A founder with a startup process you can replicate

Andrew: Hey there freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the Ambitious Upstart. I’ve done over 1,000 interviews here and you might have noticed that the thing that gets me the most excited is seeing entrepreneurs who have a process that they use for building their businesses, a process that they could describe to us so that we can learn from it. If it’s just one of these random groups of experiences, then what’s the point of listening?

Today we have an entrepreneur who did go through a process and the coolest part about it is it’s a process where he developed his idea with his customers so when he was finally able to charge, when he finally built that into his product, he got customers and he knew that he could count on certain response from them because he built the product with them. That is what I want for you. That is what I want for me. That is what I want to learn in this interview.

Joining me to help us learn that lesson is a Mixergy fan that I’m so proud to have on because he used to listen to Mixergy, probably still does. Garrett Moon is the co-founder of CoSchedule, a social media editorial calendar made for Word Press. You get it right within your Word Press and you use it to schedule your upcoming blog posts. You use it to schedule your tweets promoting your blog posts. You use it to schedule your Facebook posts. You use it to make sure that when you are putting effort into creating content people will actually see it because CoSchedule helps you get it out there to the right people at the right time. I’ll tell you more about it in a moment, but first I have to tell you that this interview is sponsored by LeadPages. You know what? Later on I will tell you why if you know how to create landing pages that convert, you should check out LeadPages. Now I’ve got to just jump right into the conversation with Garrett. Garrett! Welcome!

Garrett: Hey Andrew! Thanks for having me. Great to be on Mixergy.

Andrew: It’s so cool to have you here. You’re about to show us the right way to do things, but there’s a product that you’ve built called TodayLaunch where you made the mistakes that we are going to help the people who are listening avoid. What happened there? In fact, what did you imagine the business was going to be, TodayLaunch?

Garrett: When we started out we were a small agency building websites and solving those kind of problems for customers and we thought “oh it would be great if they could manage their website and manage social media right next to each other.” We were very much thinking methodically about how we build things that or a process that, some of it continued into CoSchedule, but we kind of started off very small thinking in how we were building it. It was just kind of for these clients who were just going to be using this site and we kind of came to “Well maybe we could make this a product. Maybe we could turn this into a SAS based business,” and then just started pushing it in that direction.

Andrew: If you could sum up what TodayLaunch did, what would that one sentence be?

Garrett: Social media dashboard was what it was, comparable to your Hootsuite or Sprout Social now to make it simple.

Andrew: And when we as entrepreneurs…

Garrett: You’d be able to monitor social media and publish.

Andrew: I’m sorry?

Garrett: You’d be able to monitor what is happening on your social media channels and publish to it. So this was back in 2008, 2009 when that was still pretty new…

Andrew: Okay. When we as entrepreneurs start to think about where the business is going to be and how many customers we have and how they’ll react, we have this vision. What was your vision for TodayLaunch?

Garrett: Well, we did SaaS math, which is where you just say “if we get this $14.00 a month and we have 1,000 customers, 10,000 customers, boy, we’re millionaires by now.” You just kind of like, do this really dumb math and you think “This could be huge! We’ve just got to get it out there and then people will come. This social media thing, everyone is doing it.” You have pretty big visions for it and you think, I think the biggest mistake, now it’s so hard for me to remember what that was, like what we saw as the vision for it or how big it could be. One of the things we thought is we could get through there by doing a lot of the same stuff after somebody like Hootsuite does, like a big competitor does, but just doing it a little bit better or a little bit cleaner or a little bit nicer. You kind of naively go into it, I think more than anything, with those ideas, those things are going to be enough to make the difference and they are not.

Andrew: I have to say, Garrett, you and your team have a beautiful design eye, beautiful sensibility to how user experience should be, what user experience should be on products, so I get why you would think “We have an edge here and we can make this product better for people.” I also get SaaS math. SaaS math says if you can get people to pay a monthly fee and it’ll grow month to month because you are going to keep getting more and more people paying after a year, you’re going to be zillionaires soon. Right? David Handmyer Hansen [sp] is the one who encouraged all of us to think that way and he’s right to because when you nail it, you nail it and your business grows really solidly.

Garrett: Absolutely.

Andrew: But you didn’t nail it, though. You launched, I don’t want to soft pedal this. Give me the pain of doing it the way that you ended up doing it. What happened?

Garrett: Well, first of all it didn’t work. We built it and the way we built it and developed it, it just kind of melted. We did not take into account the amount of work that a server has to do to monitor all of these people’s social media feeds, so it got really slow really, really fast.

Andrew: Okay.

Garrett: So it didn’t work very well, and you know, and it was buggy and was hard to figure out, how to get some of that stuff, we weren’t as good at building software then as we are now, obviously. And, for the most part, we weren’t that–. You had to work really hard to get one sale. Like, it was surprising. We were actually sitting in people’s offices, our global community having meetings, demo’ing to them, and they’re asking us really good questions that were really difficult to answer. Like, how are you better than BitSuite? We’re using BitSuite now. And BitSuite’s $5.99 a month. And you’re not better than that. So why don’t we pay $14.99 a month.? You know, I mean, what looks better. Oh, that’s not good enough. Well, this is a little easier. Oh, that’s not good enough either. So, you know, we learned really quickly that it’s a lot harder to sell it than we ever thought it would be.

Andrew: And the cool thing about the way we’re going to hear that you created and then launched CoSchedule is, those kinds of really good questions bubbled up to the top and you were able to understand them, anticipate them, and respond to them and code for them, before you’re finished with the product…

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: …and ready to talk to customers. When did you eventually close it out?

Garrett: We ran it for quite a while. I mean, we played around for a year or so. We closed it out officially when we…once we came up with the idea for CoSchedule we closed it up almost immediately and we started focusing all of our time on building that.

Andrew: I see, you knew it was going to work and might as well stick with that?

Garrett: Well, we knew we could do it much better the second time around. We kind of had, like, you know, kind of lifted the rules a little bit, and I think, what we kept it around longer than we should have, it’s hard to kill your first product. I think I wrote a blog post on Medium or something a long time ago about that. You know, we ran it till we got to a point where it was super easy for us just to turn it off. Like, this is easy, let’s move on. You know.

Andrew: And as I was telling you before we started. CoSchedule, I’m surprised, is something that you saw as a need in the world. Because, it’s built for content creators, while, whereas the challenge…And I feel like you guys are fantastic content creators. It’s no surprise that you have a mike there. You have experience podcasting. It’s no surprise that when I Google you that articles and links come up. Because, you guys are good content creators, right?

Garrett: Yeah. And that’s kind of why it did bubble up. We did create content. So when we started Todaymade, our agency, we decided that we wanted to use content marketing and social media marketing as our primary avenue for marketing our business.

Andrew: And the company’s Todaymade. What does Todaymade do?

Garrett: So, Todaymade builds web based software, basically. And, we do some website work and on larger scale projects, but we primarily build real time web based software. So we build software, we also build some mobile apps. But you know, it’s an agency. In the early days, you know, early days 2009 and 2010 when we really first got started, we did more marketing consulting as well. And, kind of early days the company would do a lot of everything, until you figured out what you’re really good at and what you want to kind of focus on. But, when we started, oh we’re going to use content marketing, we’re going to use social media marketing as our primary avenues for growing our agency. And this is how we’re going to reach the clients that we want to reach.

So, we jumped into it. We hadn’t done a lot of it beforehand. I just started writing five blog posts a week. I wrote one every single day. It was the first thing I did when I came. And, we published on that day. I mean, it was kind of like, really a basic system, and you know that worked for a while. And, it got people’s attention. People started to think, well this little agency Todaymade is really busy, they’re really doing a lot of stuff. Wow, there’s…And we kind of got this perception, even in our local community, that we were really up to a lot of stuff. You know it was three days of actual stuff, three days of actual business, you know, being in business. And we’re begging for clients all over the place. So it went really well and really quickly. And, not too long into the whole deal, maybe six months, seven months ended up doing this blogging, I spoke at a group of nonprofits. There was like 50 nonprofits there, and I spoke about social media and what channels they should be on, and everything.

