important thing that you can have is happy customers because those happy customers will tell other people. I think that’s a very old school…that’s sort of a well known sort of fact and it’s true for us as well.
Andrew: Okay.
Interviewee: So as people engage with us we just connect them with anyone on the team who can help.
Andrew: All right. Let’s go to number five and then I’ve got a couple of follow up questions that I’ve written down as we were talking. Last one is your background story is important. Where you came from, why you’re the best and so on? Who cares about where you came from? Don’t they only care about what software you have and what value you add to them?
Interviewee: You know, I watched the video on your website showing the two chairs and that two chairs story – and if anyone watching us hasn’t seen it, I would invite you to watch it. It’s just three or four minutes long and it illustrates why Andrew is talking to everyone here and why he sees the value. It illustrates the mistake and what he’s learned from that mistake. Now that story is so powerful because it indicates to me, watching it, that you’re learning from experience. That you’re talking from the stuff that you’ve learnt. And you can see the passion in there and you can feel the heartbreak of being left just with these two chairs in your empty Manhattan office.
So as we connect with people I think it’s really important to show what our background story is. Because our background story isn’t just about making money or trying to think up an idea. We invented this, our product because we had a problem. And here’s our problem, that two years ago, myself and some colleagues, we started a software-as-a-business service. There are so many of them out there these days. And we had just another one and it was an online project management product. We host it from here in Wellington New Zealand which is down near Australia. It’s the last bus stop before you hit the Antarctica, right? It’s a long way away. So what we found, really common problem, but what we found is that our website was fast for us in Wellington New Zealand but slower if you’re accessing it from Melbourne Australia. Slower again from Seattle. New York it’s even slower. And London England, it was incredibly slow. So you could draw a graph of distance from us and how fast it was. And I emailed a bunch of friends and said, “Look here, try…” and they said, “Your website’s so slow.” And that’s all that they noticed. So we invented this thing that sped up our own website and we got our load times from New York down from 30 seconds down to four seconds. And so that was the invention that ended up being the Optimize Website Accelerator. Because it took us a few months before we understood that this product that sped up our own website would be more successful than the original website that we were speeding up. The tail was bigger than the dog. And it’s interesting, you had the aha moment of “Ohhh! Okay. We’ve got something here. This is really interesting.” And it was a few months later that Yahoo came out with something called Why Slow which is a list of sort of best practices that developers should follow to speed up their websites.
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Interviewee: And we looked at their list of best practices and said, “Hey, this is everything our tool does except that we do it automatically, dynamically in real time. And what Yahoo Why Slow is recommending is that people develop these things and spend months doing it.” So at that point there we recognized that we actually had something first in world and that would be really, really interesting to people. Now as we talk about selling to Fortune 500s, when we released our product because we re-structured our business and released our product a year ago, we figured it would be small companies interested but instead it was bigger companies. It was bigger Fortune 500s and large sort of enterprises. And they’re the ones who our software really, really appealed to. So it’s kind of interesting. You learn your business from that and quite often, your best ideas are the ones that you fall into. Or the ones that you weren’t intending to invent. And that’s certainly what it was for us.
Andrew: How are you communicating your background story?
Interviewee: Yeah, that’s interesting. So if I just talked to you, and I think it’s our next point on here, “Things to Avoid”, the…I guess one thing which I learned a couple of years ago is that as you’re selling over the web don’t try to sell anonymously. I think we all think that we’ll be selling millions of units at a lower price just automatically via the web. I mean, that’s kind of the dream, isn’t it, that you turn the machine on and suddenly millions of dollars start flying out and all you have to do is sit back in Buenos Aires with your feet up on the side of the pool, drinking a pina colada or something like that.
Andrew: Or a yerba mate.
Interviewee: What is that, Andrew?
Andrew: A yerba mate, it’s the local drink here. It’s really, really strong tea and they sit and drink it all day.
Interviewee: Yeah, I’m on black coffee myself.
Andrew: I’m sorry, so you were saying that you think that it’s going to be that easy.
Interviewee: So the reality is, at least from what I’ve seen, is that people buy from people. And so they want to talk to you and it’s actually a lot of fun talking to prospects and customers. So that background story…we tend to communicate that just as we engage with customers.
