Andrew: Hey, they’re freedom fighters. I’ve been so excited about this interview. Joining me is, um, Is a Mixergy fan. I recognize the name immediately when it came through as a potential guest. And I’m so glad that he is here because I didn’t realize how much he had done his name is Andy cabasa.
He is the founder of multiple companies, but, , Juris page is what I’d like to spend time focusing on here in this interview, because he was a law student. He started looking at law firms to work for. He realized that a lot of them had webpages that were pretty bad and marketing. That was pretty bad. And he said, you know what?
I think they could do better. And he got into the business of, uh, helping them do better. And one of the things he learned was that they don’t want to spend even a little bit of time to try to improve their websites, but. But if someone is willing to do it for them, they’re willing to pay. And so he created this productized service where lawyers could hire jurors page to create sites for them, and then to create their marketing and handle it all for them.
And the interesting thing is not just that he grew that business and it’s challenging to grow agencies, but that he productize it. And then he sold the company. And I don’t think he’s going to tell us how much he sold the company for, but I will ask him no, he’s shaking his head. No, that’s fine. I just want to get a sense of what’s possible.
I never want to get like, into your finances to the point where it’s awkward, but I do want to get a sense of if you get this type of thing, right. How big can it get? And so I’ll ask him about that. And I’m also gonna ask him about his latest business. It’s called post Stoger. Um, what’s the one sentence description that you’ve got for the new business.
Yeah.
Andy: Uh, post DAGA is an all-in-one tool that helps you with outreach for, uh, building links to your site, to help improve your search rankings. Also doing digital PR to get you press coverage on blogs or featured on podcasts, uh, and also do cold outreach, uh, to find new potential customers.
Andrew: All right. So we’ll focus on jurors page, which is the productized service that you launched and sold. But I do want to see, what did you learn from there that you’re now carrying forward to a post-doc God knows the launch for Posada is way better than the launch free previous company jurors page. So you’ve learned a lot.
All right, as we find out how he launched, built and sold this company, I want to thank the sponsors who made the, who are making this happen. The first is HostGator. Andy told me that he had HostGator account and a, if you need someone to host your website, go with the company. I use HostGator sign up at hostgator.com/mixergy.
And the second end, he actually knew them. I was surprised because they’re not very well known here in the U S they are in Europe. It’s called send in blue and they do phenomenal email marketing software. I’ll tell you about them and why you should go to send in blue.com/mixergy later first. Andy, what can you tell us about the size of the sale of jurors page?
Andy: So I’ll share what, I guess I’ve already been able to share publicly, uh, which is that it was a seven figure exit.
Andrew: Um, can you tell us a little bit about the way the revenue was?
Andy: Um, I cannot, unfortunately, that’s, uh, you know, uh, as pursuant to the agreements and things like that, I can’t really share
Andrew: Wasn’t it an Inc 500 ring, 5,000 company though?
Andy: The company itself that, uh, acquired Juris page uptime legal with is an Inc 5,000 company.
Andrew: got it. Okay. So it gives us a sense of the size of what you built up. It is mostly well services completely to your clients, but some automation behind the scene. What did you do behind the scene?
Andy: Yeah. So, uh, really one of the things that we focused on early on from the beginning was building a product dyes model. So, uh, with web design, you could either go a completely custom route where every project is extremely unique. Um, or you could, uh, take a more assembly line model, which is, I, I guess the way I would describe it, which is there are different, uh, stages of the design process, but it’s all uniform in that.
No matter what the client is, there are. Specific processes that you’re, that are going to undertake. So every single client intake is the same. Uh, we have the same, same standard process for getting feedback from the clients and setting the parameters and ensuring that there’s just the right quality for each product and output.
Andrew: Yeah, I guess, unless you go really high end with your services, you’ve got to systemize it that way, or else it’s just going to be draining to create custom for each customer to give them too many options. And then they take forever and they’re in anguish trying to figure out what to do, right.
Andy: Yeah, so that I, my co-founder, uh, before we started working together was a freelance designer and he encountered all of these, these problems. Uh, uh, one of the big things with agencies is something called scope creep. So a lot of you may get in situations where clients are asking for things beyond the scope of what they’re entitled to or asking for, Oh, one more revision or one more thing to add.
And it ends up going from a project that you thought would take a few weeks to a few months, to potentially a few years with things dragging on, but having set parameters, having a set price and a fixed scope for everything, uh, ensures that you can have like very streamlined process. So you can deliver for your clients.
Andrew: You mentioned what your co-founder did. You had a business before this and what was off sprout?
Andy: Yep. So, uh, off sprout was, uh, kind of the, the, the, the Genesis of our web design agency. Uh, my co-founder and I, uh, for Juris page, uh, we were. Uh, this was back in around 2011, 2012 or so, and we were looking at the, that the web design space. And we were thinking, we, we see that like, they’re like WordPress is a really great, great platform, but for many users, it wasn’t super user-friendly in terms of customizing the sites to be exactly how they want it to them to be, uh, some drag and drop builders, like Wix and Squarespace were coming out and getting popularity.
But WordPress at the time didn’t really have much like that. So we were thinking of, uh, basically creating a drag and drop style, visual builder, uh, for WordPress. Um, and we, we created that and ended up using that, uh, with our, uh, design agency that we ended up building.
Andrew: And were you doing this for the general audience for the general market or for lawyers specifically?
Andy: So the builder itself, uh, was, is for the general market, but we also, uh, as we were building the software, we also built an agency to, uh, to help us, uh, get some money in the door or in the early stages and, uh, and bring in revenue and it ended up being very successful. And so it ended up being its own separate entity.
Andrew: Roughly. I mean, we, we’re not, no, one’s looking to get so personal that you’re
Andy: well, so, well, so, uh, I guess before we sold Juris page, we had, uh, hundreds of clients.
Andrew: Yeah. Oh, sorry. Um, I guess I’m talking about, uh, off sprout was off sprout also soaked.
Andy: Uh, no, uh, I’ll try to, still are running today.
Andrew: Yeah. So how big the decade.
Andy: Um, I unfortunately can’t share numbers around that.
Andrew: All right. And so at the same time you’re going to law school. Why did you end up in law school?
Andy: Um, so I had mentors early on, um, uh, in my career, uh, that kind of advise me towards that, which might seem strange to some people, um, the, yeah, my kind of advisors and mentors that I had looked up to, um, at were kind of, I was like, uh, working in different jobs and internships, uh, through college and before college and trying to figure out, well, what were my next steps be?
I was actually thinking of starting in, uh, starting a business. And, uh, the feedback I had gotten most was probably go to law school. It, it will help you it’ll help you more than anything like business school, what would help you for, for entrepreneurship? Okay.
Andrew: Why? I mean, I I’m looking at you and you’re such an entrepreneur from the beginning, and obviously this helped you find a customer base that helped you understand their language. And we’ll get into that in a minute. But if I’m looking at you, your kid who you told our producer, you brought screen printing supplies as a kid.
Why.
Andy: Um, yeah. Uh, I, uh, I, so yeah, so some of my earliest entrepreneurial endeavors were things like, like screen printing t-shirts or, uh, uh, I was one of the first kids in the block with a CD burner and I was burning CDs. I think the statute of limitations has passed on any copyright infringement stuff from the early two thousands.
So we’re probably fine there. Um, but, uh, yeah, and so I sold burn, burn CDs for kids at school.
Andrew: I feel like, I feel like I’ve heard this maybe a dozen times in my interviews where there would be kids who in their small area actually had a CD burner and would burn CDs for their friends. And I get it. I think it’s totally fine. As you’re trying to figure out what to do to explore like that. You then went on to work for a TV station in Boston back in 2008.