And we passed out a sheet of paper that said, “Hey, you know, sign up for this and you’ll get on our email list, which was basically our blog. So we’d write a blog post, it would go onto this email list, they’d get that email. And it was helpful stuff, you know. How to update your Google Plus profile, you know. How to gets more likes on Facebook. Stuff like that. And we had this one nonprofit and she signed up for that list, and got on that list, and read those emails for, probably had those six months. I mean, it was a long time before we ever heard from her at all.

And all of a sudden, one day out of the blue she calls us, she says, “I’ve been reading your email ever since that day. I’ve been forwarding it to our staffers and keep telling them over and over and over again that we need to be doing this social media. We need to be blogging. We have to get all this stuff. We have no idea where to start. Can you help us?” Of course we can help you. So we have one meeting. We put together the biggest consulting contract we’d ever even considered. Had more zeros than we ever even thought somebody would pay us for, at that time in business. And they bought it instantly. And we had this huge deal in a week.

And, it’s like, well that’s pretty amazing, right? I mean, but what we had done with that content, is that we had built trust with our audience, over time, so when it came to getting to the sales room, the process was done. They trusted us to provide them with accurate advice.

Andrew: I see. You’re telling me you published five days a week, every week, for how long?

Garrett: Yeah. A year.

Andrew: A year, okay.

Garrett: Then we backed it down to probably three days a week. At least a year.

Andrew: Okay. You saw the power that it had and now you are helping your customers by creating great products for them and you said you should do the same thing and that is where the problem that CoSchedules Solves came up. What was their reaction that let you see there was a need here?

Garrett: You know I think the biggest thing is we kept saying here is how you do this blogging. Here’s how you do social media, here’s how email marketing works. Here’s how it all works together and they’re buying into it. They are getting it. They’re liking it. They are willing to dedicate staff time to it. They are doing it, but they’re not getting very far because at the end of the day they write a blog post and they maybe forget to send an email or they wouldn’t get it to social media or they wouldn’t do half of the stuff we told them. And eventually (?) died. And they weren’t successful and a lot of times it was really about three, four, five tools that they needed in order to make it all happen.

Andrew: What do you mean? What are the tools that they would need?

Garrett: First of all there is email. You are communicating as a team about what blog posts you are going to write, who’s going to write what? What dates going to be available? That usually gets transferred into some sort of a calendar. Outlook calendars common. Google calendar maybe if they are a little more savvy. There’s probably a spreadsheet somewhere or a Word doc with topic ideas on what they are going to blog about or what they’re going to talk about. Plus you have WordPress itself the website where they are publishing to. Then you have a social media tool that they need to use.

Andrew: You mean like a Hootsuite or a buffer for Tweeting it out.

Garrett: Yep, or a buffer. Somehow you have to schedule a social media and then probably email marketing on the side of that as well. MailChimp or Campaign Monitor or something that’s handling their email for them as well. So you have four, five, six pieces to make the whole thing happen and we started thinking like that it has to be easier. We had for a long time the idea of making an editorial calendar. When we originally had that idea we didn’t really connect the idea of actually building it into WordPress. That came later.

Andrew: Okay. Now, I see the problem. Do you sit and start to code it or actually what’s the next thing you did once you understood the problem?

Garrett: The next thing we did is no we did not write code. We committed ourselves to not writing code until we could validate the idea somehow.

Andrew: You guys are coders. A company of great developers but you are still saying even though this is our strength before we apply our strength we want to be smart. We want to apply our brains.

Garrett: Yes. I am like holding my co-founder back because he’s like Mr. Programmer. He’s a great programmer. Loves details. Loves to get in and solve those problems really quickly. We are like, no. We did that with (?). We made the mistake that we built a product that the market didn’t want. So we need to figure out what the market wants.

Originally CoSchedule was actually two different tools entirely. We were like, maybe we can combine them. We had the social media aspect and we had the editorial calendar aspect. We are going to build them as two small tools to see which one took off. Through our user testing and early discussions we were able to bring them together. So you asked, “What was our first step?”

So our first step was we created some design mock ups on what we thought it might look like and how it might work. They were pretty simple. They were nice but they were simple. We put together probably eight or nine slide keynote presentation that walked people through these concepts. And you know kind of wire frames but it was more, it had like little bullets that said here’s the benefits why you would do it. Here’s the problems we are trying to solve with this. It walked them through the product step by step very methodically. It took about 10 minutes for us to get through maybe 15 minutes.

Andrew: Okay. What did you do with these mock ups and descriptions?

Garrett: We took one picture or one slide and made a basic website about the domain coschedule.com. We kind of had a name in mind and we seeded it out to your typical launch page type website. One thing to point out there, it wasn’t like a sign up to learn more. It was a click here to download button. So we could actually see how many people would click to download it and they would say oh it’s not ready yet and then we would ask for the email address.

Andrew: I see it right here. I’ve got a screen shot of it. It says, CoSchedule forward press it’s so freaking basic. Better editorial calendar for WordPress. CoSchedule simplifies your content marketing workflow by integrating directly with your WordPress blogs and social media profiles to make content scheduling easier on your team. Drag and drop editorial calendar. Automated social publishing, integrated… Anyway and there’s that big button and when I click it it does say whoa there we’re not quite ready yet, enter your email address. The button doesn’t even take me to another page. It just slides to the bottom of this page and says enter your email.

Garrett: (?) One page.

Andrew: Really super basic. That’s what we are talking about. What did you do with this?

Garrett: We emailed it to a few WordPress blogs that we knew about and had some connections with. They published it on their site and said, “Well what’s this CoSchedule thing?” Basically, Verbatim took some of the text we had there and put it out there, and, we got 130-40 people on an e-mail list that signed up and came to that page within probably the first couple days, first week or so.

Andrew: So you went to Bloggers, and you said, “here is a product that doesn’t exist. I’m just sending you a mock-up, will you blog about a mock-up?”?

Garrett: Yeah. Basically.

Andrew: So they knew that it didn’t exist?

Garrett: Yeah. They knew that it didn’t exist. I think the original blog post was on WP Daily. We had a relationship with one of the publishers there, so that helped just to get featured on there. I think for him, it was a problem he wanted to solve as well, so he was pretty interested in kind of getting out there. So they wrote, it was a small blog post, a few hundred words, and kind of said “What’s this CoSchedule thing? You know, here’s what they say they are going to do. It’s pretty interesting, what do you guys think?”. And so we had some comments that we were able to read through, and get an early idea just from that. But, 130 e-mail addresses was pretty exciting to us from that first couple of days.

Andrew: What about this? The other thing I see is a blog. So you have that landing page that does nothing except collect e-mail addresses from interested people, and shows a screenshot of what you imagine the product will look like, but it obviously doesn’t exist. Why a blog then? Why would you put your energy behind that?

Garrett: We wanted to tell the story. And we figured that if they put their e-mail address in; we had written a lot of code, so we were at least 6 months from launch, so it’s going to be a long time. In 6 months, or 3 months they’re going to forget why they put their e-mail address in that box. So, we had learned the power of blogging, and we were building a blogging tool. It wasn’t something we really thought about much, it was just sort of like, “well, we are going to need a blog,” and what we are going to do with that blog is we are going to tell the story of building “co-schedule”. We are going to post once a week, and it’s going to be automatically e-mailed to everyone that signs up on that little box.

Andrew: And I do see early blog posts. You are telling people, “This is a lean start-up, minimum viable product type of thing. It doesn’t exist. Here is a screen shot of a Google calendar to give you an idea of what our minimum viable product is.” I see. So you are just sharing with people the story. Great. And now you have a mailing list of people, you’re still not coding, you have e-mail addresses. And instead of coding for those e-mail addresses of those people you got, you started hunting through the domains of those e-mail addresses looking for 10 people. What were you hunting through the domains of the e-mail addresses for?

Garrett: People that we thought made a good…

Andrew: Who you thought were going to pay money.

