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And here’s the program.
Andrew Warner: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Joining me is Brian Kaldenberg, founder Proofreading Pal, which offers online proofreading services. Brian’s company is much younger than the ones that I usually profile, but I thought he had an interesting story, so I asked him to come here and do an interview and talk about it. Brian, welcome.
Brian Kaldenberg: Thanks, Andrew. I’m appreciative of the opportunity.
Andrew: Thanks for being here. So, first month in business, how much revenue did you guys generate with Proofreading Pal?
Brian: First month in business was in May of 2010. We wanted to launch over the summer period because we thought we’d be a little slower and kind of get all the kinks out. We definitely weren’t perfect in May, and I believe in May we did $400 gross.
Andrew: Okay. Do you remember what you did the second month you were in business?
Brian: I think we probably did less than May in the second month.
Andrew: Oh really? Actually, I’ve got your revenue numbers here in front of me. I could just read them off directly the way that you showed them to me.
Brian: You sent them to me and I can’t . . .
Andrew: You can’t see . . . I’ll tell you guys what we did. Before the interview, he sent me his numbers and we also went through his PayPal register and confirmed the numbers.
So here’s what I’ve got. First month in business, about $400. Second month in business, $873. Third month in business, just a few dollars more than the second, $900. And then it grows up to the eighth month in business, which was last month, December. The eighth month in business was $6,500. It’s a nice growth. It’s very quick, a very short period of time that you’ve been around, and every month it looks like you grew at least a little bit, and often much more than that.
Why don’t we understand how you did this, starting with who your customers are. Let’s understand the business. Who uses Proofreading Pal?
Brian: Our main customers from what we’ve found now eight months into the business is much different than what we thought we were going to encounter going in. When we launched, we thought our biggest customer was going to be the biggest demographic of college students, which is undergrads. And what we’ve found is, now, our biggest demographic is graduate foreign students, number one. Graduate students in general, probably our number two biggest customer. Businesses are using us. And we even have some professors, they might be post-docs, and we’ve got some professors who submit their research papers and writings to us for spelling, grammar, sentence structure, clarity, and punctuation.
Andrew: I wouldn’t have thought that students would pay for proofreading services. I thought they’d just do it themselves or they’d ask a friend to do it for them. And I thought that businesses would be your top customers.
Brian: Well, I was thinking a little bit differently. I thought that we would get businesses. I was thinking that there’s going to be students out there who really need a good grade maybe, and they don’t want to go home to mom and dad and tell mom and dad, “I failed out of college.” And so I was thinking, during finals time, those students who really needed to make sure their papers were in tip-top shape would use us. I also thought the students who maybe are achieving to do excellent and they need to get into a really good graduate school, they might use us too for a little extra boost. But you’re right, I was wrong and that’s definitely . . . we get a few students, but that’s definitely not one of our main demographics.
Andrew: But, if I understood you right, graduate students were your top customers? Or were they who you expected to be your top customers.
Brian: Graduate students were not who I expected, but graduate students are, by far, our number one.
Andrew: I see. And so who did you expect to be the top customer?
Brian: I was expecting undergrads.
Andrew: Oh, I see, okay. I see the distinction now. All right. I wouldn’t have expected any students to be big customers.
That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is because I know in the early days of building a business, it’s tough to get customers, and once you get customers, it’s hard to grow that business and get more revenue from those customers and bring in others. You’re at an early stage, but you’ve achieved something. You’ve achieved some growth here. You’ve achieved measurable growth. I want to understand how you did it while it’s still fresh in your mind and while we can understand, while you can remember the business and while I think it’s most useful.
So, let’s understand how you got here, starting with what was your original idea? Why’d you think that we needed another proofreading service in the world?
Brian: Well, I didn’t necessarily think we needed another proofreading service in the world. I think we needed one that could do it better.
Andrew: Better how?
Brian: Better by being able to deliver quality quickly. That was kind of our differentiation in the marketplace was being able to deliver two proofreaders on your document within three hours if that’s what you need. Now I’m not going to claim we’re the only company that does quick proofreading, but we’re one of the very, very few who does quick proofreading with a two proofreader model and has almost all of our second proofreaders, which is the last set of eyes, are masters degrees or getting their Ph.D.s in English or have their Ph.D.s in English.
Andrew: Okay. So you were just going to deliver a little more quality or more quality than the competition, and you were going to do it faster.
Brian: Correct. And you asked how we’ve gotten customers. I think quality is the number one factor there. First of all, they’re trusting us with their credit card information over the Internet, and they’re also trusting us with their reputation, whether it be a resume, a final paper, an essay, personal statements to get into law school or medical school. I felt we’ve got to be able to deliver really good quality, and if we do that, the customer might come back to us again, the customer might tell their friends and family members about us.
Andrew: Okay. But the way you get initial customers is not by delivering quality because customers, the first time they interact with you, don’t know that you can deliver quality. Your site might communicate quality, and then it’s the site design that gets your customers, right? Or your advertising might communicate quality, and then it’s the advertising that’s done well that gets you customers. But I don’t see how quality can get you customers in the first place.
Brian: Correct. Quality is what’s getting our customers to come back and getting our customers to provide word-of-mouth advertising. But the way we’re getting 90 percent of our customers right now, the very first time, is through Google AdWords.
Andrew: You’re buying ads and sending them to your site?