Andrew: So you do it on the phone, you do it by email…
Interviewee: So I think even on the web…
Andrew: Do you do it on the web?
Interviewee: Yeah, we telephone people. We email them or try to telephone them and just talk to them and understand what they’re doing and explain things. It just makes sure for everyone that they can understand, they can ask their questions and get answers very, very quickly and stuff like that.
Andrew: Okay. Before we go on and talk a little deeper about the things to avoid, I wrote down a few questions here. First of all, I want to make it clear: you’re selling on the web, right? You’re not making cold calls, you don’t have a sales force that has experience selling Fortune 500 companies. From what I’m understanding, your sales are being generated on the web. How are people finding you?
Interviewee: People just find us through Google. People find us through word of mouth. That’s all. We spend a little on Google Ad Words and a few banner ads but that’s basically how we work.
Andrew: So Microsoft is a customer…I’m sorry.
Interviewee: There’s word of mouth and references. I mean, when you start your business you email everyone you know, don’t you? At least we did. Everyone that you think might buy it so you connect with them.
Andrew: So if I saw Microsoft on your website as a client, they contacted you because they were Googling online and they found you as the solution to their speed issues?
Interviewee: So Microsoft are a…so I guess for most of our customers, they find us online or they talk to other people we know. I mean, Microsoft, it was a mixture of that plus us connecting with them as well. And I mean, often what you can do is just find the right people to connect to and let them know your value proposition and just email them and ask them if they’re interested.
Andrew: So how did you know who at Microsoft to reach out to and how’d you know who was going to be the right person to make this decision?
Interviewee: Well again, it comes down to…I mean, there are two points here. For the Microsoft one, I used to work at Microsoft so it gave me some connections inside. And that’s why…and I think again, when you start your business it’s really important to just email and connect with everyone that you’ve worked with in the past and find out what they’re doing. So that definitely helped.
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Interviewee: .. But then yeah then one of the critical things is to find out.. Especially those bigger companies who’s got the right ..who’s got the purchasing authority and who can make that decision.
Andrew: What about google? How did they find you?
Interwievee: So Google..so for Microsoft this [INAUDIBLE] worked. For google they found us through the web. Plus we connected. The Google people have been really really supportive of our company and so on. I connect with Steve Sallers their performance engineer and a bunch of other people inside. So Google and Microsoft are kinda unique. They’re both such powerful companies and influential. And they have both been very very helpful to us. The most of the other Fortune 500s.. and they’re listed on our website. They typically find us through the web.
Andrew: (Interrupts) So they will just go to a search online ‘how do we speed up our web sites’ and your site will come up and then that leads to a sale?
Interviewee: Correct
Andrew: Really?
Interviewee: Yah
Andrew: Is it sir..So how are you gonna even rank in your search engines? To get up and be one of the top results that they’ll see?
Interviewee: Yeah I’m not sure but I think the interesting thing is that can happen because we have such a simple to understand product and a simple to understand [INAUDIBLE] proposition. And we have a lot of people coming and talking to us who aren’t interested in buying because it’s not quite what they’re looking for. But you know.. with this massive market out there.. Huge global market.. Any bully to reach them by being on the web. .I mean everybody googles or blings or yahoo searches these days. We all do that to look for information. We’ve all become research engineers I think in a lot of ways. Yeah that’s how we generate ourselves is through the web.
Andrew: What about this? It might be inexpensive and it might be an easy to understand solution but it impacts a big part of your customer’s business. Aren’t people afraid to experiment with something as precious as their website? Especially with a company that’s less than a year old?
Interviewee: Yeah.. yeah that’s really very interesting.
Andrew: So how do you overcome that?
Interviewee: So that’s a challenge that we all have as we start our business. And it’s really not so much being a year old.. Its more who else is using it and that’s the thing. The bigger the companies are, the more you tend to trust them
Andrew: (interrupts) I see. So you’re saying that you overcame..you overcame the worry that customers have about dealing with a new supplier and having a young company touch their precious web business. You overcame that by saying look Google, Microsoft others are using us. They trust us. You should be able to also.