Garrett: I think the only thing we, for pricing wise, had to decide at that point for sure was that we didn’t want to build a freemium product. We wanted to try something that wasn’t a freemium model, and that was partially what we learned through [??] launch. We learned that freemium models are really, really hard to scale, because it’s only a growth play. We were gun shy on doing a growth model.

Andrew: You want the premium, you want to sell, but you don’t want the free part of it. If anyone is interested they should pay up, otherwise it’s too expensive to support them.

Garrett: Yeah. It’s too expensive to support them, and if we make them pay, it’s kind of hard. There’s a lot of temptation to do a free product, because then you’ll get users. People will use a free product and that’s validation of why I built it, whether there are 20 people using it, but they are using it for free…like you’re really not there until somebody is willing to pay for it. So, we just figured if we make them pay, we are going to validate what we are doing in our idea quicker and faster.

Andrew: I see. So you are looking to see: does the person who has an e-mail address have a domain that tells me they could afford to pay. So if its “Andrew” writing from @mixerg.com e-mail address, and he has a word press site, and he has built his business on a word-press site, he is one of the people that we call.

Garrett: We are going to call Andrew, for sure.

Andrew: Were you looking for enterprise customers? Or, people who had professional blogs.

Garrett: No. Generally professional blogs but not entirely. We did talk to people who were a “mommy blogger” or a “food blogger” or something like that. If they had a decent size audience we definitely wanted to talk to them, but, we tried not to allow that bias, because that is an assumption and a bias right there. We tried not to let that cloud who we talked to. But, we wanted to make sure we were getting good feedback, too. Not everybody is always going to give you the best type of feedback.

So we ended up talking to one University, we ended up talking to a very large church, a medium sized church, there were two of them in there, and I think a couple of solo bloggers who just kind of did it for fun. I think there were a total of 10 people in there, and one of them was a like a hockey site; they were talking about college hockey. They had a couple writers, it wasn’t a big profit center but it was a big site; they were publishing frequently. So, I think that was probably the thing that we used most, was how often are they publishing. If they’re not publishing every couple of days, or at least once a week, they’re probably not doing it enough to where they’re going to really know the problems that need solving, or that we’re trying to solve.

Andrew: That makes sense, you know. I imagine people would call indiscriminately and you’re saying, “No, you don’t just want to email. You don’t want to call up everyone who gave you an email address and expressed interest. You want to figure out who this product is going to help.

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: And only call up people who fit in within that criteria. All right. I know you had to even figure out. I was thinking earlier it’s such a basic way if only Andrew uses his @mixergy domain, but you don’t need that. If you have gmail, you just mouse over. If you have a portal attached, you just mouse over and you see what they do on the bottom right side of the screen. Then you can pick out the people you want.

Garrett: I’m not even sure if I was that clever but yes. I did find that stuff. Or they’d have their Twitter handle or something in their signature or if you email them and just ask them quickly. I think we did reach out to a couple of them. “Hey, can you tell me about how much blogging you’re doing” just to kind of vet some of them? But we were going to spend some time on the phone with them. We were going to ask them to commit some time to talking to us. We want to make sure it was valuable for them and for us.

Andrew: Garrett, what’s in it for them? What make it valuable for them to have a call with you, a guy who’s potentially going to sell them something and definitely a stranger to them?

Garrett: You know, I wondered that. I really would, like I don’t know that I would have taken the time to talk to us. But I was pleasantly surprised at the entire possibility of CoSchedule how willing people are to give you their time to do something like this. There’s a couple reasons I think. For one, there’s the incentive that they might get a tool that could be really helpful to them, and it’s a big problem to them. I mean, people just being willing to talk about the problem indicates a certain way that there is a problem there for you to solve. And I think the other one is people like the idea that their hand could be on a product, that they could influence what they could end up building.

So playing onto those two ideas was pretty valuable. Later on down the road we gave some additional incentives, but early on it was just a pride thing. We didn’t…There was no freebies, and we did promise early beta access, free beta access. So that was helpful too.

Andrew: You did mention something a moment ago that I don’t want to brush over which is you wanted to see if there was a problem. What kind of questions can you ask someone that let you know that they have a problem worthy of creating software to solve and that that it’s a problem that would make them want to pay. What are the questions?

Garrett: I think one thing we really tried to do was get people talking about their current workflow. So I would ask them, how are you doing it now? Okay, and then I would interview them, just like you’re doing now when you’re interviewing me. You’re asking, well, you said now you sent an email. Okay, what happens to that email How many people replied to it, and by the time that post is published how many people are on that thread, right?

Andrew: Okay.

Garrett: And I said, “What if you didn’t have any email Would that make you faster. right?” So some of those types of questions. You know, if you had it centralized, organized like that would your team do it and what would need to be in place for your team to actually buy into it? Because it’s not just about them thinking it’s a product. It’s about the team actually being able to use it and buy into it as well.

So we kind of walked them through the process on their own ground, their own team. Usually before we’d even get into the 10 page keynote, before we’re showing them our product I try to get as much raw information about what they’re doing now for two reasons. One, I could customize the pitch a little bit to them; two, we could get some raw data on just how they’re doing it so that when we’re sitting around the table brainstorming features we’re putting them into their workflow, you know, their right of way.

Andrew: What surprised you about the way that they were doing it?

Garrett: I think I was actually surprised that it was more of a…In the early days I kept being surprised that it was more of a mainstream problem than I thought. And that there weren’t more tools out focusing on solving it because I’m talking to people who are saying, “Yeah, by the end of the week on a single news blog post from our university we have 40 to 60 people on a thread, or 40 to 60 emails deep thread.” You know, it’s this enormous thread with tons of information getting lost here, tons of inefficiency there. You know, we never expected something quite like that. And that people were listing every single time the same things that they were using, Google calendar, Excel spreadsheets.

Excel spreadsheets, you know, can share the old-fashioned way. They’re not even on Google docs half the time. And social media was like some other department they’re thinking about it sometimes, but we wish we could.

Andrew: Sure. If someone’s using Excel spreadsheet, it almost makes me feel like they don’t want to be exposed to new software because Google docs would clearly be better for them for this. It’s not like there’s heavy computation that needs to be done.

Garrett: Sure.

Andrew: So wouldn’t that tell you yes, they have this problem, but they don’t recognize the need to solve it?

Garrett: Kind of but not really because the problem wasn’t always the Google doc itself for the Excel spreadsheet. Number one, there’s two problems, the place where we were able to innovate on that. One is we connected that new spreadsheet into WordPress itself. So when I move a post or I relabel a post in WordPress it immediately is reflected on my CoSchedule calendar. Or if I change in co schedule, it’s immediately reflected in word press.

Andrew: Okay.

Garrett: Right. So, the part of the problem was redundancy. So, on somebody’s excel spread sheet they may decide to change the title of that post or may decide a different author is going to write it. But even if they do that, they still have to go over into word press and make the change. And then if they scheduled social media, they have to go into Hootsuite or wherever to make the change. So there’s no syncing between any of those tools. Most of the tools on the market don’t change that at all, there’s no adjustment in syncing, for lots of reasons.

Andrew: I’m sorry. I think I see the issue, you’re saying, “This is such a big problem that they would be willing to change their work flow for it.” It’s such a big problem and you did check out with them. You said, “If I create it would your team use this?”

Garrett: Well, I think I’m saying is that even if they adopted some of the current tools, they still had some of the same problems. Like multiple tools, they just replaced a spread sheet with a different tool. They weren’t able to eliminate any of the other ones.

Andrew: So you’re saying, “Hey Andrew, it’s not about if they move from excel to Google docs. It’s still not going to work.” So it’s not that they’re being stupid for using excel. It’s that they don’t have a better tool and excel just happens to be the tool they’re using.

Garrett: Well, we felt that we really had to become an all in one workflow in order for it to work. I think that became really clear to us is that…

Andrew: What is it about the call that made you say yes? I know that at the end of 10 calls you said, “Yes, this is it.”