Brian: Correct. Yes.
Andrew: Okay. Now aren’t keywords around proofreading competitive?
Brian: Very much.
Andrew: So how are you competing in that space with so many other established players who are buying ads from Google the same way you are?
Brian: We’re very data driven. Google Analytics plays a huge role in my decision-making process with which keywords we’re going to spend money on, which keywords we’re not going to spend money on. I know a while back you interviewed the Unbounce guy. We don’t use Unbounce, but what he was preaching, that you need to test is very true, and especially when you’re running an Internet marketing business on the Internet. You have to be able to test because your competition’s so great. If you’re not testing, someone else is and they’re getting more efficient return on investment for their Google spending.
So we have, as far as setting up our Google AdWords campaign, we’re very specific. We use a lot of exact match, which means our ad only shows up if they type in that keyword exactly. And then we write a very, very targeted ad for that exact keyword. Because the way Google works is, a lot of people think it’s just who’s willing to spend the most money gets to be the top search result. That’s not necessarily how Google’s paid advertising algorithm works. They have what’s called a Quality Score and a click-through rate, and Google’s going to show whose ad has the highest Quality Score and who’s making them the most money.
So one guy could be willing to spend $10 a click, but his ad only gets clicked once every 200 searches. So he would have a half a percent click-through rate. Whereas, we might get our ad clicked six percent of the time. We’re only spending $3 a click, but Google’s making $18 off us for every 100 searches, where they’re only making $10 off the other guy for every 200 searches. So that’s kind of the secret in our sauce right now is a really highly optimized Google AdWords campaign where we’re using Google Analytics heavily to eliminate keywords that we know are not going to convert.
For instance, “editing services” was one of our keywords, and it still is in phrase match. Phrase match means someone can type a keyword in front of “editing services” or behind “editing services” and our ad will still show up for that. So they could type in “Chicago editing services” or they could type in “editing services quick” or “resume editing services.” Well, we noticed some people were typing “video editing services.” Well, we don’t do video. So, by using Google Analytics, we can target that keyword and add it as a negative keyword. We don’t want to show up for video editing services. It eliminates it from the campaign. We will never spend another dollar on that keyword.
Andrew: Okay. So that’s how you’re optimizing the ads that you’re buying.
Brian: Correct.
Andrew: And you said that you were also writing ads based on these keywords and you were writing your ads differently. How?
Brian: If anyone wants to learn a great methodology for Google advertising, it’s called triangulation method. You can google it and probably find the video. It talks about how it’s very important to put the keyword that you are targeting in the headline, because Google bolds that keyword and so your ad will stick out a little bit more than the others if you have the keyword in the headline. Also, you need to have the keyword in the description. The next two sentences you get, try to fit the keyword in there in one shape or another.
Then also, you have your display URL. Now, we chose Proofreading Pal because proofreading is automatically a keyword that’s heavily used. They bold that, but then you can put whatever you want after the backslash. So we will put the keyword there. So if they typed in “proofreading services,” we would have “proofreading services” in the headline, and we usually have “24/7 proofreading services” or “best proofreading services.” And then in the second line we’ll have “Two proofreaders on every document. 100% satisfaction guaranteed.” We don’t have “proofreading services” there, but we have “proofreaders. So it will bold that. And then in the display URL for the keyword “proofreading services,” we’ll have proofreadingpal.com/proofreadingservices.
Andrew: I see. Wow. All right. And then when somebody clicks on that ad and goes to your website, what do they see?
Brian: We haven’t really done much with landing pages yet. I did for a while. We had a landing page that had a video that started playing, and that video right now is on our testimonials page if anyone wants to see that. The video plays with a few testimonials, and then it had arrows pointing down to get a quick quote. Then they could fill that out, put in their word count and get a quick quote for how much it was going to cost. And our conversion rates were not beating just sending them to our homepage. I don’t know.
I know we need to be using landing pages more than we should, but right now . . . part of me is I’m almost wondering if this type of business, they want to maybe snoop around a little bit more before they use us. Our FAQ page is heavily visited and also our About page is heavily visited. So right now, we’ve been having the best results sending them to our homepage. But I haven’t really gotten into really heavy testing there yet.
Andrew: I see. So, conceivably, what could happen is you can find one landing page that answers all the questions that people are going to your FAQ page and to your homepage and every other page. You want to take all those questions that they have, put it on that one landing page, and create conversion in that one page. Is that your ideal?
Brian: I think it would be too much information then. Eventually, we’ll need to test that. We’ll need to test our landing pages a bit better. Right now, we’re just improving our checkout process, improving out copy on the website a little bit, improving how we word things to try answer the customer might have before they decide to order. And we are seeing our conversion rate going up.
We also changed our buttons to orange. Companies that I like to copy — I do a lot of copying, I’m not going to lie – are . . . I like to go see what PayPal is doing with their buttons. Amazon and Google. These guys are collecting so much data, they are probably doing what works. I like to copy them as far as their aesthetics go.
Andrew: Why did you bring up the fact that your button is orange? Of all the things that you brought up, that’s maybe the most specific detail. What is it about orange, and how did you find that out?
Brian: I think I’ve seen some orange buttons on Amazon. I haven’t really seen any data on it. We just decided, we had those boring grey “proceed to next step,” “proceed to payment” buttons, and I figured let’s spice our buttons up a little bit. So I kind of modeled them after what I saw on Amazon. It used to just be “next step.” Now we say “proceed to payment page.” We tell them where they’re going next within the checkout process.