Um, you told our producer, you watched how they use these giant cassette tapes to get film that would go on the air.
Andy: Yeah. So this was, uh, in, uh, I want to say yeah, 2000, yeah, 2008, 2000 or so. And, um, I was like the was working for two different public access TV stations in the Boston area. And they for replaying old episodes and reruns and stuff like that, they were, they had these, basically these like jukebox machines is the best way to describe it, but it was like a crane machine that would, uh, basically go into a closet, pick out a VHS tape ahead of barcode on it that it scanned and then throw it into a VCR and play that tape.
And that’s how they would run their entire. Library of content and it just, and these were sizable, uh, organizations. And I was thinking like, is this a common thing? And I talked to the producers and the directors at the stations who had worked at other places. And they said, yeah. And I was just kind of baffled.
I’m like, why can’t we put this on a, uh, server? Why can we digitize this? Um, it must be a lot more cost-effective. And so one of my early endeavors was trying to build a, a server based, uh, business, uh, to provide that for, uh, TV studios.
Andrew: You know what, for a while there I was reading books about, um, about Fox news, not because I care about politics, but I wanted to see how they made their shows. And there are a few things that were interesting. One was they kept all the art that they got from their fans, um, that their fans used to keep Fox news on so much that the Fox logo would get burned on their screen.
But it’s, it’s a little touches of how they put a story together that were interesting to me. And then the thing that stood out about their technology was like you said, they had these old fashioned cassette tapes for years. People would go work for them and say, I know about online digital stuff. I do it in my, in my dorm room.
I do it at my house. How do they not have it? You saw that. And you said at some point it has to go digital. I’m going to digitize it. How well did that go?
Andy: it did not go well. Um,
Andrew: It makes so much freaking
Andy: it makes so much freaking sense. Uh, but I, I, I was definitely, I mean, I was very ambitious, but, uh, it was, it was me and it was bootstrapped and, uh, I, I was a college kid and I just, I don’t, I, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And, uh, I think I just, like, I was definitely like shooting big and I just couldn’t get the traction that, uh,
Andrew: you get the hardware and software, right?
Andy: So I had like demos.
I had like beta versions of it. Um, but I, yeah, I just couldn’t make, make a go of it.
Andrew: Is it sales? That was the biggest problem. Like if you could be a little bit more confident, if you could express yourself better, you could sell harder.
Andy: I think park, well, part of it was like getting in front of the right people. Um, and I, I made a go of it, like, and I was in undergrad at the time and really trying to figure out like, am I gonna, like, I was at a crossroads, am I going to invest more time in this and more, more money and effort into this? Um, and or when, what am I going to do next otherwise?
And, uh, it was, I guess, Late 2008 or so, uh, not a great time, uh, you know, um, and so like, uh, with, uh, the great recession, uh, that’s kind of when I decided, you know, what I’m going to, uh, shut this business down and then kind of pivoted to law school.
Andrew: That’s what it was then that it was, you were at a place where you were personally vulnerable because the business didn’t do well. You were at a place where the whole economy was vulnerable and it right. Even entrepreneurs were being told to watch out and they were scared. And so you said, all right, I’ll go to law school.
Meanwhile, you get into law school. You realize it’s not for me. You start doing what that helps you realize, Hey, you know what? These law firms need me. How’d you notice.
Andy: So there were kind of, of a few different moments here. I guess one was that like, when I was trying to apply to different firms to work for and. Most, every site that I checked out, like the website looked really bad and like, it was just like simple, like very simple fixable things from like copyright dates from like years and years past suggesting that, all right, this website has not been touched in years, too.
Just like very disconnected and messaging. Um, that if I were potentially looking to either hire this firm or work at this firm, I would not beat you enthused. Um, And so that’s kind of like what I had my gears turning about a PR like about a web designer marketing service for this audience, but also at the same time, I was like, I was kind of thinking, well, do I want to, uh, have a career practicing law?
I can’t help myself with, uh, with this focus on entrepreneurship and wanting to start a business. And so what does that, what does it really gonna end up looking like for me, um, there. Uh, have you ever had, I’m assuming you’ve probably hired tons of lawyers in the past. Um, and one challenge that I kept seeing was that there is a very big inherent inefficiency in the delivery of legal services, which is that for, for most things, when you’re hiring a lawyer, you are paying them per hour.
And so they are only as good as the amount of time that they spend on your project. And, uh, I being influenced by like works like the four hour work week and, and wanting to eventually be able to build a business, hopefully that I could build a build processes for, uh, I could as practice doing, running a law practice, I didn’t see a way where I could extract myself from the process.
Andrew: Ah, so you’re even looking forward and you’re saying I could be one of these people who doesn’t have the time to spend on their website because I have to charge my clients hours and hours who could never do anything because I get paid only when I do work. Yeah. The, the process of working with a lawyer is just opaque.
You don’t know how many hours and why did it take as many hours as it does? It’s um, it’s randomly expensive things that you wouldn’t think would take time, end up taking a lot of time. And it’s kind of stuck in the old way, but I have to tell you, I have hired a lot of lawyers and I’ve never hired a lawyer just because of the website or even gone to the website, to be honest.
How did you know that was an issue I’ve always just contacted a friend said, who should I hire? Or my accountant or someone else.
Andy: So, uh, in my experience, like ends up varying very much by the practice and the space that they’re in. So like for a lot of let’s, I’ll call it consumer focused areas of law. So like personal injury, uh, divorce law, and, and, uh, like traffic tickets and DUIs and things like that. Uh, people very often hire those lawyers by searching online and some, some of them, these areas of law people.
Don’t necessarily want a referral from a friend or family member, like, like DUI law in particular. It’s um, you know, if you’ve been arrested or anything like that, um, you’re gonna be wanting to try like look online or do some research yourself and find, find a lawyer like that. Uh, and so, uh, a lot of those firms really need a good web presence because they, their clients are finding them online.
Um, but there are other types of practices that are like more like corporate focused that get most of their business from referrals. The biggest law firms in particular are not really geared towards, uh, like attracting new business from people searching online for, for people in those practice areas.
But they’re geared towards people who have been recommended and have heard about them through word of mouth. And so they still need a good web presence because, uh, they have to have a web presence. So because. Uh, if someone’s looking them up just to do their due diligence and thinking I’m going to pay this firm thousands of dollars for this legal matter, I want to make sure that, uh, that they have experienced in this area.
Andrew: You said, I’m going to do this as a service. If I understand you, right. It was you going out and saying, I know how to build websites. My friend knows how to build websites. I know how to talk to lawyers. I’ll talk to them, I’ll sell them. And then we’ll build websites for them using WordPress. Right. That was the original model.
Do you remember your first phone calls and how well they went?
Andy: Yeah. It was terrifying. Yeah, I kind of just like jumped right into it. I, as far as like marketing channels go, like the first clients that we got were were through word of mouth, uh, being in law school definitely helped with that and having access to a network of potential customers. The first sites we did, we did to build our portfolio.
We did them for free. And I said to my, my, the, these people, Hey, I’m willing to build your website for free. Uh, if you can, let me build you the website that I think you should have. So it’s gonna, it’s gonna look great. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, you can’t tinker with it that too, too much in terms of like, I’m happy to collaborate with you on design and layout, but I want to make it look good for our portfolio and an exchange.