Garrett: That, we talked to 10 people who we thought could really benefit from this tool. Like they would benefit from it, they said would they buy it. You know, we even asked them at one point, “Would you pay for a tool that did this for you?”

Because you have to remember, we asked them they’re problems and then we showed them the solution. You know and then we asked them if they would pay for it, which is a tough question. You can’t necessarily build a business off just that one question alone. But you know, it gave you some indicator and they said, “Yes, yes, yes, we would do it.”

Andrew: Eric Reese, the…

Garrett: It felt like we were providing something that there was so no other solution out there. We didn’t find anybody that said, “I don’t need your tool, because I already have this.” You know, no one said that.

Andrew: Eric Reese, the father of the Lean Start Up movement, the creator of it, said when I first interviewed him “He created an event, using the Lean Start Up methodology.” And before he created it, he actually saw if people would want it by sending out a survey and at the end of the survey he asked for a deposit. I said, “Do you wish you would have charged right there?”

He said, “Yes, that would have been a better indicator.” Do you wish you would have charged at the end of these 10 calls? And said, “If I build it, would you pay? Will you pay now to put a deposit or pay to show that you really are interested?”

Garrett: You know, if I did it again nothing would stop me from doing it. It would be very interesting. Would you pay $10 to have beta access?

Andrew: Right. Just to get a clear…

Garrett: Something like that.

Andrew: Yes. All right…

Garrett: I don’t know if we ever talked about that or not but you know, I wouldn’t be afraid of doing it. I would, I think it’s a great idea. It’s a great way to do it. And I remember, I had bought some Eric Reese stuff, for that reason. Like I paid $10 to get access to something that wasn’t even done yet, you know. And I know it’s great because you know he’s testing it. So, it’s always kind of neat to see that happening right in front of you.

Andrew: And that little event that was just an idea at the time that he and I were doing the interview became this huge thing. It’s still ongoing…

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: And there’s smaller events to support it. Alright, I’ve got to quickly do a sponsorship message here that’s really important. Anyone who’s listening to this interview knows that this whole story that we’re talking about here, started with a landing page. Just a single page that expresses the idea that, Garrett and his team had. And said, “If you’re interested, give me your email address.”

Well those pages are a work of art and a work of skill and a work of understanding of how to create conversions and how to explain your product. Garrett and his team are really good at it. Most of the world is not. They’re not good at creating these kinds of landing pages that collect email addresses and express to people why they should put they’re email addresses in. So, what do most people want? They just want to pay someone who will do that, who will create the page for them. And I want that person to be you, the person who’s listening to me here at Mixergy. If you’re a designer or if you know how to create designs or if you’re a good content creator who knows where things should go to persuade people. Or to explain to people what the product is and persuade them to give an email address.

If you have that skill, I want you to take that skill and go over to Mixergy.com/leadpages. Lead pages makes it really easy for you to turn your landing page ideas into templates and then they will sale those templates for you. And frankly, the first five people who do it and tell me. I will help sell those templates for you. This is a big need. People should be creating pages that explain their products and collect email addresses, they shouldn’t have to do this on their own. I want you to do it for them, if you have any skill at doing this, go to Mixergy.com/leadingpages, it won’t cost you anything. One of the first questions I’ll ask you is, “Where do we send your money when we sell the design that you create?”

And you’ll see that they keep improving the way that they allow non-designers to design landing pages. You don’t have to know everything about html. Frankly, I don’t know if you need to know anything about it. Mixergy.com/leadpages. Go there and check it out. No, go there and create a landing page. All right. So now we have these calls. Things are going well. You know that you’re on the right track, but you still haven’t created. I’m looking to see what the first version is, and I see it here in my notes. How would you describe to the audience the first version that you created based on the calls and feedback you’ve been getting?

Garrett: Well we took some pieces from Today Launch. Some code that allowed us to publish social messages. We’d rewritten that. We took mostly an already existing code for us. A very simple code. We made a very simple plug-in. It said, if you’re running your blog post up here in WordPress, right down below it you can schedule your social media, and that social media will be attached to your blog post in a relative fashion. We won’t actually schedule it and put it on the calendar, until you make it live. Making it very, very flexible. That was it. It was just one. We didn’t even have the calendar feature. You mentioned Google Calendar before. We didn’t’ even have that.

Andrew: It wasn’t even that. I got to tell you, first of all, you guys still have one of the best landing pages I’ve seen. I interview entrepreneurs all the time. I go to their homepages to get a sense of what they do. It takes me too long or it’s too complicated. I go to yours, not always, but too often, I go to yours, it’s this 2 minute where you jump right in and explain everything and you show screenshots exactly the way that I think people should.

Frankly, people should copy your format. Not the video, but the way that you describe it. Including, you don’t introduce the whole thing by saying, hi, I want to welcome you to CoSchedule, it’s a new App that I created. My name is Garrett Moon. I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’m coming on this landing pages, what is this tool? You take me right through it, and you don’t even include your last name when you do say your name. You say it’s Garrett. Anyway, one of the things that you show is, here’s the standard WordPress input box, or text box where you write your WordPress post. Slide underneath, and you can see how you can schedule a Tweet that goes out. You can schedule another social media promotion. that’s all there was to it when you first launched.

Garrett: That was it. There was no calendar, which is interesting because it’s like the basis of what we do now. We’re a social media editorial calendar, but there’s no calendar at all. It was just that social media portion. We launched it that way for a couple of reasons. 1, we wanted to see… We knew that it was going to be a core benefit of our tool. We knew that it was a key benefit to have there right away. We needed to start enforcing some simple ideas. One, we’re going to stay with WordPress. We’re not going to go everywhere. We’re not a separate tool, somewhere else. Two, we’re going to solve how promotion and social media publishing, along with your blog content.

We’re going to do these two things together. We just needed to learn what it’s like to build a WordPress plug-in and live inside of someone’s WordPress installation. One of the things about WordPress is there’s 75 million WordPress site, and every one of them is completely different. We knew that there were going to be some challenges as to build plug-ins. The sooner we could do it, the sooner we could start learning what we’re going to need to do in order to be successful in that market.

Andrew: When you create a plug-in like that, there’s this feeling that it’s just a plug-in. You can’t create an empire by just being a plug-in in WordPress. It seems too small. Did you feel any of that?

Garrett: Absolutely, we talked about that a lot. We were really concerned that we would be seen as a plug-in. We knew that if we build the whole thing, it would be a standalone application that integrated well with WordPress. It’s not built on WordPress in any capacity. We knew that it was a battle we would have to fight. It was something we discovered early on. There were some places that we incorporated that into feedback and questions we asked costumers as well. We were pretty conscious of that early on.

Andrew: All right.

Garrett: But you notice that we don’t describe ourselves as a plug-in now. We call ourselves a counter for WordPress and we have a plug-in that’s required in order to use it, but it’s a plug-in that it’s about.

Andrew: You know what, sometimes I feel like when people do that kind of thing, they’re just marketing, but in this case, I think it’s true. It happens to live inside WordPress because that’s where the team is, but it’s not a WordPress plug-in and I don’t know why but it feels right that way.

Garrett: Well it’s true, it is marketing as well because marketing has to describe it properly in order for that idea to take hold. Rhetoric in that way is important.

Andrew: Terrific. Now you’ve got this idea, you’ve got a simple plug-in. How long did it take you to write it?

Garrett: Maybe a couple weeks. Maybe, at most… I don’t think it was that long. That’s not full time development. We’re running an agency on the side. We only had 1 programmer, my business partner, and he’s programming other people’s projects plus ours.

Andrew: Wait, your whole company has just one programmer? Just Justin?

Garrett: At that time, yes. I believe so.

Andrew: Wow. You know, your blogging really did make you sound like you were huge.

Garrett: Yeah, yeah. It did. At that time, it was me, him, and another writer. We had a writer who helped us out.

Andrew: That was it?

Garrett: That was it. That was it. It was 3 of us. We had a designer for a while, and freelancers, and stuff like that, in and out, but yeah, it was just us 3.