We also, up at the top of our checkout process, we have step one, two, three, four. It shows them exactly what stage they are in the process. And I got that from a company . . . another really good e-commerce company to model after is MyWeddingFavors.com. I believe that guy owns the Net Effect magazine and StomperNet. He’s really, really good at little things. I go see what he’s up to every now and then and see if I can get something and implement it into Proofreading Pal.
Andrew: And he’s not teaching you what he did. He’s not blogging it. You’re just watching as he does it on his site and you’re testing anything that he’s testing, anything that you see him use.
Brian: Correct. Yup.
Andrew: All right. That’s great. I’m actually picturing people running to this interview right now and trying to find a way to stop and take a note on the website that you mentioned or remember some of the techniques that you talked about. Did you test multiple pages versus one page, or did you test showing people what stage they were in the registration process versus not?
Brian: No.
Andrew: No. They did it. You just go for it.
Brian: I just go and look at our conversion rate. Now one thing, if people are looking at their conversion rates and if you have a business that gets repeat business, you’ve got to make sure, when you’re in that analytics conversion rate setting . . . our conversion rate went up more steeply when I looked at all visits, but that’s because a lot of our transactions now are repeat customers. And so they’re coming in and ordering right away, and these repeat business customers are inflating our overall traffic conversion rate. So, you’ve got to make sure . . . what I like to do is just separate out my paid search traffic, and I just look and see if the changes we made are trending upwards. And they have been. I don’t want to spend too many hours looking at data too deeply and granularly because I think paralysis by analysis sometimes occurs. So we use data but we don’t spend hours and hours on it.
Andrew: Okay. Actually, a lot of people will say you should test every little bit of the site, get data on it, and then based on that data either keep or adjust. But I don’t talk with too many people who actually do that. Beyond having too much information to actually act on, what else is it about doing what you’re supposed to that’s too impractical to actually implement in business? What is it about taking all those ideas that they tell you you’re supposed to do, that you know will improve your business, that just isn’t practical, that keeps you from doing it?
Brian: Well, I think a company like Walmart, who’s probably spending millions of dollars every week on paid advertising, I think the little miniscule percentage increases they might experience from testing every little detail, and they can pay someone a decent salary to probably do that, it makes sense for them. But for someone who’s only spending, you know, right now we’re spending about $4,000 a month on Google AdWords. Is it worth my time to spend an extra ten hours a month on that to maybe get an extra half a percent or a percent increase in conversion?
Now, maybe it is, and maybe I need to do more of it, which I probably do. I just think sometimes it’s just overwhelming. There’s so many different things you can do. We kind of have picked what we do. We really make sure . . . we test our Google ads. We test those against each other to see which one is getting the highest CTR score. So we pick things that we do test. I just think in our infancy stage, we can’t test everything.
Andrew: All right. Makes sense. What has gotten you to grow your business month after month so far? Is it just spending more money on Google?
Brian: No. That’s a piece of it. We have been creeping up the search engine results. Eight months in, I believe we’re fifth on Google right now for editing service in the natural listings, and we’re knocking on the door for the first page. I think we’re like 13th for proofreading service, and it’s 15th for proofreading services. So we’re getting more Google organic traffic, which is free traffic.
Like I said, the biggest niche customer that we have is graduate foreign exchange students. Just from when I was in college, I think foreign exchange students kind of hang out with one another maybe a little bit more, and I’m thinking we’re getting some word of mouth through them. We’re getting repeat business.
We also try to differentiate. We try to build a relationship with the customer a little bit more so that we’re not just a checkout process on the Internet and there’s no human connection. So every single order that we get through our website, when their project is done, I call that person and I say, “Hey, this is Brian Kaldenberg with ProofreadingPal.com. I’m giving you a courtesy call to let you know your document’s ready. You should have received an e-mail with a link to download your completed document. We’d like to thank you for your business.” And that’s if we have a voice message. And then if the person answers . . .
Andrew: Actually, you know what? I’m sorry. Let me stop you there. I want to focus on how you get people in the door first and then go into what you do with them afterwards, because I don’t want to lose the train of thought here and the list of questions that I have for you.
The next question I had is this. I was checking to see . . . and I promise the audience I will come back to what he does, because I know customer service, the techniques that he uses there are going to be interesting to you too. But here’s what I was doing. In preparation for this interview, I did a search to see who was linking to you, and I saw just a ton of directories. Tell me how that fits into your strategy for getting customers in the door in the first place.
Brian: Well, with Game Rosters, which we talked about a little bit . . .
Andrew: We did that in the pre-interview, and Game Rosters is the company that he started before this. I’ll talk a little bit about what that company was and how well it did. But yeah, what were you learning from Game Rosters?
Brian: I found that directory submissions do help your search engine results. Some people might disagree with me, but from what I’ve seen, they help. So there’s a company out there called iNetZeal.com, and for about $400 you can get your website submitted to I believe like 2,500 SEO-friendly directories. Then they’ll let you split up your title and description, five different titles and descriptions. And so that’s why you see all those links out there is because we did a directory submission. It’s a great way to get some initial link juice. I know there’s probably a lot of directory submission programs and companies out there. I would just recommend iNetZeal because we’ve had good success with them.