Interviewee: Yeah but I think lets get back to those 1st sales. That’s very critical and as I’ve talked to other people who’ve started businesses. You make those first sales by pure will power. There’s no.. You know.. You’re.. Like If I get back to a year ago when we made our first I guess like team sales, then you did it by sheer willpower, by just talking to people and just evangelizing and going about, you know, doing everything you can to make them delighted. And I think as we talked to your viewers on this one here, most 1st team sales are critical. I know you can either do it as yours, as the company founders, as the visionary. You can just go out and sell your vision to people.
Andrew: So here’s something I’m noticing in a lot of my interviews, with Tom Zachy, the found of Teracycle. With Albert Lai who’s a serial entrepreneur and a few others. They say instead of building up to the big customers by doing a bunch of smaller customers, then winning over bigger and bigger and increasingly bigger customers, if you spend a lot of your time trying to win over one marquee customer, you can then sell to everybody afterwards because your potential customers will trust you when they see that a marquee customer has bought from you. That I Andrew trusted Ed to come here on Mixergy because I saw the Microsoft logo and the Google logo as two big customers of yours. I said okay, if they trust him enough to do business with him and to be his customers, I’m gonna trust him enough to have him here on Mixergy. And I’m sure your other customers do the same. So fair to say that you’re better off as a younger company pursuing the bigger customers just so you can use their name to win over everyone else?
Interviewee: I don’t know the answer to that. I think that’s one approach and we’ve certainly got some pretty big customers. I think ..
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Interviewee: .. But then yeah then one of the critical things is to find out.. Especially those bigger companies who’s got the right ..who’s got the purchasing authority and who can make that decision.
Andrew: What about google? How did they find you?
Interwievee: So Google..so for Microsoft this [INAUDIBLE] worked. For google they found us through the web. Plus we connected. The Google people have been really really supportive of our company and so on. I connect with Steve Sallers their performance engineer and a bunch of other people inside. So Google and Microsoft are kinda unique. They’re both such powerful companies and influential. And they have both been very very helpful to us. The most of the other Fortune 500s.. and they’re listed on our website. They typically find us through the web.
Andrew: (Interrupts) So they will just go to a search online ‘how do we speed up our web sites’ and your site will come up and then that leads to a sale?
Interviewee: Correct
Andrew: Really?
Interviewee: Yah
Andrew: Is it sir..So how are you gonna even rank in your search engines? To get up and be one of the top results that they’ll see?
Interviewee: Yeah I’m not sure but I think the interesting thing is that can happen because we have such a simple to understand product and a simple to understand [INAUDIBLE] proposition. And we have a lot of people coming and talking to us who aren’t interested in buying because it’s not quite what they’re looking for. But you know.. with this massive market out there.. Huge global market.. Any bully to reach them by being on the web. .I mean everybody googles or blings or yahoo searches these days. We all do that to look for information. We’ve all become research engineers I think in a lot of ways. Yeah that’s how we generate ourselves is through the web.
Andrew: What about this? It might be inexpensive and it might be an easy to understand solution but it impacts a big part of your customer’s business. Aren’t people afraid to experiment with something as precious as their website? Especially with a company that’s less than a year old?
Interviewee: Yeah.. yeah that’s really very interesting.
Andrew: So how do you overcome that?
Interviewee: So that’s a challenge that we all have as we start our business. And it’s really not so much being a year old.. Its more who else is using it and that’s the thing. The bigger the companies are, the more you tend to trust them
Andrew: (interrupts) I see. So you’re saying that you overcame..you overcame the worry that customers have about dealing with a new supplier and having a young company touch their precious web business. You overcame that by saying look Google, Microsoft others are using us. They trust us. You should be able to also.
Interviewee: Yeah but I think lets get back to those 1st sales. That’s very critical and as I’ve talked to other people who’ve started businesses. You make those first sales by pure will power. There’s no.. You know.. You’re.. Like If I get back to a year ago when we made our first I guess like team sales, then you did it by sheer willpower, by just talking to people and just evangelizing and going about, you know, doing everything you can to make them delighted. And I think as we talked to your viewers on this one here, most 1st team sales are critical. I know you can either do it as yours, as the company founders, as the visionary. You can just go out and sell your vision to people.