Andrew: I always assumed you guys were big, because you are big in the geek community And I assume that you guys were hardcore big, like big but only the geeks know you for some reason. I don’t know why I had that in my mind.

Garrett: That’s marketing, Andrew

Andrew: Actually, you know what, that is what it is. All right. You don’t do a big splashy launch even though it’s WordPress. There are tons of WordPress sites covering WordPress, you could have gone to them and said here’s our big plug-in. What do you do instead?

Garrett: We gave it out to the people on our list. I don’t know if we gave it out to all of them. I think we did. I think it was 130 people we emailed and 60 of them started using it. They installed it and started using it in their blog and we immediately started getting feedback. “Wouldn’t it be nice if this network was there? Wouldn’t it be nice if this network was there?”

The only two we launched with were Twitter and Facebook. We all knew for sure we would want those. Other than that we didn’t know. We’ll see. But we gave them a way right inside the app, I think we used intercom right away to allow people to submit us feedback very quickly. We would read those emails and respond to them and just try to learn. We have all kinds of base camp documents tracking the feedback we were getting. We just started listening to our users and I think it wasn’t too long after that where we started introducing some features, not necessarily based on what they were asking for right away. Our first features were more based on things that we wanted to learn about, like what they want, the XYZ features.

Andrew: You know what I’m just thinking, if I only has 130 people on a mailing list I would think that’s a failure this thing isn’t going to go anywhere if I can only get 130 people. How’d you know that 130 people on a mailing list would be enough?

Garrett: It kept growing. We bought some AdWords. So we started testing AdWords and having people trickle in that way. And the feedback we were getting continued pushing us forward. And I might not be completely correct on those numbers because, eventually, by the time we launched there was thousands of people on that list, so it was slowly building. This was all before March was even over. We were right at the beginning of the year so it was all happening pretty quickly.

Andrew: So you getting all this feedback from people… One of the reasons I understand it that you decided to send it to a small group of people is you wanted to see would this break the way a day launch did. Will it be something that works great in our isolated environment but when we take it out to the world it just can’t handle it.

Garrett: Yeah. And we certainly learned stuff fast.

Andrew: What did you learn?

Garrett: I wish my technical [??] was here my [??] because he would have explained it more. But plugin conflicts, some early beginner mistakes we made in making a plugin that would have been there, think about that, if you build a product for a year, relatively new WordPress developers. We built WordPress sites but we were relatively new as plugin developers of any kind. So we were following some of those simple conventions that developers learn by building a couple of these things and having some time under their belt.

So we made dumb mistakes that were pointed out very quickly. Because it was a small plugin we were able to iterate it on very quickly and get them a new version. We are able to learn that we want to be able to build it in a way that we can update it remotely, so that they don’t have to do a plugin update all the time because if we have a plugin update… Okay, we have this catastrophic bug and 60 people are using our plugin and now we have to do a plugin update in order to improve it except for two weeks into it only 12 people have updated. They all have this bug.

Andrew: That stinks. The crappy part about WordPress plugin updates is we have to now have a whole routine around updating a plugin because we have to make sure that the new version doesn’t conflict with one of our other plugins so we have to read it. We have to look at it. We have to make sure that it doesn’t conflict and we have see if it’s on our do not update list. We have to see if we made any changes. It’s such a pain in the butt. I hate that about WordPress.

Garrett: And all those things where people download a plug-in, and they may have a plugin that we know. We can test against a plugin but they may have customized it. They may have changed it. It’s not fully under our control. So we decided… we learned very quickly that we have to be this kind of separate layer on WordPress. We can’t be deep into it because if people have conflicts with us, and they inevitably will happen, they’re going to blame the most recently installed plugin. And that’s a hazard for us in going forward.

Andrew: The most used plugin is sometimes the problem.

Garrett: Yeah. That’s true as well.

Andrew: All right. So now you’re learning, you’re improving. The product is getting better. People are telling you new social… What’s a new social network that they insisted you put in that you didn’t expect?

Garrett: I didn’t expect Tumblr. I didn’t think of it as one that they would want and actually lots of people use it and we have several customers that’s why they use it. So, you know…

Andrew: It’s interesting. You wouldn’t expect someone who’s using WordPress to want to port over to Tumblr. It feels like its conflicting platforms that do the same thing, but…

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: You know what? As a Tumblr user I get it. I use Tumblr for weird things and it helps. Okay. So you’re doing all that, now it’s time to see will they pay, will they show you the money How do you test that?

Garrett: Well, we did a couple of different things. We ended up building a version of our calendar and put together kind of a really small test group on that. We focused on small focus test groups not these really big large numbers. And we had them testing the calendar, and we had them using it. And then we kind of said, “Okay, here’s the price. You know, and we said, “Would you pay for it? Would you do this?”

Andrew: So did you say here’s the price?

Garrett: So fast forwarding where we actually built the first version of the CoSchedule calendar, maybe 90% of it. That’s when we first started talking to people about price.

Andrew: I see. And you were already starting to build this calendar again with user feedback, checking in, do you want a calendar. Is this how you want it to work all right? And that’s when you decided to sell it.

Garrett: That’s probably one step that we missed a little bit. We could have tried to sell something to them early on what if we just said, “Hey, on this date this plug-in you’re using right now is going to cost $10 to use per month.” And say “Will you pay for it? Yes or no” And see how many people put their credit card in. Even if we eventually say, “Oh, I was just kidding. Yes, you can all use it for free.” You know, that would have been an interesting exercise.

We never did that. And for us finding the right price was something that we didn’t really learn until we started making people put their credit card in. We changed our pricing three times in our first month being opened to see what would happen, and so we kind of learned on the fly that way which is fine but we should have done it earlier.

Andrew: Garrett, when you say we ask them to pay, do you mean you called them up or within the app or within intercom within the app?

Garrett: Most of the time it was over Google Plus, like a hangout. What we started doing with customers as we got further along as we start having them use the app in production. And we’d do once a week a quick call with them to see how it was going, and we’d show them something new. “Hey, here’s what we’re thinking for the dashboard.”

Andrew: Each customer or all customers could join the hangout?

Garrett: Ten or 12 selected customers. Again, we kind of did the same process where we had them apply, kind of figure out how likely are they to be kind of a target customer once we launch. It was a very selective group.

Andrew: Okay. All right. You know what? Actually tell me more about these Google hangouts? I noticed that the guys over at Zapier do Google hangouts on a regular basis to show their software. I feel like there’s something to this. What’s the benefit of just talking to just 10 people and showing them your software?

Garrett: You can get a little deeper, I think. You know, it’s tough. Our process was in order to be a, we called them co-pilots, you have to be commit to using the product on a production blog, right? Despite hiccups and hangups. So we want you to use it, and you’ll get it for free for a year, I think, or even for a lifetime, I think, for that blog afterwards. That was the big payoff. And you’ll get access to it right now. No one else got access to the beta calendar, only this select group of people.

So they all applied, and we just said, “And what we want you to do in exchange is once a week Wednesday at 3:00 we’re going to do a group hangout, and we’re going to ask you a specific set of questions. Usually what we would do is we would show them mockups. We would show them wireframes actually sometimes and saying, “This is how we think this feature would work. How would you use it?”

And they would each go around the room and use it. And what was interesting we learned there are benefits to get in groups, and there’s bad reasons for groups sometimes. Sometimes group think can take place. Other times you’ll see people play off each other and say, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. We would do that too totally, and here’s why and blah, blah, blah, you know that sort of thing.” All the while their benefit from Google Plus is that hangout we could include multiple staff members and call really easily.

On our early calls we were recording them. I’d record my screen, and you’d have somebody talking on the phone over here, like super low like a little speakerphone, and me talking. The volume’s all over the place. But in this one they would jump into the call and sometimes our developers would just chime in and answer questions and be able to come and interact with the customers directly.

Andrew: What about when you’re talking to people and you’re in the Google hangout asking for something that you think is stupid, that you know actually is stupid, they’re asking for it and they’re there and they came and they’re eager. And they need it. What do you do? Or do you say, “No, I can’t do that.”