Andrew: So that’s one thing that you do to get some traffic. What about this? Why are you doing an interview with me? How does that fit in with your strategy?
Brian: Well, I’m hoping that lot of Internet marketing companies and web design companies might watch this video and think that they might want to have their website text proofread. I also like to share our story because I love watching the interviewees that you have, because I learn and pick up things from it. Hopefully, my story will give someone some techniques. And then also, I’m hoping that when you post this video up on your website, I’ll get a nice one-way back to Proofreading Pal.
Andrew: What does it mean to have a one-way back?
Brian: It’s a one-way link. When you’re trying to rank high in Google, it’s called search engine optimization. There’s a bunch of different factors that factor in. It’s how you set up your page, title tag, H1 tag, image, names, paragraph text. Another factor that plays very heavily into Google is the amount of links pointing to your website. Not the amount of links pointing from your website to others, but the amount of links pointing to your website. And that’s why it’s important to do interviews like this, directory submissions, get involved in forums and blogs, maybe submit some articles out on the Internet, maybe be a guest blogger on another blog. These are ways to get links pointing back to your website. There are other methods too. You could make a video or something that’s viral. Tons of different methods.
Andrew: So, one-way link though means I like to you without you linking back to me and that’s more powerful for you, more helpful?
Brian: I don’t know. I think it is. If I link back to you though, I don’t think Google . . . I think it’s going to be very similar.
Andrew: Okay. Does that impact . . . this is just now a selfish question, but I’m curious and maybe someone in the audience is too. Does that impact whether, when I link to a past guest, whether or not they decide to add my interview to their press page?
Brian: I don’t think so. People might not want to link back to you because they might think they’re bleeding link juice. But I think, from what I’ve gathered a really good place to follow SEO is SEOchat.com. From what I’ve gathered is link juice, you don’t really . . . it sometimes can help you even more if you link out to relative content. So I think if someone had put your interview on their website back to you, it’s probably going to help them more than hurt them.
Andrew: Okay. So part of your hustle is — at this stage in the business, you’ve got to really hustle — find people to do interviews with. Okay.
Brian: It’s a piece that I’m just starting to get into, and I see some value in it. It’s PR, kind of. It’s online PR, but it also has an SEO element to it.
Andrew: I heard Jason Calacanis call it “PR for PR.” Public relations for page rank.
Brian: That’s a good analogy.
Andrew: Okay. All right. So that’s why you’re here. And I’ve got to tell you, I would feel terrible if the only reason that you were doing this was just to get a link back because you didn’t have to show me all of your financials in preparation for this interview and tell us all the different techniques that you’re using to get traffic to your site. I’m glad that you see the value in helping other people, and I appreciate the generosity and I appreciate the openness as you’re telling us about your business. So you don’t have to do it. If you want to hold back, now you can just clam up, and the answer to every question could be, “Word of mouth, Andrew. That’s the solution.”
Brian: We just need to somehow block out all the proofreading companies from this interview and then we’re fine.
Andrew: And I will have to give you a good anchor text. But you know, let me tell you this about that, about anchor text. I don’t usually have the patience to figure out what someone’s anchor text is. I don’t care either way. What I notice though is that Rand, over at SEOmoz, has a really good short bio of himself. And he knows that people like me don’t have the patience to write a bio about everyone who comes on our site. We just want to copy and paste a bio. When I copied and pasted his bio, it had all the anchor text in there and I had all the links that he was looking for. And the reason that I used it verbatim is he wrote it the way that I would put it up on my website, the way that I would do it, the way that CrunchBase would do it, the way that somebody who wrote an article about him might include the about page. If I could give people tips out there on how to get the right anchor text, write your own “about” page for you and your business in the language that you’d want other people to just rip off, because we will.
Brian: That’s a really good idea. I’m going to do that.
Andrew: Who else did that? The guy from BigCommerce I think also, and he thanked me for linking to him properly. I didn’t try to go out of my way to link him properly. I copied and pasted. I just need people to know who my guests are. I need a quick “about” text. All right. So we talked about the hustle. We talked about links. What else are you doing to get people to your site?
Brian: Pretty much right now, it’s Google advertising, and we dabbled in Facebook advertising a little bit. Didn’t have much success. Not going to give up on that yet. And we’re also doing Yahoo and Bing advertising.
We’ve also dabbled in some Google content advertising. For the viewers, content advertising is separate from search advertising. Basically, your ads run on the Internet, on websites that have relative content to what you’re trying to target. So I thought if we put ads on Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com maybe we’d get something from there. Not very good results from that yet either. Our best results so far have been Google search, Yahoo search advertising, and Bing advertising.
Andrew: Yahoo and Bing have been effective?
Brian: Yup.
Andrew: How effective compared to Google?
Brian: Oh, not as effective.
Andrew: Why not? What is it about them that makes them less effective for you?
Brian: I don’t know. I know that the volume is much lower there. But what’s weird is Game Rosters, Yahoo has higher conversion than Google does. I don’t know why. I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me.
Andrew: All right. I’m going to come back to Game Rosters. Now let’s go back to something I promised I’d return to earlier, which is customer service. So you told us what you left as a voicemail, if you got voicemail for a customer. What happens if you get the customer on the phone?