Andrew: So here’s something I’m noticing in a lot of my interviews, with Tom Zachy, the found of Teracycle. With Albert Lye who’s a serial entrepreneur and a few others. They say instead of building up to the big customers by doing a bunch of smaller customers, then winning over bigger and bigger and increasingly bigger customers, if you spend a lot of your time trying to win over one marquee customer, you can then sell to everybody afterwards because your potential customers will trust you when they see that a marquee customer has bought from you. That I Andrew trusted Ed to come here on Mixergy because I saw the Microsoft logo and the Google logo as two big customers of yours. I said okay, if they trust him enough to do business with him and to be his customers, I’m gonna trust him enough to have him here on Mixergy. And I’m sure your other customers do the same. So fair to say that you’re better off as a younger company pursuing the bigger customers just so you can use their name to win over everyone else?
Interviewee: I don’t know the answer to that. I think that’s one approach and we’ve certainly got some pretty big customers. I think ..
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Andrew: Which is unfortunate for us cuz I’d like to automate the whole process but I want to deal with reality as it is and that’s the reality that we’ve got to learn to deal with it. You were saying, point number two
Interviewee: Yeah, I just, finishing on point number one, I have met so many interesting people in the last year and I’d far rather be talking to them on the phone than just anonymously watching a tracker record sales. So yeah, it’s kind of interesting. Yeah, number two point, yeah, this is kind of important. Anything that you do, that you invent, and I can only really talk about software here, because software is what I understand. The key thing is, one of the key things is don’t try to make people change, they are, we are creatures of habit, we don’t want to buy any software that, that, that will, that forces us to change our operating system of you know, change how you do things. So the more that your product, I think of it this way, if I’m buying toothpaste at the supermarket I will happily go from brand to brand to brand cuz there’s no change, you know, I can just buy one brand then buy another brand and they’re, they’re interdispursable, you know, but, if you’re buying some new teeth care system that requires you to, I don’t know, to spend twenty minutes doing something, you, you’re going to be more hesitant because it requires a change in behavior. It’s the same thing with selling software, people have their own way of doing things, don’t force them to change.
Andrew: I see
Interviewee: Third point, and then I’ll stop
Andrew: Oh, no, go ahead, let’s go on to the third point, please.
Interviewee: Yeah, please, no more social networks. We’ve got enough already. So I don’t think, I think we’re kind of set around that, you know there’s websites that allow you to build your own social networks. They’re social networks for building social networks, but if you’re starting small like as your audience, and, you know, and your bootstrap in this and you haven’t got money to buy that stuff that’s floating around. You haven’t got a pound, you know, you’re not Bill Gates. So you’re not able to, just, you know, derive everything from, from your reputation, you’re a small company starting up, then you’re going to be selling one by one, not to hundreds of thousands of people inside a social network, and to build a critical mass inside a social network takes a huge amount of effort, so please, no more of those.
Andrew: You know, and it’s kind of interesting because, because so many of us use social networks, we’re building social networks. Very few people are trying to figure out a business like yours, which is how to speed up websites, because it’s not sexy, because we don’t come into contact with it every day, because our won’t necessarily understand the business and our friends won’t talk to us about it, and because we won’t make the cover of most websites, and bloggers won’t even talk about us. And so, you’re right, we’re not paying attention to where the business is, where the opportunity is because, because I think it’s just not where we live, where we happen to live.
Interviewee: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right, the social network stuff sounds really interesting and fascinating if you can make it but it’s, it must be, the success rate for such endeavors must be under one percent. You know, it must be so small. So if you can find, if you can find a problem that’s really common and fix that problem, which is what we do then, then, you’re going to be successful. Alright, here’s my, I’ve got to tell you my next one before we, before we break for questions. So, don’t try to say you’re time saving, because no one believes you. You know, I think of it this way, if you go to the supermarket, the number of things you buy that are meant to save you time, you know, from a razor to a new pair of shoes or something, you know, everyone is trying to sell you time savings and yet we’re busier. I’ve bought so many time saving devices that, that we are busier than we’ve ever been before, so explain that to me.
Andrew: Alright, let me say this, that, this is interesting, I think that just a few minutes ago I posted an interview with the founder of Freshbooks that said that he was able to charge for his service, for his invoice based, let’s see what is it, a web app that helps make it easier for you to track time and to send out invoices and to get paid, that he was able to sell it online because he sold it as a time saver and
Interviewee: Yeah
Andrew: And here you are saying the exact opposite, which is, what’s interesting about this is often I hear entrepreneurs contradicting each other and I don’t think it is because one side is right and the other side is wrong. I think it’s because they’re different approaches and, and it’s not as easy to figure out, this is a universal truth. You have to spend some time with the entrepreneur, you have to spend some time with the thought and then figure out the nuance, and then see if it’s appropriate for you.