Garrett: You have to learn how to…I read a book called “How to Interview Users?” I forgot the name. I can send you the link. Steve Portigal wrote it, and it’s a short book but “How to Interview Users” I think was what it was called. And what I found out is it’s all about the questions and how you ask them, right? And again you have to remember you’re there to seek information. I think as entrepreneurs we do some of these calls and we’re trying to sell our product or even worse defend it, really dangerous thing to fall into. You have to become this objective interviewer. You’ve become a good interviewer and you’ve learned those things. As an entrepreneur, I didn’t know that. So they said, “Crazy feature idea number one: I want you to track piano lessons.” Somebody asked us this. “I want you to track piano lessons on my WordPress editorial calendar.”

Andrew: Yeah.

Garrett: What a weird idea. So why is it you’ll (inaudible)? You have to come out differently. So why would that be a benefit to you? Why would you want to see that? What time would that save you? What effort would that save you? Because what you’re trying to get is information. Not necessarily just a list of features that you could build. At the end of the day, building a piece of software features are your . . .

Andrew: . . . [SS] . . . on set.

Garrett: . . . easiest . . . [SS] . . .

Andrew: [speaking to person in background: I’m recording. Thank you.] Just got some junk mail.

Garrett: Junk mail. Nice.

Andrew: (laughs)

Garrett: Special delivery. . . . [SS] . . .

Andrew: A new receptionist. I’ve got to let her know . . .

Garrett: (laughs)

Andrew: . . . lights mean interviewing. What’s the name of the book? I was trying to Google it as you were talking, but I can’t come up with it. Or what’s the name of the author?

Garrett: Steve Portigal.

Andrew: Portigal. I see him now. With a ‘G’. Portigal.com is his site.

Garrett: “Interviewing Users”, I think.

Andrew: “Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights.” Great book, I see.

Garrett: . . . [??] . . .

Andrew: Yeah, okay. You were saying this person wanted piano lessons within the blog. What did you say? How do you follow up on that?

Garrett: (laughs) You know, I did a whole post for Ash Moira [sounds like] on (inaudible) about interviewing users.

Andrew: Ash Moira. Let’s see.

Garrett: I think it is that you just have to remember that you’re there to understand them, and that’s what you need to try and do. You can’t get too defensive out of your products, and you can’t try and get into, you know, too soon. You can’t ask questions like, “What would you expect to be available?” You know, “What would you expect to be on this screen?” Sidestepping their questions and turning it back to them as a question. So they say, “Here’s a terrible idea.” And you say, “Why would you want that?” Or, “What tool would you use now to attract them?”

Andrew: (laughs)

Garrett: You know? So you turn it back into a question and make it into a discussion, rather than just saying, “Well, that’s something we thought about.” And I found myself doing this. I found myself in these Google plus hangouts saying, “That’s a feature we might do. We’re not really sure.” And it’s like, “No, dummy. You’re not there to defend your features and what you’re building. You’re there to get feedback.” So, “Okay. Well, why would you use that feature?” And then open up to group, “Would anyone else use that feature?” And they just heard that person describe it. And now they’re saying, “Group, what do you guys think?” And so you’re able to hash all those ideas very quickly.

Andrew: Then it’s time to now charge. You were saying you were asking people would they pay. What was the feedback on that?

Garrett: We were too expensive. We thought Co-schedule was going to be a premium tool for a niche audience. And I think what continually surprised us throughout the process was that this was a much bigger and a much larger problem and a much larger market than we’re giving it credit for. And we continually learned that slowly. And I think that was one hazard that we had: where we continually sought feedback from small groups rather than large groups – the larger groups of people. So I think we could’ve balanced that more – of getting larger feedback and smaller, more focused feedback. But, yeah, I mean, we first launched . . .

Andrew: What did you start charging?

Garrett: $100 a month.

Andrew: 100 a month. I’ll say in a moment what you charge now is considerably lower. How did you get the feedback that said that’s too expensive? How did it come across?

Garrett: Sales were sluggish. At the same time, we had two people sign on after the first two weeks. So we had great validation. Two people paid. One person paid for an entire year (laughs) all at once.

Andrew: That’s great, yeah.

Garrett: Somebody who had been there since the beta plugin, which was crazy. But I feel like what changed our mind on pricing was that we saw the excitement for the product over here, and then we saw how that translated into sales, and we said, “These two don’t add up. There should be more people converting.” Even after working for companies and stuff that we think should be able to afford this, we’re not looking at this problem correctly.

Andrew: Okay. So then you started reducing the price. And did you get more sales? Was it in lockstep?

Garrett: Yeah, we did. So I think we dropped it down to a three-tiered pricing system – $29, $59 or something like that. We kind of broke it down into some steps, and then sales improved right away. We still had the (inaudible) users saying, “You know, I’m going to just, every day . . . ” Because the only thing is that we really underestimated, like, “Mommy blog”, “Photo blog”, “Food blog” market. Because we thought they’re hobby-bloggers – they’re not going to pay money for a tool.

Andrew: That’s what I would’ve thought.

Garrett: That’s what we thought. So we thought we don’t want to be in the lower price-point. What we learned is that we were kind of wrong. They are willing to pay for it. They’re willing to pay for hosting and CoSchedule. That’s it. It was that useful to them, and save them that much time. Here’s the tell on money water(??), I’m going to save you so much time that you can spend more time with your family. You can spend more time with that cooking that you love. You know, like the time saving for them was valuable enough for them to put in ten dollars a month, or five dollars a month.

Andrew: How did you know that it was about saving time, so they could spend time with their family?

Garrett: They told us. They told us. They sort of, So, one of the things that we did later on is we started giving people incentives to save money on the product by writing a review. Which was phenomenal for growth, but also really great for getting that raw feedback. Like what they’re telling their friends in a blog post, is what you want them to tell you, but they don’t always tell you.

Andrew: Yes.

Garrett: You know, it’s hard to get to that point sometimes, because sometimes they’re talking to the person that makes the product so they’re more nice than they should be maybe. Because it can be intimidating to give negative feedback if it’s possible. Or whatever, you know, they are just not thinking of it as clearly as they are if they are sitting there writing a blog post.

Andrew: I see. I noticed that actually in your current marketing, in fact in the video towards the end of the two minutes after you show the features and how they help us you say “one the benefits is that you get to spend the time it frees you”, or something like that. I forgot how you, do you remember how you positioned it?

Garrett: Save time and grow traffic. I mean those are the two things that we focus on the most. I don’t know how I said it on the video, maybe “Spend time on what you really want to be doing”.

Andrew: Who did that video?

Garrett: The one on our homepage?

Andrew: Yeah.

Garrett: I did it. It was just me and my laptop, this microphone, and a screen sharing application.

Andrew: And the music? It was quick, it moved fast, who did that?

Garrett: AudioJungle.com. You know it was a ten dollar track, nothing in particular.

Andrew: What’s the name of the site?

Garrett: Audio Jungle.

Andrew: That’s the marketplace.

Garrett: Yeah, yeah the (??) I think.

Andrew: Sounds good, we’re on the right track here. But we also have to acknowledge that this was not easy, and you actually at one point had to stop taking a salary.

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: Why.

Garrett: Because we were running an agency, and a product company at the same time. Which was always our goal, but I think you really underestimate how difficult that can be, because you have two completely conflicting goals. If you have a product that is showing signs of success, it deserves and requires 100% attention in order to make it successful, to turn that gap from an idea into a successful product. But in an agency, you have commitments. In order to make money, as our source of revenue, that’s how we were bootstrapping that’s how we were paying for the co-schedule. By this time we had two or three different team members. We had a team.

Andrew: So you hired people to work on CoSchedule.

Garrett: We hired people to work on client projects, with a side benefit they could work on CoSchedule too. So we were running that very…

Andrew: It’s a very tough thing to do.