Brian: Basically that same message, but then I make sure that everything was okay. We use Microsoft Track Changes, and it’s basically a way for the customer to see all the changes that the editors have done and all their comments. And sometimes the customers don’t understand how that works exactly, so I can help them with any of those features and basically answer any questions they might have so that I know, when I’m done, that they’re 100% satisfied.
I think that phone call . . . it’s so cheap now with Voice over IP and everything, I don’t understand why more e-commerce companies don’t use the phone right after the transaction has been completed or after the product or service has been delivered to follow up and make sure everything is okay. So that’s one mechanism of customer service.
The other mechanism is having a phone number prominently listed on our website. I read somewhere a while back that just having a phone number . . . some e-commerce businesses are scared that their phone’s just going to start ringing off the hook. It doesn’t work that way. But it will increase your conversion rate. If someone sees the phone number there, they know you’re not hiding behind, you’re not down in the basement over in India or something, and they can talk to you if they need to. And so we have our phone number nice and big at the top of our website.
And let’s see, we try to find our customers on Facebook and I invite them to be my friend after . . .
Andrew: Really?
Brian: Yeah. We built a custom CRM application that keeps track of all these. So after I make a phone call, I click the button and then they get out of the calling queue and then that side can keep track. We started to get so many orders, I couldn’t keep track just through PayPal anymore of who I needed to call. We also had our developers include LinkedIn in the CRM side of things, and we find one out of every fifty customers in LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, we just quit doing that. But Facebook, we’re probably finding about half of our customers through Facebook.
Another thing we do is if a customer orders over $75 from us or they become a repeat customer, I like to call this “moving in with your customer.” We mail them a gift package. It’s just a real small gift package in a padded envelope. We thank them for their business, and they get a Proofreading Pal chip clip magnet so they can use it for chips or they can just put it on their refrigerator and it can hold a picture or something in the clip part. They also get two Proofreading Pal pins. Then we also, our system, through MailChimp, we send out automated happy birthday e-mails.
Andrew: All right. Now let me dig into all of this. First of all, the phone call out. What do you get out of having a phone call out with someone? Obviously, you’re hoping that you’ll turn a one-time customer into a repeat customer. What have you learned about your product by talking to a customer who’s bought it and experienced the whole sales flow?
Brian: Tons. Probably the biggest thing that we learned from this was our server generates the automated download e-mail when their project’s been completed. And so, maybe their project was done at 9:00 at night, and I called them the next morning to follow up. They never got the e-mail. It could have been an urgent matter and they could have needed it that night. It’s spam filters or they could have entered their e-mail wrong, and I was getting this about 10%, 15% of the time. It took us a while to get it implemented, but probably the biggest thing we implemented was the order status link on our website. Now they can get their document without having to receive that download e-mail. We learned that. Oh, you learn a lot.
It also is good to hear from people that you guys did a great job and it was an excellent job. That makes us feel good, and I relay that on to our proofreaders. It’s encouraging that people are really valuing the service they’re receiving. And you know, sometimes, very rarely, maybe we didn’t do a good job, and we can address that situation. Then I know who the proofreaders were. I know to give that customer his full refund. So it’s learning. Customer service, I think, shouldn’t be seen as an expense. It’s an asset and it’s a way to learn questions your customers are having and concerns they’re having.
Andrew: All right. Let’s see what else I have. Custom CRM. You have a system for responding to customers and knowing where they are. Beyond what you told us, what is it? What’s this system look like?
Brian: It’s really just a simple log-in. I log in. It shows me projects waiting for call back. I click on it, and we’ve added things to what I get to see. So I see the customer name. I see when their project was completed. I see what their project was. I see where they live. And the reason I want to see where they live is if they live somewhere I know, I can relate to them some way or another. “Oh, you’re from Denver, Colorado? I’m going out there next month to go snow skiing.” And that’s why we added that. And we can also see when the project was done. We added that so I can say that I saw your project was completed last night at 10:00 p.m., just wanted to make sure everything was okay. So that’s the call back feature.
Then the Facebook search feature, it has their name and everything and I just click “e-mail search” and it searches on Facebook for that e-mail address automatically. If it finds them, I just add them as a friend and tell them that I’m the owner of Proofreading Pal and I want to be your friend. The gift package feature, that has their address. And that’s all it is.
No, no, no. We just added a new thing. We added a quick quote feature. If someone does a quick quote through our system and that e-mail address does not become a customer within one hour, that quick quote lead goes into our CRM and then I can send them an e-mail at the end of the day to all the quick quotes that came in saying, “We saw you did a quick quote. What can we do to answer any questions you have” or something like that.
Andrew: All right. I’ve got to dig into that. This is why I love the details. I always find one little thing that I’m dying to know more about. That’s interesting because now you have a list of people who wanted to be customers, but didn’t convert for one reason or another. Let me ask a basic question on that. You’re e-mailing them from your e-mail system and you’re sending essentially the same thing over and over to multiple people. Don’t you get flagged for spam for that?
Brian: I don’t know. We haven’t been. For the quick quotes, it’s not necessarily the same message over and over again. They might have submitted a resume. I try to vary it up a little bit for the follow-up e-mail. But yeah, our e-mails that go out to the customers, order confirmations, project’s ready e-mail, they’re the exact same. I think the e-mail service providers or internet service providers somehow have a way of determining. But I do know if I send the same message out 100 times a day, it will eventually get caught for spam.