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Interviewee: Yeah. And also he, he maybe, I, I’m not familiar with that. I, I’ll certainly watch that after this, this interview that we do now. He may be selling time savings, but his customers may not be buying time savings.
Andrew: I see. They may be buying some other aspect of the business.
Interviewee: They might be buying a different. But, but you ask yourself this, “Do you buy time savings?” Like, when you, if you go out and buy a product or, like, like, like FreshBooks or anything else. Do you think, “Okay, this is gonna a hour more of my day, and I’ll be able to go skiing at night.” Or, or do you, I mean for me, I don’t, kinda, believe that. I not gonna bank on that. I think it probably means…
Andrew: You know what, I have to say. I wonder if it’s a cultural thing. In the U.S., we do. We keep getting suckered into these time saving things. I will download an app, and spend a lot of time installing it, because it’s a productivity… I had to stop myself from doing this, so I hopefully don’t do it any more. To download all these apps that are gonna be productivity enhancements, and then I’ve got so many apps on my iPhone that I can’t find the app that’s gonna increase my productivity in this particular moment. So I search and waste time searching, or I waste time learning how to use it instead of just, instead of just giving the whole thing up and doing what I’m doing. It becomes a big distraction.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: But I used to get suckered in to these, these productivity blogs. That everyday they would post seven, or ten, different ideas for how you could improve your productivity and save more time. And I realized that the best time savings I could have is just stop reading them, and stop trying to learn every little technique that they have, because that’s what was suckering me in to wasting time. In that sense, I grew through 100%, and I, I hopefully have weaned myself off of that nonsense.
Interviewee: [laughs]
Andrew: There’s a little rant.
Interviewee: There’s an app for that.
Andrew: There’s an app for that. Thankfully, you know what I have to say, I, I, before I came here to Buenos Aires, I wiped out my whole iPhone. I stated off fresh. I’m very judicious about what I put on. I make myself, just, think about it for a couple of days before I accept something that’s gonna increase my productivity. I’ve found that doing less, and accepting less in my life has been the better, and the best increase of, best productivity boost.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: Alright. I’m gonna get off my soapbox on that one, and let’s go on to number five, which is, oh, this I hear over and over, everyday, here, practically, on Mixergy. You say, “Don’t do stealth mode. Don’t do stealth mode for the transcribers.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: S-T-E-A-L-T-H mode. I want to make sure I’m pronouncing that right.
Interviewee: So, at Aptimize, we didn’t do, we didn’t do stealth mode, and again you probably have half the ent-, half the business people coming on here saying, “Do do stealth mode.” But, you know, I think…
Andrew: No. No. They same the same thing. Not a single person here has come on and said, “stealth mode saved my life.” But a lot of people have come on, and said, “stealth mode killed my business. It disconnected me from my customers. It kept me from being in touch. It kept me from getting feedback.” You could listen to lots of Mixergy interviews and hear the same thing you’re saying. Why are you saying, “Don’t do stealth mode?”
Interviewee: Yeah. The way I look at it. The world is so information saturated these days. You know, there’s so many things being fired at us that, that we, we can’t respond. You know, we just can’t absorb it all. And so, with stealth mode, you basically, sometimes you only have a limited window that you’ll actually get people’s attention, and tell them about your business. And so, with stealth mode, you’re missing out on that. You’re assuming that you can do a one big splash, and everyone’s gonna cover you. And the world isn’t like that. You know, no matter how much you splash, people will know after ten seconds then it kind of goes away. I mean, even our business, we’ve been around for a year, and I’m guessing that, that 80% of your audience has never heard of us before. The reality is that there’s so many things. Excuse me for a second. Hey guys, I’m doing a live webcast in front of thousands of people. Okay. Sorry.
Andrew: Thank you. And, by the way, thank you Justin.tv for promoting us on your website so he can say that there are actually large number of viewers out there watching us. Go ahead. Sorry.