Garrett: That was the biggest challenge of the whole thing. How do we make the jump, when you break apart into separate companies. I think some of these wait too long, and I think part of our problem was that we were small enough, like we were six people, so we felt it fast. In order to keep six people employed, you pretty much need to be taking on client work. But CoSchedule was demanding more and more time, it was showing signs of success and we knew it was worth putting our time into it. So it was somewhat like we just said, “Well that’s it we’re not taking bids right now, or taking limited projects”. And we’re going to spend 50% of the efforts in this company on building co-schedule and on running co-schedule.

Andrew: And that’s why the money started to dry up?

Garrett: Because we decided that we couldn’t take any more projects. Because projects were a distraction from building co-schedule. And there was a point in our company where we had to be very, very conscious of that, and just say “No” in order get to the next step, even though we knew it was going to bring hardship.

Andrew: I remember being in school, and the only classes I ever liked were the business classes. And one of the things I learned was entrepreneurs do not love risk. Up until that point I thought “that is a risky business, you know going into start-up world that you’re going to take a risk, that you’re probably going to die, but because you’re smarter than everyone else you’ll live”. And I never felt fully that that was true. And then when the professor said, “Entrepreneurs like to box up risk, they like to be clear about it, they like to box it up”. So my sense is that you didn’t just say “Screw it, let’s take a flyer on this thing”. There was some indication that CoSchedule was on the right track. What was that indication that told you that this was worth, really, risking our financial health and future for it?

Garrett: After adjusting for the pay models a little bit, sales started to happen. All of a sudden people were buying it, and we were selling it, and the amount that we were selling was growing each month and week. We saw incrementally.

Andrew: That’s the SaaS math.

Garrett: That’s the sass math, small versions of it, happening right before our eyes. I think the other one was a realization of the market. Once we started to understand how big the market was and how many potential costumers there were…

Andrew: How do you know how big the market was? I remember that BS section of the business plans where you’re supposed to say how big the market was, and you always say, this research company said it’s going to take over the world and Mars is next, and you go, alright, great. I’m pasting it in. How do you legitimately find it?

Garrett: I don’t know what the real answer is. I know what we did. We looked at WordPress. WordPress has 75 million blogs. It’s 54% of the CMS market. 20% of all web space in the world are running WordPress. There’s tons of people doing this and what’s interesting is, there’s aren’t a lot of people focused on building tools on it. I think our biggest bet in the company wasn’t even on the problem. It was keying on whether people will buy a SaaS-based product, a monthly subscription, you know, in a WordPress environment.

Andrew: That’s the question, right. That’s a thing that I wonder, too. How do you know that all those people aren’t just blogging? That they aren’t just doing it for fun? Or aren’t enterprise?

Garrett: Lots of them are. Some of them are .com, and some of them are enterprise. With a gap that big, you know that you’re going to have some of everything. 50 of the top 100 blogs in the world run WordPress. There’s thousands [??] lots of efforts.

Andrew: I see what you’re saying. 20% of the world’s websites are basically running on WordPress. Hell, 20% of the world’s websites is a great market. In there, it’s not 20% of the world’s websites that are all blogs, 20% of the world’s websites are using it. That’s a huge market. You’re looking around and you’re not seeing professional tools built on it. I see. Got it, all right. You’re testing and seeing whether people are willing to pay including mommy-bloggers, and if mommy-bloggers are willing to do it, then other companies would be willing to pay for it, if you can show them the value.

Garrett: When one of our first costumers, the one who really validated us, was Full Contact. You may know who FullContact is. It’s a startup company out of Denver. They bought the new CoSchedule. They still use it. They’re still a paying customer today, and they’re on our website. They’re one of our early paying customers. I would say it was in the first two or three months they bought and started using Co Schedule. They were recommending it to the Next Web, who is a paying costumer of Co Schedule as well. There were some big players early on that gave us indicators that this is something that scales into lots of different markets and people are very interested in this product. By the end of the year, we launched at the end of September, we were probably at about 90 costumers, paying customers.

Andrew: Ninety, paying 10 bucks a month.

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: Every month, that’s 900 dollars.

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: By the middle of this year, 2014, how’d you do?

Garrett: By the middle of this year, we hit the 1000 costumer mark.

Andrew: 1000 costumers a month? 10,000 dollars every month coming in, in sales?

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: Did you have any outside funding after this thing started to take off?

Garrett: We did. We bootstrapped until the point of about 100 costumers. That’s when we’re like, okay, we’re committed to this. We’re not taking contracts anymore for today made. We’re not going to take a salary for a couple months if we have to. We’re going to make it up later, which we never did, by the way.

Andrew: You never got… You should get IOUs from the company.

Garrett: We should, right? Literally, what’s interesting about that, that’s the first time we ever not took a paycheck. We always… Our first month in business, we took a paycheck. It was just kind of that point where you see it. You become completely convinced, and you know that you have something. I think you’re right. Risk inside of a box. It was risky and it sounds really risky, but it didn’t feel that risky then. It just felt like this is exactly what we should be doing. By the way, this is a scenario that we had planned and considered with Today Launch as well. It wasn’t like this was the first time we considered it, but TodayLaunch, we knew it was never the time to do that.

Andrew: You considered getting funding and considered turning it in to its own business?

Garrett: Yes. We considered getting funding. We considered, stop taking client projects and only focus on building this piece of software. We considered all those types of things. We never jumped at that point because it was never right. It just wasn’t.

Andrew: Are you on Angel List, I don’t see you on there.

Garrett: I thought we had a profile, maybe not.

Andrew: How much money did you raise?

Garrett: We raised 500,000.

Andrew: From?

Garrett: Local Angel investors. They’re in our community here.

Andrew: How’d you find them?

Garrett: In good networking. We made a list of everyone that we knew who might know someone. My best piece of advice on fundraising is, if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money. We just asked people for advice. We met with lawyers, financial planners, insurance salesmen that knew were in our personal network. We said, here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s our business. Here’s the traction. Here’s how much money we want. Who should we talk to? Who should we be talking to next? They would give us referrals and we would set ups meetings for those people, so we just had meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. Eventually, you find the right place.

Andrew: North Dakota, was that a challenge?

Garrett: No. It wasn’t necessarily. What was a challenge was tech. A lot of the local investors and stuff are more used to real estate or oil. I mean, there’s a huge oil boom up here, which means there’s lots of capital in North Dakota. There’s lots of wealth in North Dakota. That doesn’t matter, necessarily for tech startups because it’s all new wealth, and new wealth doesn’t get distributed very quickly. It kind of just sits there. Anyway, bankers explained that to me throughout the process. It was a challenge in explaining and finding people who were savvy enough to understand enough about what we were doing in order to do it, plus having the money to back it up.

Andrew: You had advice from someone who knows the startup investment world? I don’t see it on Angel List actually.

Garrett: We might not be there. Yeah we worked with a local venture company in Fargo, a town nearby us. They gave us a ton of advice. One of the things about being from a small state, is that people are very helpful. Venture firm, it’s done big deals. They’re actually involved, I think, with lead pages, one of your sponsors. They were willing our North Dakota start up. They spent 3 hours going through our pitch and going through our plan and asking us really tough questions and getting us to be comfortable with talking about valuation and stuff, just to help out a North Dakota start up. That’s not something you find everywhere. With a small state and a small community, there come some big benefits that come with it as well. We certainly found those in our fundraising efforts.

Andrew: I’m trying to see if there’s anything that I missed. Now what kind of revenues are you doing today?

Garrett: Since our launch this summer, we continue exponential growth. What we’ve grazed for is a profitability mark and we’re on track to hit that early next year, which is pretty exciting for us. It’s continued compounding growth at pretty much the same rate…

Andrew: How about total revenue for 2014? Can you say that?

Garrett: It’s over 100 thousand, no it’s between 100-200 thousand, somewhere around that.

Andrew: Consider this a business end to where the company is right now. It’s funded so you can use the money for developers?

Garrett: Primary development. We have a lot of stuff to do there. Support, bringing out some full-time support staff so we can keep people updated and communicate with our audience.