Andrew: Yeah. All right. So you’re probably not doing 100 of these a day for the quick quotes. How many are we talking about, roughly?
Brian: Oh, like two or three.
Andrew: Okay. So you can sit and write them differently. In fact, even if they were the exact same, it’d be fine. So what’d you learn from that, from talking to somebody who asked for a quote and didn’t convert into a paying customer?
Brian: Well, most of the time they won’t respond. They’ll either come back and become a customer, and if they do respond, it’s typically that we were too expensive.
Andrew: Okay. All right. So there hasn’t been any learnings that helped you adjust your system? You just know you’re too expensive, and you’re accepting that you’re going to be priced out of certain business. Is that right?
Brian: Correct. Yup. That’s just our quick quote. We also want to implement some sort of system that will flow into our CRM for checkout process dropouts. We don’t have that in place yet, and maybe we’ll learn more when we get that in place.
Andrew: That’s interesting. Right. So if you’ve got a customer who went through the process and suddenly decided forget it, you want to know about that and find out why.
Brian: And we mentioned MyWeddingFavors. If you go there and start a checkout process and then cancel out, wait for a couple hours, you’ll get an e-mail from them, automated, that will have an incentive or something to get you to come back.
Andrew: Brian, how do you know so much about this wedding favors website?
Brian: I went down to Atlanta, Georgia. It’s an awesome Internet marketing conference called StomperNet. The guy who runs the whole show, he’s maybe 35 and he started MyWeddingFavors and he’s huge. I mean, he’s making a lot of money and I’ve just kind of been watching what he does.
Andrew: I see. And he’s making a lot of money with the wedding favors website?
Brian: Yeah, he actually now owns the sourcing companies in China too. He went over there and built them up. He’s also a huge distributor for boutique wedding favor companies here in America. But his website’s huge.
Andrew: And the key to success, you think, is the understanding of the whole sales funnel? Little things like calling somebody or e-mailing somebody when they drop out of the system.
Brian: I think that’s one piece of the algorithm. It’s one piece of the algorithm.
Andrew: Okay. I’ve got to get an interview with that guy. If someone in my audience can help me meet him. Brian, if you know him and can introduce me to him, do it. I’ve got to get this guy on here now on Brian’s recommendation.
All right. What else do I have here that I wanted to follow up on? All right, you’ve got that. You close the sale. How about the way that you’re taking credit cards? Anything interesting about that? About the way you’re accepting payment?
Brian: We’re using PayPal as our payment processor, and we do have an SSL certificate and we have McAfee Secure installed. We’re right now working to get PCI compliant because I don’t think we’re quite perfectly there yet. We’re also making them type in the security code on the back.
Andrew: The back of the card.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Right. And that’s PayPal, right? Taking all that?
Brian: PayPal’s the payment gateway, yes.
Andrew: Okay. Anything else before I move on to this and find out a little bit more about Game Roster?
Brian: No.
Andrew: All right. That’s a lot of detail that we got here. And I like, also, the list of resources throughout the interview. I know that people like that. And then they’ll come back to me and they’ll ask me to put it together for them in one page or put it somehow on the site. I can’t. I can’t do the research for these interviews and do the interviews and do the follow-up afterwards to get it up on the website and pull out the key points, unfortunately. I’d like to. Maybe at some point in the future. Maybe someone in the comments will do it. Or another blogger will put all these key resources on their website. I hope.
Brian: You need to get a virtual assistant.
Andrew: I don’t even know how to get that done. I mean, I know how to get a virtual assistant . . . sorry?
Brian: oDesk.com.
Andrew: I don’t know that it’s worth it to get somebody to go through and pull out these key resources. People say they want it and I know they want it, but at some point, if I just keep throwing money and people at every little thing that they want, I’m going to be out of a house and home.
All right. So let’s continue here. What is this other business? I see Game Rosters all over. What’s Game Rosters? Game Roster’s all over your Skype, your e-mail, your Google search on your name.
Brian: Okay. Game Rosters is a business I started in college back in 2004, when I was a junior at Iowa State University. It’s a website that delivers a product for the video game NCAA Football. When I was in college, I spent way too many hours playing this video game, and one of the aspects of it was the players don’t have the names on their jerseys. It just has their position and number. You know who the player is, but they didn’t put the players’ names in. But the game allows you to go in and add all the players’ names manually and save that data file. It makes the game a lot better when you’re playing because you see the players’ names now and the announcers will also say the names.
There was a guy out there, his name was D.T. Linder, and he owned PS2rosters.com. I would get his product all the time, and I loved it. And he gave it away for free pretty much. You could download for free, or you could donate money. You’d mail your memory card to him and he’d mail it back. A lot of complaints were it would take forever to get your memory card back, and a lot of people didn’t know how to do the download. And I called him and I basically said, “Hey, why don’t you charge money for this?” And he just didn’t want to have anything to do with it, so I started Game Rosters.
And the same exact way, my customers came through Google advertising and search engine optimization, but we made sure we got their memory cards shipped out right away. We answered e-mails as quick as possible, and we answered the phone and we tired to give them as easy-to-follow directions as possible to download the rosters. And this business, it’s really only busy June, really, really busy in July, and then mediocrely busy in August. By the second year, I was just graduating college, I would make more money in July in my pocket than if I went and got a full-time job for the whole year.