Interviewee: I think they’re scared to say anything now. Yeah, so I think, I think the more people that know about you. So, if you think about the reason for stealth mode, I guess there are two of them. The, the first one is that, that you’re scared that people will steal your idea. And the second one is that, and you know what, we’ve had people stealing our ideas. There’s another company that’s trying to fast-follow what we’ve done and we were the first in the world with our processes. But, you know, that just happens. The, the second, the second reason is that they’re hoping that the big splash will be what they can do when they come out of stealth mode. And maybe you will get that big splash, but tomorrow there’ll be another big splash. And the next day, there’ll be another one. And suddenly you’re outside of people’s, people’s minds. I think the key thing is to build up trust, and it’s been really important for us as a business to.
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Interviewee: To, to, to. Everyone who comes to us, we build their trust and just build up that connection. And, and for any kind of real business, whether it’s online or offline, you know, you get that vibe, that vibe of being open as open as you can.
Andrew: Ed let me ask you this
Interviewee: Yes, yes
Andrew: What if somebody who’s
Interviewee: I would’ve
Andrew: We’re now broadcasting this out to a few people, we’re gonna then post it on Mixergy and have an even larger audience. What if one of these ambitious upstarts listens to your story and what you’ve done and says huh, now I see, alright, you’ve got this, you’ve got a lot of images on a website, sure combine them into a mosaic, you’ve got this all this Java script and all this other stuff, I could do that. Why am I just sitting back here and listening to Mixergy interviews? I need to do what Ed does, you know, I’m gonna steal Ed’s idea. Isn’t that a threat to the business?
Interviewee: Yeah. It’s totally a threat and that will force us to. It will force our company to be better at what we do. You know cuz maybe that one person’s got some idea that will skim out the whole process and then we’ll have to go one step further and I think all these things, you know, force you to be a better business. It’s far better to be a competitor, to have competitors so that you’re continually being stretched and pushed and offering better service to customers than to be, you know, a single, you know, a single business.
Andrew: I, you know what, I never got that. I never wanted to, the reason I became a entrepreneur is not to be forced to do anything, to do what I want all day. I never got the idea that if I have competitors I’ll be forced to be better. I, here’s what I would think, first of all, I have enough of a head start on my competitors that I better stay ahead of them. Number two is that they’re probably so small that I’m going to watch what they do and I’m going to steal every idea that they have. When I was in the greeting card business, no one was embarrassed to say I stole the idea for the greeting card business from Brad from Marie, I stole every, every innovation that was out there and just pumped it out on my website, even before it was ready. I didn’t wait till it was perfect and stealth moded it until it was, I’d put it out there, and the reason I wasn’t too afraid of competition is cuz I was going to stay on top of them and jump on every idea. I did an interview with Julia Admil, the writer for the Wallstreet Journal who wrote the book “Stealing Myspace”, about how Myspace has stayed on top of those things as long as it did and she said they’re obsessive, they would steal every idea, and Tom would stay up nights watching what other websites did across the, around the world and then bring them back. Any truth to that, that if one of these guys, one of these young turks who’s watching us right now comes up with an idea before he gets big, before he even gets two of your customers, you’re gonna take those ideas and incorporate them.
Interviewee: You know, like, I, I, I look at it this way, that’s really interesting, I’m kind of “scared” (1:07:56), but, but I look at it this way. In a lot of ways your competition, is, is probably youtube. That youtube is where people come and watch videos, you know and they might be watching a video of a cat jumping on a monkey or something like that, but still it’s people taking, in one sense, your competition is youtube. And yet, youtube has probably helped you create a better mixergy, because it’s, the technology they have in our stream video theater is more accepting for people to watch video online without, you know, the boss coming in and kicking them and you know, to touch, so competition helps, even if it’s indirect or in the same space, it helps build up that market, it helps build up the ecosystem, for you, for you to thrive and so as long as you’re good and you’re staying on top, and you do, then that can help you survive. And I look at competition in our space and think, well that’s going to number one raise awareness of our performance and raise awareness of that market and raise the acceptance of people spending money in that market, and it also forces us to make sure that we’re sharp, so we’re not just sitting back in our armchairs and various areas and drinking those, those green drinks here.