You will get a free website. And so, so I realized that people weren’t going to hire us without some proof of our work. And so we. Built our first few websites for free, uh, built that portfolio. And then, uh, as far as marketing channels go, I did a lot of, uh, local networking, but by far the biggest impact that we, that we got was via content marketing.
Andrew: Local stinks for like, Oh, what’d you go to the rotary club, the chamber of commerce,
Andy: Uh, I, I gave, uh, continuing legal education courses at local bar associations in like the New York city area. Yeah.
Andrew: How would you get to do continuing education courses? You hadn’t even graduated.
Andy: Uh, Oh, so this was after I graduated. Yeah. So after I graduated and, uh, got my license, uh, I started giving presentations on like ethics, like legal ethics and law firm, internet presence and social media and
Andrew: so you can convert customers. You did.
Andy: Yeah.
Andrew: You know what I used to do. Um, I used to teach Dale Carnegie and one of the things that we would tell our students at the end was congratulations. You’re a graduate just like, and they’d list a bunch of people. And Warren buffet always stood out for me and I wanted to go and fact check it and it turns out he wasn’t just proud to have gone through Dale Carnegie.
He had the, the certificate of completion or, or the diploma that they give him, um, in his office. But he did it for one specific reason to do what you do. He went to teach people how the stock market worked as a way of finding clients, which I wouldn’t have thought that he would go that I wouldn’t have thought he’d go that route.
That one-on-one well not one-on-one, but that direct to customer sales process.
Andy: Yeah, well, so what, like, I, I was happy in all of my presentations and materials and blog posts and videos to show people how to do exactly what I was doing. I was, you know, I’m basically giving away the farm I’m, I’m showing people how I would design a website, how I would, what I would focus on, especially depending on what my practice area would be, knowing that, uh, like me giving this information away for free, I’m building trust, this, this audience appreciates my insights and my input, but they’re also recognizing, okay, so this will take some time for me to do
Andrew: But were you doing this in the classes and the continuing education classes while you were teaching ethics, you were also saying, let me show you how to build the right website,
Andy: Well, so I would, I would do things like share record. I show examples of websites that I thought looked good. What they did well, like having the right calls to
Andrew: to ethics or is this
Andy: Oh, so, so there, there are connections to ethics. So for example, in, I would talk about how in New York, for example, at the time, uh, you had to have an attorney advertising disclaimer, on the footer of your website on every page and things like
Andrew: okay. So now you’ve got a reason to bring up the fact that you do web design. You’ve got clients that way. This seems really tough. The first 18 months of this, you told our producer we’re slog. It was just like this and saying, where does this end? I’m now a service provider, right?
Andy: Yeah. Um, and, and it was, it was definitely tough. My co-founder and I like it. It was tough going your, your producer was like, Oh, you have, I checked out your LinkedIn profile and you have like this string of, of like successes. It looks like it’s all been great. And, um, I, I said, you know, you’re only seeing like the highlight reel there there’s a lot of things that happened in that period of time.
There is a lot of, uh, challenges and setbacks and, uh, times when we were like, all right, uh, we are draining our savings and we’re getting to that point where we’re like, do we, do we, do we have to go get jobs now? Uh, are we going to have to like, cause this wasn’t going where we hoped. We were, uh, it was probably a few months away. Uh, we, I was, I was, uh, out of, out of school, uh, student loans and all that, and, uh, trying to grow this business, but it wasn’t going at the, at the, at the first stages, it wasn’t growing at the pace that I wanted it to. Um, and, uh, it was definitely draining some of the savings.
And so I’m like doing the math and I’m like, all right, I can, I can do this for a few more months. Uh, before I, before I, I out of savings and I have to get to get a job. And, uh, that was, that was definitely tough.
Andrew: Why didn’t you give up at that point? Why didn’t you say, you know what? This doesn’t make sense. I’ll either get a law firm job or I’ll just do something else, maybe something in marketing or web design.
Andy: Um, I am incredibly irrational. Um, there is something wrong with me. Uh it’s I, I wish I had a way to describe how my brain works. Uh, there is like a certain, I guess, attraction to risk that I, and some other entrepreneurs, plenty of other entrepreneurs
Andrew: though, the attraction to risk. Like, let me see if this will explode because I think it could go up or was it a big vision or I’ll tell you one of the things that happens for me is I tend to stick with stuff. That’s why long distance running ultra marathons make sense for me, long distance bike riding because they stick with it and they demand a lot of, not just in the day of marathon sticking with it, but in the months leading up to it of constantly going back at it.
Is that what it is for you? What is it? Examine yourself a little.
Andy: the introspection, uh, see, I I’ll run a marathon. I will not run an ultra marathon. You’re crazy. Uh,
Andrew: it’s this it’s a continuation. It’s like my brain does not like things like CrossFit where the big attraction is. We’ll keep coming up with new things for you. It wants to say, this is the thing, it’s the path I’m going to keep sticking with it until I die. Or until I crossed that finish line. Is, is that it for you or is it more of a risk?
Andy: Uh, I, it, it, it, it must be something like that, right? Um, yeah, I I’ve Al I’ve run two marathons and a lot of halfs and there, there was something about the journey, right. About starting something from nothing and wanting to see it through and see it, see it succeed. Um, yeah, I it’s, it’s kind of tough to explain.
I, I, I, a lot of. People like, definitely like think I’m crazy. And the thing is we can’t, I can’t, we can’t all be right. Right. Like we all have these ideas for businesses and we want to take that one to be successful and we’re not all going to be right. Like many of our businesses are going to fail and we can’t all be successful at it.
Right. But there’s just some like, but there’s regardless there is still some drive and motivation to make it happen.
Andrew: What’s the vision that you had. You said your, your partner had a stronger vision, a stronger sense of the path, but combined, what is that you saw when the reality of the day wasn’t showing you success?
Andy: Um, so, you know, kind of having our backs against the wall, like really forced us to get to really hustle harder, um, and see like, alright, what are our channels that are the most successful? What can we, uh, lean on to. To get us to this next stage. Um, and what are we seeing that’s working and like, uh, over the years, I I’m, I do a lot of marketing and all of our successes have been through trial and error.
Um, uh, or a lot of them had been through trial and error and seeing what works and more often than not what doesn’t work, but we were definitely getting to a point where we saw like, all right, so here are some things that in particular that are working, um, here’s some channels that are working in, we really just focused on those.
So, so the in-person classes, uh, like while they were great one-offs it was not scalable, uh, blending that we found that that was scalable though. That was definitely like increasing our audience was, uh, was content and also, uh, partnerships. And that eventually got us in touch with the company that, uh, ended up acquiring us.
Andrew: Let me come back and ask about the content, because that seems to have been an early win and then partnerships after that. But first I’ll tell you, I asked you before we got started, do you know, send in blue? You said you did. I was surprised. How do you even know about sending blue? The email marketing company, email marketing, the software.
Andy: Generally, I just try to keep abreast of, of things going on in marketing automation. I, marketing automation was definitely like key to our, one of the big keys to our success. Um, in terms of doing things like B, we created lead magnet. So I created downloadable eBooks and through our marketing automation software, one people downloaded our eBooks.
We sent them a drip series of emails relate first related to what it was they downloaded. And then we tried to pitch them our services. Great.
Andrew: Excuse me. Let me drink tea here. Okay. So send in blue. The reason we don’t know about them is because they’re a European company. It’s very rare for Europe. Well, not rare, but it’s not as common for European companies to come to the U S as it is for us companies to go to Europe. So we don’t consider European companies enough.
Here’s why we showed. Especially with email marketing because they come at it from privacy first, right? The European union is very privacy focused. And so when it comes to send in blue, they are a company that had to stick with the European laws. They had to offer them to their customers. And they created that kind of experience from early on where American companies had to follow up and try to figure it out.