I think I still am very lucky to have had that opportunity, because it’s allowed me to move on and do other things. I still run Game Rosters today. That business taught me so much just in the world of Internet marketing and the world of customer service. I bought out that guy, D.T. Linder, eventually. So I’ve learned how to do domain name transactions and all sorts of cool things that Game Rosters has experienced. That’s kind of my passion is delivering products and services over the Internet.
Andrew: So you were just giving people the names to go along with the numbers on one video game that they happened to be into? That’s the whole business?
Brian: That’s the whole business.
Andrew: You couldn’t ship it online? You had to ship them a product? Is that right?
Brian: Back in the day, back when PS2 and the regular X-Box, the only way to get the file was to either buy a memory card from me and it would be pre-loaded. You could mail us your memory card, we’d load it, and mail it back. And then if you had this special little tool, it’s called a SharkPort, you could transfer the file from your computer. You had to hook a cable up to your PS2 and go through a whole bunch of steps, and then you could transfer the file that way. It wasn’t until like the third year on the PS3 game where they finally made it available to download over the Internet, and so we charge for the download as well.
Andrew: What’s your biggest month last year? How much revenue?
Brian: I think last year in the month of July — it’s always the month of July — I think last year . . . we’ve started to trickle down a little bit because of people can get it easier online now for free and they don’t have to go through us or they can buy our file and then share with all their friends. But last year, I think we did over $80,000 in July.
Andrew: Wow. Why July? What is it about that month? Is that when the game comes out?
Brian: Yeah. The game comes out usually the middle of July. And so we try to get the game early from somebody here in town, and then I have two guys who’ve been working for me. They’re students at the University of Iowa who do the roster editing for me. We probably work . . . someone is in my office 24 hours a day for at least six days of we’re editing rosters. It’s very stressful. Lots of Mountain Dew and caffeine, but it’s all worth it in the end.
Andrew: You know what I’m going to do because we’re almost at the end of this interview? I’m going to leave it there for Game Rosters. We’ll just use this, what you said, as a tease for what I hope will be a follow-up interview that you’ll do with me just on that one company, because I know that there’s a lot of information there that my audience is going to be into and I’m going to be into. How do you feel about that?
Brian: That’d be great.
Andrew: Will you come back?
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. Good. So I won’t reveal too much more of that story. We’ll leave it out as a tease. Let’s see. There is one other thing that I didn’t get to ask you about with proofreaders. For the sake of completion, where do you get your proofreaders?
Brian: Good question. We hired a consultant lady and I’ll give her name. Her name’s Jodie Renner, and I believer her website is JodieRennerEditing.com. She’s from Canada. She introduced us to a few proofreaders in the early going. And then we contacted the University of Iowa and their graduate program and we picked up a few more there. Then the local business paper here in Iowa City wrote an article on us, and now one of our very best proofreaders, Tom Dean, he’s an English professor at Iowa, he thought it was a great idea and he wanted to work for us. So he’s come along.
Then about half of them, they just come through our website and submit their resume. If their resume is pretty good and we’re hiring, Jodie, our consultant, she developed our test and she grades the test, and then she lets me know if this proofreader can be a first proofreader or a second proofreader. So I think moving forward now, most of our proofreaders are just going to come to us.
Andrew: All right. I can see that.
Brian: I’ve had to turn away some. I’ve had to turn away about five or six in the last month or so because we’re full, right now, of proofreaders.
Andrew: And there’s a question that I ask a lot of entrepreneurs here that I didn’t get to ask you. What did the first version of your website look like?
Brian: Well, we didn’t have that little video in the upper right, that little animated video. That wasn’t there. We didn’t have the testimonials that you see are part of the main image on the top of every page. We didn’t have that. The buttons were not near as good. The copy wasn’t near as good. It looks similar, but it’s improved. Little things . . . it’s improved a lot and you have to. That’s a big piece of running an online business, especially when you’re starting. You’ve got to improve. And so we’ve added little things here and there as time went on.
Andrew: Like what? Anything especially significant that we should talk about?
Brian: That video on the testimonials page. We have a testimonial video. I’m trying to think. For instance, the quick quotes, they used to just go to the next page. Now the quick quote also gets e-mailed to them so we move into their inbox. Oh yeah, little rules with our checkout process. First, we would take a three hour turnaround and it could be a 20,000 word document. Well, we can’t do that. Rules within our checkout process. Word limits for turnaround speeds. Times. We don’t accept three hour turnaround between midnight and 6:00 a.m.
Andrew: Did you get burned and that’s what made you change it?
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Tell me about that.
Brian: Last night, we had a customer who came back to us, and he was like our second customer and it was the second or third day we had launched. He’s from Hawaii. He submitted a really big resume. It was a military resume, which, for some reason, was much bigger than your normal resume. He submitted it at midnight and he did six hour turnaround. And that point we only had four or five proofreaders, and so we got burned there. We weren’t able to meet his deadline. Fortunately, he wasn’t on a strict deadline, and so we just had to refund him back to the turnaround speed. We got burned a couple of other times. When you get burned, it forces you to make the change with word limits that we just weren’t able to meet a deadline on the word limits.
Andrew: All right. You brought up Matthew Inman before the interview started. You said you were going to say something about him. What is it? What is it about him?