Andrew: Alright, well
Interviewee: That’s just, that’s just
Andrew: Fair enough, I’m glad you’re pushed. I was curious to see what your response would be to that and that makes sense. And I’ll say this to, to anyone who’s listening and hearing and saying, Andrew just stole all these ideas. What till I have on here, I’m going to have on the guys who stole my ideas at Mixergy, they were very clever too, and I’m someone who becomes friends with his competitors during and after the war. I’ve gotten to be good friends with these competitors, I’ve got to have them on here to tell the stories of what they did to take our customers, it was very interesting. So, alright, so let’s see what people are saying here in the chat and before we say goodbye we’ve got monocat who’s actually saying, looks like they’re generating
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Andrew: meaning your company, Optimize, is generating the report via three servers, one in the US, one in England, one in New Zealand, these people are really hunting into your business, trying to figure out every aspect of what you’re doing and they love the report you’re sending out, and by the way, Andrew SG who’s watching us live got a report from Mixergy, and he’s saying, well actually no it was someone else who did, but Andrew SG went to you and he says, “14 seconds for Mixergy to load, whoa!” which is right, why is my sight taking so long to load, I don’t have that much on there, got to figure it out. Maybe somebody who’s listening is a WordPress maven who could tell me what’s going on.
Interviewee: So anyone there can email me, ed.robinson@aptimize.com, and I can reply back and get answers to questions that you’ve got, so just on those thngs there, but yeah, Mixergy, we can help you speed up.
Andrew: You can help me speed up.
Interviewee: Uh-huh
Andrew: Alright I’ve got to take a look at this report and see what’s going on. Let’s see what else people are saying. Andrew SG is saying, “probably the widgets,” Michael is showing the report, he’s the one who got it, Michael you should change your name in the chat room to something that’s a little more distinctive than Michael, I would do maybe, somebody who was using his website name, you should do that, that way every time I call your name or every time I read out what you’ve written, I’m really going to be reading out your website, get a little publicity for it. Buddyboy2006 is saying maybe its the live, maybe its the feed from Justintv, i’m not willing to say anything bad about Justintv, those people have been getting lots of traffic. Alright, let’s leave it there for now, we’re going to have to do more interviews, and more, more work here around how to sell, I got a lot of interest here in selling and Chris Tritt who’s saying he’s interested in even more nuts and bolts of getting Fortune 500 companies, we’ll do more interviews here, if anyone’s listening to us, let me know who you think I should be interviewing, Ed, if there’s someone who you think I should be interviewing around sales, let me know, actually even if it’s someone from your part of the world who’s not about sales, I’ve got to interview people outside of my hemisphere.
Interviewee: Yep, Yep. Hi I just want to thank you for your time and thank your audience for watching. So our company is, as we talked about before, we have a software product that doubles the speed of websites instantly, no code changes, no extra hardware, it’s www.aptimize.com, which is like optimize with an “a”, and you can reach me at ed.robinson@aptimize.com and I respond to every email I get. So I’m happy to talk to anyone and offer any kind of advice, and I’d like to thank you for your time, Andrew it’s been great.
Andrew: Alright well thank you, I can see, I’m glad that it’s the end of the interview because I can see that now we’re totally losing the Skype connection here, which says something about the audience, the person who stuck with this interview all the way to here. We are at this point of the interview, we’re talking to the hungriest of the hungry entrepreneurs, the hungriest of the hungry businesspeople, who are willing to, knowing full well that there is like high definition video now on Youtube, that you can watch the latest Britney Spears and Saturday Night Live video in super high-def on Youtube and other channels, and here they are, listening to this interview or watching this full interview here, with the stuttering video and with the audio that sometimes cuts out, it shows something about them, this is the audience that I want to reach, this is the audience I want to see do well in business, and I’m really appreciative to you, for not just coming here and doing this interview, but I have notes from you here because you spent time before this interview, you cared about what you were going to teach them, we set out points and thoughts and ideas that we were going to communicate, so I’m really grateful to you for doing that, Ed, and I’m really grateful to the people that are watching us live, and the people who are listening and recorded, let me know who you are, especially if you’re recorded, I never get to see who’s listening to us on the recorded version, I want to know, send me email, write something in the comments, let’s connect, send Ed and email, check out his website, get a report for your site, see what all these people are excited about here, I’m going to go check out my report. Ed, thank you, thank you all, and I’ll see you in comments.