So some people care about that. Other people won’t until later on. Here’s another thing that’s important for people to realize when it comes to email marketing software, a lot of them will start off really inexpensive and then boom, ratchet you up. Once you get to a certain number of email subscribers.
Am I right?
Andy: Yeah,
I know plenty of people who have used certain softwares that I not going to name, but, uh, where they start off on a really sweetheart deal plan. And then once you hit a certain threshold of subscribers, your rate doubles or triples, and you have to come to the conclusion, like, do I want to stick with this and pay a lot more than I’m comfortable paying or do I have to now migrate all of my contacts and lists and automation sequences that I’ve already built in.
So you’ve invested all this time. Um, so, and over the years I’ve looked at many different platforms of, for marketing automation to figure out like, what do we want to use? And what’s going to be scalable with us. So it’s, it’s I really have to say like, how important is
Andrew: really hard to move later on and you’re right. That they scale up the price. I’ll give you a name. MailChimp is really big for this, right. They’ll start off with free. And then boom. As soon as you get to a certain level, They charge you a ton of money, but it’s not just that they charge all these companies charge a lot of money for the email list.
They charge a lot of money, not just for the people that you can mail, but for the people who are on your email list, that you can’t mail because they unsubscribed or because they’re not in a funnel or because you’ve decided that you want to only email the people who matter to you, but you don’t want to delete the people who are not active because you have all kinds of information tied up in them, their tags, the things that they were interested in, whether they bought in the past or not.
And so a lot of email software will still charge you for the tens of thousands of people that you build up in your email list that you’re not emailing. And then it becomes excessive. I’m going, it becomes frustrating because you don’t want to delete them when they reactivate. You want to know their past experience with you.
Anyway, send them blue does not do that. Send in blue, we’ll charge you only for the emails that you want to and can send out to. A lot of other companies will make marketing automation difficult. They make marketing automation easy, which means that you can say, if somebody buys sending this other sequence of messages, if they’ve expressed an interest in something else, let’s send them messages about that.
And finally, I can go through a list and that goes on and on and on. But the last thing I want to do is say, it also includes SMS that we have found that if you can con, if you can combine text messages that go to people with emails that go to people, you’re going to reach them in two different places.
And if you message it right, it’ll feel in sync. One of the best examples Andy, that I’ve seen is, um, Actually, you know what it comes from fricking Ty Lopez, his company, one of the things that they do, Hey, Ty Lopez is, seems like he’s all out there, but I’ve got to say, I’ve talked to some of his people there.
They put me on an email list. The emails are short. They look like they’re written by a real person. Then I get a text message says, Andrew, not sure if you saw this, but we just released this other, this deal that you could invest in. And the combination of the two and the simplicity of it feels like it’s just a real human being who messages me anyway, it’s going to be people.
I don’t know that Ty Lopez is using this, but he’s definitely using marketing automation. You should to get the best ideas from marketers whose results show. That it works. I’m trying to find a way to, not, to not Ty Lopez into them, but also say it works. Listen to me, go to send in blue.com/mixergy, and you will get to use their software for free send in blue.com/mixergy.
And if you’re not ready to sign up, go do all the research you want, but keep them in the mix. When you’re considering an email marketing company, you’ll be really happy with them. All right, let’s come up with content marketing. What worked for you in the beginning? What are the early wins? And then how did you develop.
Andy: Yeah, so kind of one of the, the like flashes of brilliance where like, Oh wow, this, this is connecting. I’m seeing that it’s having connection to traffic. Was I created content initially. Uh, before I was really like honed in on keyword research and things like that, I was creating content based on conversations that I was having with, uh, colleagues and potential clients.
So like for example, one early thing was a colleague of mine was saying, you know, I’m trying to find a good software for my law practice. And I don’t know, there’s so many, uh, case management software apps out there. I don’t know what’s any good. Uh, I don’t trust the websites. I wanna like find an impartial review.
And what I was seeing was that there really wasn’t much good content in this, in this area. So I created a lot of content geared towards reviewing different other different pieces of software that my potential customers would be interested in. And also I was finding that. Uh, when people would be at this stage of building a law practice, that they would be looking for our software, they would typically be like starting up their practice or really looking inward to invest in their practice, which would also be a great time to be looking at getting a new website.
And so, uh, I created a lot of content geared towards this, which some people might call like top of funnel content, where it’s not directly related to our services, but there’s a larger audience for it. Uh, they can find our content. I then created other lead magnets, like I mentioned before. So like I’d create downloadable guides and checklists on, uh, on software for lawyers.
They would get on my email list. And then I would slowly provide them a series of like educational content, uh, related to software, and then transition that into content, focused on building a website and send them like our weekly newsletters related to other content that we were creating. Um,
Andrew: Let me highlight that part, that one of the things that I’ve learned from you is that lawyers are not looking for SA not looking for service providers who are going to build out their websites. They didn’t even know they had a problem with it at let alone start going on the hunt for it. But what you realize was if you write those articles, they’re not going to come to your site.
They’re not looking for articles about how to build a better website, but if you write the things that they’re looking for, while they’re at a time when they would consider a new website, they’ll come to you and then you could slowly tell them how building a website is just as important as those other things that they’re looking at.
That was really insightful.
Andy: Um, I want to say that it was all this genius plan, but it was one of these things that it just kind of like right place, right time. Like it, I experimented, we tried this out and it, it ended up working out very well. Um, con
Andrew: that’s what you mean by you love the experimentation. You felt like each experiment is bringing you closer or showing you what doesn’t work and allowing you to go and create something else that could work.
Andy: Right. Um, I, there, I have tons of content that just did not perform well. And, um, yeah, a lot of articles and hours spent writing stuff that got a handful of viewers or readers each month. And, um, yeah, in hindsight I’m like, all right, well that didn’t work out. And so we then have focus on the stuff that does bring, bring in people.
Um, um, w one example, I wrote an article that was, I don’t think exists on the internet anymore, but it was like, um, it was like a, like, A piece about like what the, the underpants gnomes from South park could teach us about, uh, building a website or something like that. And like, no, one’s obviously searching for a term like that, but the content was really more geared towards people in our existing ecosystem on our lists, but it just didn’t resonate with anyone and went nowhere.
And that was a learning experience. Um, uh, yeah,
Andrew: That is a painful one. I mean, in retrospect, that makes sense, but I, I get it. Um, it feels like that one though is written for fans of your blog, people who are reading on an ongoing basis. And what you discovered was that’s not who you should be writing for. You should be writing for Google. What are people searching for?
Write those articles and lead magnets, and then transition them into customers, but not into, into fans of your blog. Am I right?
Andy: One thing was, um, like I realized that I, you know, like early on, I tried to write the content that was geared towards people looking to hire a law firm, web designer or something very specific like that. But those terms were particularly competitive because that’s what other agencies were very focused on.
And so it was hard to hard to out-compete. Um, and like, you could be finding people, you could be connecting with people. If you get that, get those readers, you’re getting them when they’re ready to hire someone. But for a lot of our audience, we were finding was they, while they were doing their research, they were maybe not ready to hire someone today.
They were definitely taking their time. And so it was, we were really finding that. Playing the long game was more, was more successful for us. So we created this content that would be relevant to them at whatever stage they’re in, uh, and then getting them on our email list and then nurturing them over time.
And so when they were ready to pull the trigger, they would reach out. And often what they would say is, you know, I’ve been reading your blog for a long time. Um, I, I trust you in the advice that you’ve been giving and I appreciate that. And you’re the first person I thought of when we’re ready to build our website.