Brian: It was just funny that he mentioned Dreamweaver . . .
Andrew: In the interview he did here on Mixergy.
Brian: Yeah, he mentioned that he uses Fireworks, which is a real dumbed-down version of Photoshop almost. Not many people use it. I thought it was interesting that he uses it because I use Fireworks too whenever I need to do graphics. When I first got interested in web design in my early days of college, that’s what I built my first websites on was Fireworks. It was just funny that somebody else out there uses Fireworks.
Andrew: And that somebody out there with such a huge following is still using it. And someone who’s such a pro. What’d you think of that interview?
Brian: It was interesting. It was interesting to hear that he is such a potty mouth on Twitter. You kind of raised concerns, you know, you’ve got some risk there. I was interested to hear that. And also, it’s just weird to see how these other people are making money online. It’s just, you make a poster that has a semicolon on it and it sells 10,000 copies. It’s very interesting to watch your show every month.
Andrew: Thanks. And that was shocking that he was making so much money by selling these cartoon posters and that the ones that were the hot sellers were the ones about punctuation. And yeah, that he was willing to be so aggressive in comments in some places. But at the same time, when I pushed him on it, you could see that he is concerned about what people think about what he says online. He’s not willing to . . . he doesn’t want to insult people. He does want to be part of the community and somehow he got into the fights. I don’t know how. And it makes for a much more interesting personality for the rest of us to follow.
All right. What else do I have here? More resources. Do you have any other resources? Are you on SEOmoz? Are you subscribed to any other SEO service?
Brian: SEO Chat is where I go to follow some people. oDesk. I mentioned that. I think if you want to find a freelancer to do some niche work for you, it’s a great resource. Also oDesk is a great resource for people to do link-building for you. Or one thing we might use oDesk for is have them try to get me more interviews like this, and they’ll go around and find all the websites that deal with entrepreneur, startups, and Internet marketing.
Andrew: That’s pretty cool.
Brian: We’ve given a lot of resources today. I don’t know if I have any more.
Andrew: All right. I’ve been looking over your shoulder. I know your office is having some work done, so you had to do the interview from home. I’m looking over your shoulder, and I see a couple of black and white pictures. Who are in the pictures?
Brian: I think those might be my wife’s. They’re pictures of little children, and I think that actually it might be my wife’s grandma.
Andrew: Okay.
Brian: But don’t quote me on that.
Andrew: What room are you in?
Brian: It’s like our office/den room in my house.
Andrew: So this is a shared place. This isn’t your personal office in the house?
Brian: No. It’s mainly my wife’s office. She’s getting her Ph.D. here at University of Iowa, so she needs her space. But I had to rent it out today from her. So I’m getting new windows put in my office today.
Andrew: So one more thing. You’re in Iowa right now. I was having drinks and dinner with the guy who founded SitePoint last night, sorry, the guy who owns SitePoint. And I told him about how cheap it was to live in Argentina and he said, “Are you kidding me? It is so much cheaper to live in Arkansas. For $150 a month, I could get an apartment that would make you feel so much more comfortable than one in Argentina for $800. You thought $800 was a steal? Wait till you see Arkansas.” What’s life like in Iowa?
Brian: I like it. When I get older, I want to go down to Arizona in the winters because the winters here are cold. But it’s a great place to raise a family. Cost of living is very affordable.
Andrew: That’s what I mean. Give me a sense of what it would cost if I wanted to buy a house in a nice, but not super nice, neighborhood.
Brian: Okay. For $300,000 you could get a 3,500 square foot brick home, pretty much brand new, really, really nice, in a nice neighborhood.
Andrew: And what about apartments? Do people live in apartments there? You’re in Iowa City, I think.
Brian: Yup. Apartments here are probably a little higher than normally in Iowa because of the college town. And we get a lot of people from Chicago that come to school here. But you could find, for a two bedroom, you’re looking between $350 to $500.
Andrew: Get out!
Brian: Yeah. For a one bedroom, studio type place, you could probably find between $450 to $700.
Andrew: I’ve got to tell you. I should be . . . what Tim Ferriss did for world travel, telling people that they should go travel around the world so that they could work on the cheap, I should do that for within the U.S. travel. You can go get an apartment for a few hundred bucks in Iowa. Here’s how comfortable it would be. The Internet is solid and everyone speaks the language.
Brian: And Iowa City’s actually one of the most educated cities in the country, and one of the best places for a startup business. I believe it was . . . I don’t remember. It was a major news publication that came out with those statistics. Lots of skilled labor here and very low cost of living.
Andrew: Yeah, I bet. If I wanted to find a cheap assistant, I can go overseas and work remotely, or if I happen to live in Iowa, I can just go to the university and hire somebody on a part-time basis at first and then work up.
Brian: Yup.
Andrew: All right. So that might be a whole other interview. I should do a whole interview on living on the cheap within the U.S. Bootstrapping within the U.S. instead of bootstrapping internationally.
Hey Brian, it’s great to meet you. I’m so glad that I did this interview with you. This has been terrific. I appreciate it.
Brian: Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew: All right. Let’s tell people where they should go. ProofreadingPal.com to check out your site.
All right, awesome. And guys, come back to Mixergy. As always, I want your feedback. I need your feedback. There’s a contact form right on the site where you can give it to me. Bye. Thanks for watching.
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