Andrew: Okay. And they wanted you to build a website for them. You are initially thinking software, right? How did you make the transition from software to services?
Andy: Um, that was, uh, well, it was a failed experiment and really, we are kind of like the first iteration of our service. We were thinking it would be a product where people could build their own websites. Uh, but it was, it turned out that, uh, after we launched it, uh, there was just not as much interest in it because, uh, we were kind of interviewing some of our users and they were saying, you know, I could, I know that I could build my own website, but I just don’t have the time.
And I’m charging 300, 400, $500 an hour for my services to clients who are going to pay me. I would rather pay you. Who has this expertise in web design specifically? I know that you’ll do a good job. I don’t have the time to learn how to build a website, even if you have this easy to use tool. Um, so I’m just going to pay you and you’ll do it for us.
Andrew: No, it makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. If you really look at it from the customer’s point of view. But we often look at it from our point of view. We just want software, so we don’t have to deal with people and we want it to work on its own. And it’s more interesting to build software, but for a lot of things, I’d rather have someone else do it for me than even deal with software or forms.
I think the example I’ve been giving recently is that I needed a small, uh, small claims lawsuit filed and the paperwork is pretty fricking easy. It’s it’s I dunno, it’s just not that big of a deal, but I couldn’t deal with the paperwork for it. And then I found this company, what was it called? People?
Something I had to do is fill out a form and then they handle everything. I emailed them. If I have a problem, they come back and they give me the solution to it. It’s just so much smoother than even filling out the forms myself. And they, they take what a hundred bucks or so it’s worth it. So that’s, that’s interesting.
The other thing that you realized was, or at least your, your co-founder realized was you need recurring revenue and from the start, he. Build recurring revenue into the business.
Andy: Yeah. Uh, absolutely. So, um, we, my co-founder was, uh, you know, coming from this background as a freelancer, uh, his name’s Sam, by the way. And he was like, you know, I’m going from project to project. I’m building someone’s website and then building another completely different website. And every month I am constantly looking for new work, reaching out to my network, doing my own marketing, and that’s time that I have to spend finding new business and then earning it and then doing the projects.
But if I don’t sell any new projects this month, then I’m not bringing in any money. Um, so one thing that we wanted to make sure that we were building from the beginning was, uh, was a business that. If we ever wanted to take a vacation would still be bringing in money. And so, uh, from the beginning, we were turning away clients who were saying, uh, I’m happy to pay you to design our website, but I want, I want to, I want to pay you once and then leave forever.
And, uh, ho ho host my website somewhere else and never talk to you again. And that was just where, like, you know, I understand what you’re saying, but that’s not our business model. And, uh, I have other people that I could recommend you to, uh,
Andrew: And so with services, it’s a little bit harder to build it in with software. It’s just a natural, what did you build in that was recurring.
Andy: Yeah. So the kind of the very first thing that we built in was an ongoing support hosting and maintenance. So we keep the sites online, but if the client ever wanted to like add content, like another lawyer to the team, so adding a bio page for them, or even if they just wanted to send us the text for a blog post of theirs, we would add it to the site for them.
And so this way they wouldn’t have to deal with the site or worry about it. We just took care of it all for them. And that kind of came back to the lessons that we learned from the DIY model was that this audience in particular really cared about, uh, us doing the, doing the work for them and making it as easy as possible.
And so by saying to them from the beginning, uh, we’re going to charge you a monthly fee and you’ll never have to worry about, uh, any issues related to the, to the site. Again,
Andrew: All right. Um, what were you charging for
Andy: uh, we are charging $99 a month. Um, and that
Andrew: had left
Andy: sorry.
Andrew: How did lawyers feel about doing that about paying $99 a month? For things like post my blog posts, put my blog post up at another partner to the site.
Andy: it was, it was great. Uh, the vast majority we, we had, uh, by the time we sold the agency, we had hundreds of clients that were, were onboard and happy with us. And so, uh, yeah, so we added, eventually added other services as well for recurring revenue things like, uh, ongoing SEO and paid search, um, and yeah.
Build building other products.
Andrew: What’d you do behind the scenes to systemize this so that you wouldn’t go crazy servicing every customer. You talked a little bit about the websites you had templates and processes for that. What about the rest of the business?
Andy: So, uh, so probably my favorite thing is project management software. Um, So aside from having things like, uh, SOP and documentation, um, it was really important that like, from the beginning, like we, we did documentation, but like documentation on how to use our like Trello boards, for example, for, for having clients at different stages, how long they should be in this stage, at what point at what point and what frequency we should reach out to the client to ask them, to give us the assets that we need or to get their approval to launch the site.
Andrew: that you had had a system with with a Trello board or the equivalent of a Trello board for every step of the way to be managed. So if someone said, I want this new partner put on my site that went onto some kind of system, what was the Trello for that?
Andy: Uh, yeah. So yeah, in the earliest, early days we were using Trello, we use other other apps, uh, eventually as well too. Um, uh, Podio is another one. Um, I, I would say that Podio is it w I loved it. It, it, but it’s, it took us a while to really configure how we wanted it to be. It’s kind of like the Salesforce.
It felt like a project management software because, uh, it was very capable of being customized to how we wanted to use it, but it took a lot of, let’s say programming to make it, do we want it to, so, like, for example, I could create monthly recurring tasks for clients that check these boxes. So like, if this client has, uh, has paid search, uh, services, then each month they will have a new paid search task recreated each week or month.
If a client is past due on an invoice, then these, then as of this date, they’ll get suspended or something like that. But there’s a lot of automation that we built in to. Ensure that like really can really mirror our processes. So we didn’t have to do things manually. So we could automatically know where we’re at with every client, every step of the way
Andrew: You know what, just like you guys productize this, that service. I think there’s room to productize other services. Let me talk about that within the context of my sponsor HostGator, if you’re out there and you need a website for your business, go to hostgator.com/mixergy. You’ll get a hosting company that Andy and I both used.
I still use it. I love HostGator. They run Mixergy, but here’s an idea that someone should run with. Um, you tell me what you think of this, Andy, you know, how creating those SLPs, what does SOP stands for? Again? I.
Andy: standard operating procedure.
Andrew: right. Like the procedure taking what someone does on a regular basis, turning it into a document and then a checklist and ideally even software that manages that process. That’s a pain in the neck. I think a great service would be for someone to say, I’m going to watch your people, turn it into this process and then allow your people to be organized better.
And I’m going to create order for your whole business. We start off with some kind of setup where I interview your people, where I set this thing up for you. And then we have an ongoing process, an ongoing fee, just like you guys did Andy, where your people will be able to either send a screen recording of what they do.
And then we’ll turn it in or for maybe a little bit more money. Your people get on a call with one of our people and we will constantly be updating this SOP and creating new ones. What do you think of that?
Andy: As someone who has spent many, many hours creating SOP is, yeah, that sounds great.
Andrew: Somebody’s got to do that.
Andy: yeah. Um,
Andrew: And then ongoing revenue there, you bring order to their business, and then there’s also a teachable aspect of it. So the free content that you write on your site is things like how to, how to systemize what you could systemize, how to hire one less person by creating better order, how to do a, how to use a sauna, to systemize your company, how to use Podio and evaluation of all the different software that you could use.
Different project management software that you can use. All that type of stuff could go together. Summaries of books, right? The E-Myth revisited. Here’s one quick summary of how the E-Myth rezip visited works. And by the way, if you want to use it, our service can actually do this. All right. That’s one idea.
I love the HostGator ads because I’ve been turning them into idea generating a time. What do you think? How would, how would somebody be able to do this? Well, if they decided to run with that idea,
Andy: I want to find this person that you. Created right now who’s doing this because that would be great. Um, so like for doing SOP is like what my typical process has been. Like, I like I’ll do things like I’ll create screen recordings and then I’ll have like a Google doc open with notes along the way. And I’m like, all right.
So what am I doing every time I do this for a specific client or customer or whatever, um, because I need to make it. So like, in my ideal version, I want somebody able to read this who has never done this before and has no experience with it to be able to do it on day one. And if they can’t, then, then there’s a problem.
And, um, it like one thing that I’ve done, like when hiring people, uh, one thing that I’ve done with hiring is that, uh, One process process of mine is I’ll. Uh, with hiring contractors, I’ll often hire a few contractors, give them a test project, pay them all for this test project and have them follow the SOP is to deliver on the project.
And, uh, if any of them can, can do it particularly well and does a great job. I’m like, all right, great. I know someone, I know who I’m going to hire, but if all of them can’t get it done, then I’m like, okay, then maybe it’s not, not an issue with these people, but it’s the SOP itself. Um, and so that kind of gives me some good insight in there, but
Andrew: But it’s, it’s even created that
Andy: yeah.
Oh, it’s so
Andrew: screenshots and then make sure that I put it into the Google doc. And then did I explain, well, when in reality, what it could be is just someone doing their job and talking into the microphone and even going back and saying, actually, I didn’t mean to do that.
I meant to do this other thing, but don’t go back and change it. Just talking to the microphone or do a zoom session, which gets recorded and talking to that and the person who’s who’s watching, you would ask a few questions. You’ll be able to pause your screen, share if there’s something that’s sensitive, bring it back on afterwards.
What do you think of that whole business? Makes sense, right?
Andy: I’m ready to hire that person.
Andrew: Listen to people, whether it’s that idea or any other idea that I brought up here, or frankly, any of your current ideas and you need a website go to host gator.com/mixergy, hostgator.com/mixergy. We’ll get you the lowest price from HostGator for their hosting package. Give you know what I like to go through features.
No, I never do in anymore. I usually, I used to, I think you just have it HostGator, great price, great service. We use them. You’ll love them to host HostGator. Thank you so much for sponsoring hostgator.com/mixergy to get that really low price. All right, let’s continue. Then you talked about partnerships.
How did you get partnerships before we get to the one that led to the sale?
Andy: Yeah. So through our, kind of through our content marketing, which like really helped us take off, uh, we were getting noticed by the, uh, by the companies that we were like, who software we were reviewing. And so some of them would reach out and be like, and for something as simple as, Hey, uh, do you want to be an affiliate also, if you, yeah, like you’ve been mentioned as a bunch.
That’s great. Thank you for sending people our way. Do you want to be an affiliate? Um, There are other things that we can do as well. Like some of them that we ended up doing, we built direct integrations from where we basically custom built with within the APIs, from WordPress to their software. So that things like when someone would fill out a contact form on our client’s website, that contact form submission would go automatically enter into the case management software database of the client.
And so that really helped us stand out in particular because no one else was doing that at the time. And so we like, all right, we built these unique integrations that we have and are the, these. Software companies were happy to promote us because we had this unique integration with their software. Um, they could recommend us to their existing users.
We could recommend them to our users and we built, built a few integrations with, uh, with different software companies in the space. And so, uh, and then from that, a lot of other things like co-marketing going on doing webinars presenting at events and things like, yeah,
Andrew: I feel like, Oh man, I’m doing this again. It’s talking to lawyers, talking to software, improving the flow of the landing page to the email.
Andy: there’s always something new in the business was, uh, evolving. And so. How things were where things were a few months in a few years and were very different in different challenges. Um, like from it, from starting at a point where it was just two of us and, uh, it was my co-founder doing, uh, all the design work to me doing all the content and sales, to growing and then hiring and managing people and working on further kind of refining our systems.
So we could build something that could scale further. Um, yeah. Diff at different points that there was always new challenges.
Andrew: Oh, okay. And that keeps it fresh. Why did you decide to sell? I know that one of these partners said to you, Hey, you know what, instead of partnering up, how about if we just acquire you? Why did you say yes.
Andy: It, so it was kind of a right place, right time. I, I w. I wouldn’t say that we were looking to sell for sure. One, when we were approached, it kind of came out of the blue. We were, uh, in talks with a few companies about, uh, white labeling our services for their audiences. And one of these companies said to us, can we, that sounds great, but can we just acquire you and I, my personal, I remember my response was.
Uh, I don’t know, maybe. And the thing is we had a lot of good things going for us that, uh, put us in a good position. One was that recurring revenue model that we had. So we already had a existing book of business. Um, we already had value, uh, otherwise like without the recurring revenue, the value is your brand and that’s it.
Right? Um, what, uh, here’s your history, here’s what you can possibly generate in the future. But if you were to hand over the keys to the business today, what would, what would there be? And for our agency where we were very focused on, uh, filling that recurring revenue model, we had that value. But, uh, I guess beyond that, we, you know, having this product ties model.
Was something that was attractive to the acquiring company cause they also had a productized model. Um, and it like, they, we saw the, the, the kinda the synergies between the two. Um, but, uh, also it was just kind of like, uh, it, it all made sense like, uh, by us getting acquired by, by this other company in the, in the space, we had a lot, we had some, uh, customers already that were overlapping, uh, between the two companies.
Uh, but there was also the potential that they could help us grow to another level. Uh, thanks to there exists. There they’re a much larger company in the space, so they had a much more influence. And so, uh, we saw that, uh, they could just take us further.
Andrew: Was it also from you to be able to lock in a win, to be able to say, I’ve got something I can count on now and not go from scrambling forever to figure things out to another risk and another risk.
Andy: There probably was some of that. Um, uh, it, I mean, it was definitely like, like it, like, uh, I was happy with how it ended up turning out, but we might co-founder and I were definitely like, debating, like, is selling this something we want to do. Do we want to sell this and move on and do something else? Um, or do we are kind of like, it was definitely a discussion that we had a few discussions we had in terms of, uh, how far do we think we can scale this and take this, uh, uh, what would we do if we sold this kind of, what were the next steps?
Andrew: I bet. What did you get to do for yourselves? And then we’ll get into what you’re doing now with post-ACA what’d you do to get something fun. Do you buy a house?
Andy: so, uh, I’m not retired. It, uh, the, the, the, uh, the sale, um, uh, didn’t end up with me being retired, but, um, uh, Uh, I, I did put, put a down payment on a house. Uh, we paid off our student loans. That’s, that’s the sexy thing of selling a business. We paid off our student loans. Right. Um, but we also had capital to invest in a new business and that was, that was attractive to us.
Andrew: Why post-ACA, what was it that led you to start this new business?
Andy: so one thing that we, my co-founder and I were seeing, uh, with, with, with Juris patient with, with off sprout, uh, was that we wanted to, like, we want it to be able to. Uh, like, like doing SEO for ourselves and for our clients, there were certain things that we wanted to do to be able to help that help these sites scale faster.
And one of like the initial challenges is that a, a big thing with Google and Google’s value for your website and helping you get better in search results is the amount and quality of links from other sites pointing to your website. And there are a lot of the process that people go through to promote their blog posts and websites is very, the manual and labor intensive and traditionally has been.
So typically what involves is, uh, you’re like, all right, I’ve got this blog post, or I got this website and I want other sites to link to it. So I’m going to first. Prospect, I’m going to find these other websites. I’m going to then find their contact information and then cold email them to pitch them, to link to my site or content.
And it’s a, it’s traditionally been a very manual, labor, intensive process. And so we wanted to figure out what, like, could we do something to automate and streamline this, um, for ourselves and prefer potentially other agencies. And so, uh, given that there were a lot of disparate tools out there that were very disconnected and the process being very manual, we came up with kind of post-doc as this way to, uh, from one platform streamline all of that.
Andrew: So I’m trying to figure out what you do now to be a better marketer than you did before. One thing I’m noticing is you are getting a bunch of traffic already. It seems like it started, um, Pretty recently over the last couple of months. So I went to see using SEMrush, where are you getting your traffic?
AppSumo major source of traffic, right? Because I’m guessing you did a deal with AppSumo. They love doing deals with new software creators. You get a lot less per customer, but you get a flood of customers all at once using your software. Right. That’s a big thing for you.
Andy: So we actually offered a, we did a, a freebie deal with AppSumo. Um, we, the product is a freemium product, um, and, uh, AppSumo has been a great channel for us getting in front of potential customers from businesses agencies. And, uh, yeah, they’re happy. Like it, the deal they get is better than any free plan that we have.
And then if, if they’re, if they want to upgrade and get more, we do have, uh, paid plans as
Andrew: I didn’t know. They did that. Did you have to pay AppSumo to do that?
Andy: Uh, Nope. Um, yeah, uh, it was just something that, uh, was an option and like, it, it kind of made the most sense for us.
Andrew: All right. I didn’t realize they did that. I see that there is a postdoc. I get it now free. It’s still up on AppSumo. So that sends you, how many customers would you say or how many free users and how many customers?
Andy: Uh, fat, uh, thousands of free users, uh, fewer customers than that. Um, yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Um, give me a sense, like, how are we talking? Dozens, hundreds of customers.
Andy: Um, so there, there are numbers that I can can’t share. Um, we are recently joined an accelerator program and there was some inspiration I just can’t share for that, but yeah.
Andrew: Yeah. This freebie that you’re offering through them is fantastic. I like the free hunter.io integration for getting contact information to people you’re searching for. That’s got to cost you some money, right?
Andy: Uh, so, so for the, for the free tier, we actually like, we have an integration with Hunter and you can have your own free or paid Hunter account, which looks right into
Andrew: Uh, it’s a bear Hunter IO account that you’re connecting with. Okay. All right. Here’s the other thing that I noticed that stands out, duck, duck go is sending you traffic. It’s one of the top four sources, according to SEMrush, I’m starting to see duck, duck go in more people’s search, um, traffic. Is that a thing or am I just happened to notices?
I just randomly noticing it.
Andy: I have, I wish I had an explanation for why,
Andrew: What is going on with duck? Duck go
Andy: uh, magic. Yeah.
Andrew: Doing anything that you haven’t found, some kind of duck, duck go traffic source. You’re just, you’re not buying ads from DuckDuckGo. Are you.
Andy: I am not blind to ads from duck. Duck. Go.
Andrew: I wonder if they’re just becoming so big that now they’re starting to show up on people’s search, um, uh, search journeys.
That’s pretty interesting. All right. Uh, product hunt, also major source of traffic. You were number one for the day that you were on there over a thousand of boats on that. That’s you getting really systemized about the launch? What did you do to make that work?
Andy: it was a, a process for us. So from, from the beginning, as we were building the product and as we were in kind of beta mode, uh, we recognize that product hunt is a, is a great channel to launch on. It could send a ton of traffic, uh, to your site, a lot of early users as well. And, uh, kind of from the beginning, I was getting beta users by doing cold outreach.
And we were looking for like, what would be a good way to kind of announce ourselves to the world and product hunt scene wa was a good fit for that. But, uh, your, your app is not necessarily going to get the top spot of the day or one of the top spots of the day. And so. Uh, so for several months we actually ended up originally delaying our, our, our launch.
Um, but we, uh, our, our at first, but, uh, we took a very strategic approach. So we wanted to like learn from the successful launches. We spoke with friends who had launched on product hunt. We, I cold reached out to, uh, other companies that had done well on product time to see what they had done, what they had had success with and, and try and figure out why.
And then kind of reverse engineer that, um, uh, speaking to other people, other consultants and marketers, and just speak to people who knew more than I did about product hunt
Andrew: So it seems like what you did was you said who’s gotten to the top of product on for their day, who are some of the hunters who did it, who are some of the makers who did it, you reached out to them and you said, Ken, we’re about to launch something. Can we ask you some questions? You then started making a list of things that work for them.
Were they receptive to those questions?
Andy: Yeah. I mean, most everyone that I reached out to that replied was very friendly and helpful. Um, yeah.
Andrew: are two things that you learned from that process?
Andy: uh, so I guess just to, um, like, so a few things were like launching, right? When, uh, when the new day starts. So like 12:01 AM Pacific time on the day you want to lunch?
Andrew: up 1201 and then manually hit the button to submit, to submit
Andy: I think we scheduled the launch. So yeah, like we, some people like use, uh, like work with, uh, uh, product hunt Hunter and some people launch it themselves. We, uh, launched it ourselves and I believe. Oh, so like, like you could have someone hunch your product and
Andrew: Oh, got it.
Andy: some other person can like recommend your, like, share your product.
Andrew: So like Christmas scene, there’s a, there’s a friend who asked for an introduction. So when I said, why don’t you go to Christmas Santa? He’s the inventor of the hashtag also maybe the most active person on product hunt. So he submits more people are going to see it. He knows the process. So you’re saying whether it’s you or someone else you want to have it scheduled to show up a minute after midnight.
So that you’re the first person or as early as possible in a day. Okay.
Andy: Then also early, like for the first few hours, there’s kind of like, it’s a free for all. And there’s like jockeying. Um, you want to send as much benefiting people early on as you can, to like your, your email list and things like that to upvote you, uh, because. I think it’s, but, but so like after a few hours then that’s when the, the days like list shows of who is in the top ranking.
And then that’s where the ranking is all set up. And if you’re, you know, if you’re one of the top spots earlier on, in the day, you’re going to be one of the first things that people see when they go to the website. And so if you’re, if people already seeing you, they’re like, Oh, what’s this, I’ll check it out and maybe be more likely to it.
But if you, if you like launched later in the day, or if you’re on like page two, you know, just like if you’re on page two of Google, you’re going to be less likely that people will organically see your product and vote for you.
Andrew: All right. What’s one thing that you’re gonna be doing differently now with this new company.
Andy: definitely being well for sure. Being very operations and data-driven, uh, like the SOP is, and things like that were something that I kind of developed along the way, uh, with the, with the agency, but. Like today. I, I learned like, yeah, it’s been, it’s been a journey. Uh, but for sure, like having processes and procedures and sticking to them is incredibly
Andrew: It took me a long time to understand it. And then also when people heard in my interviews, I used to wonder, are you too locked in? If you have processes, if, if it’s all documented, are you preventing creativity? Are you preventing your team from finding new ideas? And instead you’re just creating what you’re rolling your eyes.
I say
Andy: Aye. Well, it’s, I mean, it’s constantly an evolving thing. If, I mean, if you’re going to take the approach of, this is what it is and this is what it’s always going to be, then you’re, I think you’re not setting yourself up well, for, for being able to pivot or evolve as, as. You know, the world and things around you change.
Um, but like have a process stick to it, but also be open to change things if you need to. Like, I, yeah, over the years, we’ve switched product, product management, management, soft project management softwares, because we found other things that work better for us, or we’ve changed the tools and processes that we’ve, that we’ve done as we’ve gotten like more information to see, alright, this is a better approach, but making informed decisions and, uh, we gone from there.
Andrew: Yeah, I do find that it becomes harder to switch once there’s a system, right? You’ve T you’ve taught your PE your people to use it. You spend a long time documenting it. It’s hard to come back and say, now we’re going to do something else, but you really have to force that into your culture. And I have to keep saying that that this is here today, but we have to be willing to try something else tomorrow.
Andy: Well, that’s why we got to hire this SOP company to
Andrew: would also be something that they need to do to come back in and question everything. This has been the same system for a long time. It’s stale. You may not see dust on it, but it’s collecting dust. Let’s think differently, by the way. Speaking of, I just realized one of the systems that we need to try to change is zoom.
I want to switch over to a Riverside FM to see how much better it is. And I have not been testing it. Zoom has been working really well for us, but we should be trying other software to do our, our interviews
Andy: What’s the problem that you’re having with zoom that you’re, that you’re not happy with that.
Andrew: That’s the thing that I actually should be looking, even if I’m happy with something, I should be looking at alternatives to see what do I not know that exists, but here’s one problem that I do have with zoom. Zoom’s phenomenal, no downloads, all that makes sense. There’s one big issue. And that is, I want to record my guest side of the conversation right off of their computers.
So I want to record it remotely on mine, but I also want to record it on there. So what I often will do with guests is I will teach them how to record their side of the conversation. And then I ask them to upload it to me. I didn’t do it with you because we spent 20 minutes just chatting before we got started.
I didn’t want to have one. I wanted that. feel bad. Don’t feel bad
Andy: No, I’m sorry. I’ve done that before. Like we’re like all open QuickTime on my computer and then send you a file after.
Andrew: Right. It stinks that that has to happen. It doesn’t take a long time. It’s an extra two minutes, maybe three, but I didn’t want to ask for another thing after doing right. And so with the past guests that I did earlier today, I had to help him adjust his microphone, tell him to unplug his other microphone, plug in the new one, then tells zoom that it’s in there.
Right. And then at the end of that, I also had to say, and let me show you how to record. And when we’re done, make sure that you upload the file to me. And it only works well, if you have earphones so that you’re so that my audio doesn’t bleed into your microphone, it’s a pain. So Riverside says they handle it.
We should be at least trying it. All right. That’s what I remembered out of this interview. That’s the big takeaway for me. Number one, the number two big takeaway for me is whatever you’re doing, there is possibility for recurring revenue. We tend to think of recurring revenue as something that happens in the realm of software as a service, right?
That’s the whole beauty of it, but it doesn’t have to be services should also have it. I actually think just about every business should be thinking about it. And yes, the majority of customers won’t say yes to it, but some will, I’ve talked in the past about how the barbershop should do it. They should charge me a monthly fee every day on my, every month on my credit card.
And then give me something, maybe it’s one haircut a month. And then by the way, we’ll also clean up the back of your neck. Anytime if you’re on this subscription, right. Something
Andy: that where, uh, actually in my neighborhood, there were a few car washes that have a subscription for like, like a monthly fee for unlimited car washes. And that’s just like,
Andrew: I would go beyond to any, anything that we do. I order pizza from the same place as Mandy, right on Valencia street, they should do just a monthly pizza thing. We charge you every month. Here’s how much you get one slice a day, as many days as you want, or whatever it is, delivery of food. They should just be delivering food every month or every day.
Excuse me. So that’s the next thing that I took away from this interview. What else did I miss? Anything that I should, that I should have been aware of? Here’s another one, a lot of products that we sell people aren’t in the market for, right? For you. You’re talking about websites for lawyers. They’re not sitting around thinking I need a new website. They think theirs is fine. They also are not hunting for it and searching for it. But people who should need a website and are maybe on the ER on the edge of getting one are hunting for other things.
And that’s what you need to be aware of. And then start talking about those things, sell those things, and then let them know that they could be switching off to, to your service. Right?
Andy: Rick go. Yeah, exactly. Go where your audience is and find out what they’re interested in and then try and get in front of them. Even if it’s not like directly related to your product, you can pivot eventually. So like
Andrew: You know, a great example that I saw that, um, I was in Chile waiting to go to Antarctica and there’s nothing to do. And so I would just go into this bank and work from there, coffee shop, well, people aren’t thinking everyday, how do I go and get a new bank account? But you know what we are thinking every day, how do I get a cup of coffee?
And they just had a regular cafe there and it felt so comfortable that if I wanted a bank, I would just go on. I talk to them.
Andy: So now, now you have a bank account in July,
Andrew: No, no. Uh,
Andy: so they didn’t get you.
Andrew: they didn’t get so, but the majority of people are gonna say no, but some number will say yes, some number will feel comfortable enough to say, Hey, you know what? I have this issue.
Can I open up an account? All right. Those are the big takeaways that I’ve got from this interview. Um, is there a way for people who, who want to connect with you or follow up in any way to do that?
Andy: Yeah, I’m pretty easy to find on the internet. Um, uh, website is daga.com, P O S T a G a.com. Uh, you can also find me on LinkedIn. Um, Andrew Cavasso cause it’s, uh, maybe a little more professional. And then Andy, I don’t know. Um, you can also find me I’ve uh, we have a Facebook group dedicated to, uh, doing outreach and digital marketing and digital PR called grow together.
S E O.
Andrew: All right. I bet that if we went to hunter.io, we’d be able to get your email address. I’m I’m searching right now. Um, Oh no, it says no posts. Stago it says no email address. Weird. You managed to get away from, from their services. They’ll get you. All right. I want to thank the two sponsors who made this interview happen. The first, whether you’re taking the idea that we had before creating a documentation company that will actually systemize and bring order to other people’s businesses and allow them to hire fewer people and make the people who work for them, right?
Make the people work for them, uh, be more productive, whether you take that idea or any of the other ideas that we brought up here in past interviews, you need a website. And when you do go to hostgator.com/mixergy, they’ll give you a website that just works on a platform that you could take to somewhere else.
If you decide that you don’t like them, And price that is reasonable. And if you use my URL, you get the best possible price that they have. It’s hostgator.com/mixergy. And the second is the email marketing company that will not charge you for email addresses that you can’t reach, that will not start you off really cheap, and then blow up the price on you when you can’t get out of, out of paying.
But instead give you a great service, very European, um, which means that they, I mean, they started in Europe, they raised over $150 million, I think, just so they could come to the U S and they’ve been doing great here in North America, but because they started in Europe, they’ve got that privacy centric focus, and you could get that and so much more for free right now.
If use the URL send in blue.com/mixergy, starting to enjoy these ads, man. All right, Andy. Thanks so much.
Andy: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. This is fun. And also, yeah, I love the ads. I’ve never quite seen like a format format like this. Um, it’s been fun.
Andrew: It has been, it has it’s it means sometimes that I don’t get paid for ads because I like go off on a whole other rant and then go, well, I can’t really charge a sponsor when all I did was talk about this other thing, but it’s worth it. It makes it more interesting. I hope
Andy: Awesome. This was, yeah, this is so much fun. I, I was in a mastermind group, uh, that you really started for us, uh, many years ago with somebody I was with, with some other agency founders. And that was super helpful for
Andrew: I remember that. I remember that. Yeah. Now I’m getting a stylistic actually. That’s what that was like. I miss those old days. Alright. Thank you so much, Andy, by everyone.