Andrew: You know…

Garrett: We put some marketing in there, but not much, you know. Word of mouth is still our major marketing channel for growth.

Andrew: You and I were introduced through Noah Kagan.

Garrett: Right.

Andrew: I actually want to ask you how you know him, in a moment. He suggested you, and I looked at the site, and I said, you know what, it’s too early. One of the reasons why I thought it’s too early is this. The bottom of your site, the copyright, says 2013. We’re almost done with 2014.

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: What’s it…

Garrett: That website needs to be rebuilt. That’s our launch website, actually. That is basically the launch with a few small changes. That is almost exactly what we launched with. We’ve hardly changed it at all. We have some other landing pages where we’ve done some testing and stuff, but that is just a pipeline issue. There’s only so much time when you have a small team that can get done. Where are the priorities? Our conversion rates are where we’re really extremely happy with them. We made some small copy adjustments. We’ve [??] tested pages and we’ve had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to improve them in some places. Everything we’ve tried just doesn’t seem to work. That home page in particular, is basically the launch page, which is pretty crazy. It still works. It still works. I can’t beat it. I’m not ready to make a homepage that beats it, yet.

Andrew: How do you know him? I see that you wrote on his site and his personal blog. I see that he’s still sending you guys traffic and costumers. How’d you hook up with him?

Garrett: He hooked up with me. He reached out to me on Twitter and asked me to write a guest post. I think it was just through our content. We continued that drum beat of creating high-quality content, publishing our blog, the thing we did for [??]. It’s how we launched Co-schedule. We have a list of email costumers and our marketing list that we continue to use to bring us costumers. We were able to build an audience, and he stumbled on our content, liked a post that I had written, and said, hey would you write one for OkDork? I said yeah, I have a great idea for OkDork, actually.

We just hit a million headlines in our system. What if I analyze them and try and pull some good nuggets of data out about what makes a good headline? Perfect for his audience, a growth based audience. Useful for us to dig in and continue to learn about the headline writing process and make ourselves better. It just turned out to be a really good partnership. Since then we’ve just talked a few times. We’re both making stuff in the WordPress space, so there’s been a lot of overlaps and continue to kind of work together.

Andrew: He’s such a good champion for people. I think I even emailed back and I said, “It seems too early.” And he came back and told me, “No, it’s not.” And said 1000 I forget what it was. And I said,”1000 users?” He goes, “No, customers. Pay attention. This is a real business with real customers.” So all right. Yeah.

Garrett: [??] that distinction around here. Customers versus user. It’s an important one. Users don’t matter.

Andrew: Every user is a customer for you.

Garrett: Well, yeah. I mean, a person who signs up for a trial, we call them a user. Versus somebody who converts to a bank customer, we call them a customer. We still have the distinction around our office as well.

Andrew: All right. You know, let me save this last question for after I say this. If anyone’s listening to this and they still have not heard my interview with Emmitt, the founder of Twitch. Twitch TV. They did so well. If you want to take this conversation to the next level, you have got to, not to the next level. If you want to hear another story who used this same model and ended up building a company that he sold for about a billion dollars to Amazon, you got to check out my interview with Emmitt. Just type in Emmitt, with two M’s into the search bar. So good.

Garrett, if someone’s listening to this and they say,” I’m going to do this. I’m going to actually come up with an idea and then I’ll put up a landing page and get email addresses. And if I only get 160 email addresses, that’s terrific because then I’m going to go and really talk to them and understand them and do everything that Garrett did. Garrett’s interview will be my Bible.” What’s one mistake, what’s the mistake that they’re going to make that we can help them avoid?

Garrett: They’re not going to want to fail fast enough. They’re going to be afraid of failing quickly. And you hear that, a buzzword, a lot of startups. But it’s living that is always a tough thing because we, entrepreneurs, we can take things personally. We become champions for our own ideas. And you have to learn to disconnect from that and love feedback. Like real feedback.

Andrew: What do you mean by fail fast in this model? You’re talking to customers. How are you failing fast?

Garrett: We put a plug in out there that broke a bunch of people’s blogs, you know. And we just did it and got the feedback and knew that that was going to kind of suck for a while. But you just work through it and know that you’re going to be better because you worked through it and get through it.

Andrew: Breaking people’s sites is a big one. That would be a demoralizing experience.

Garrett: Yeah. It sucks. It makes people mad. You lose some beta customers sometimes. But you have to be willing to get it out there and learn as quickly as possible. What’s the fastest way I can learn that this idea sucks, that my idea sucks, that my idea is no good, that I shouldn’t run this start up, that I shouldn’t do this, that I should just quit now? What’s that fastest way I can learn that? That’s what you got to do. I mean, you have to be ready to do that because, and you may not, what you may actually find from that is the actual idea you need to run one.

Andrew: Was there anything about CoSchedule that people told you, “No way. This is an idea you should turn away?” Or part of the idea you should turn away?

Garrett: We had originally a whole idea for integration with email marketing. And like, you’re going to have your campaigns in here and stuff and it was on the calendar and everything. And yeah, did they like it? Everyone liked it. You offer somebody a feature, they will like it. But once we heard how they described how they might use it and what they might use it for, we realized there was a really poor use case for it. That it wasn’t a major enough problem. And it would have been a huge waste of our development time to do.

Other ones are more around, you know, maybe some things like certain tools that we might integrate with that we thought might be important that no one really cared about. Evernote. I had this whole idea for a huge Evernote integration because my blogging workflow includes Evernote. Not everyone’s does. It would have been way too specific of an integration. It would have been a waste of our developer’s time.

Andrew: [??] Fail with that idea. Have people tell you that, “No, that’s a chump idea. It doesn’t make sense.” Or whatever harsh thing that you imagine they’re going to say, have them say that to you so that you don’t end up creating it and feeling it for real. That it’s a waste of time and money.

Garrett: I asked our copilots, “Where do you put your blog ideas?” And then they told me ten different places. None of them were Evernote. And I’m like, “Well, that is a problem we’re probably not going to need to solve.” They all have a solution that they seem fine with and, you know-

Andrew: When I have an idea for something I want to write, I hit Command, Option, Control with these three fingers, the letter “N” with that one and I start writing that blog post, or writing that email, or writing that idea. That’s my Evernote shortcut.

Finally, let’s end it with this. You are a guy who used to listen, who listens to Mixergy interviews, who is listening and has gone through an interview now and see the whole process. What do you think of my work here? And let me fail fast if you’re not thinking it’s good. Or praise me publicly so that everyone sees the value here, if you think it’s good.

Garrett: Well, you know, one, I haven’t heard from you in a couple years. You know, I mean, I haven’t watched. So, you know, is there ways that you can drip out, even maybe small segments and stuff that we can see more often so we can see you more often. You know? I mean, I know you’re still cranking the way great videos and great stuff. And I learn tons of stuff from Mixergy interviews, but, you know, I want to know you’re still doing it and more active-

Andrew: [inaudible] the whole interview if you have no commute. I see you want to say here’s a clip, this makes sense, go learn from that use it and if you want the whole interview, it’s there.

Garrett: The video content is always tough because you really have to commit. I can’t work and watch it like it I use to. In my old job, when I was just doing graphic design at an ad agency, I could do it in the background. For me, its small clips that I can get. I’ll stash them away, you never know or something, and when I have a minute to watch ten minutes or so, I’ll pull it in.

Andrew: I was hoping you would say ‘Andrew, this is the most in-depth interview ever. Everybody else just does fluff, but you really got underneath, you did your research you did your homework right down to the copyright you bastard.’

Garrett: You do that. That’s true.

Andrew: [Laughing]

Garrett: You go deeper and you get more actionable content because you continue drilling with questions. And you’re really good at stopping someone and saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to go back. I want to go back and do this.’ I always remember that, Andrew is always ‘No, no, no, hold on. I want to go back. I want to ask you about this. Because someone is going to want to know this.’ And it’s those things that we brush over, because they’re easy now for me, they weren’t very interesting. But those details of how I made that landing [??] page, where I made it, how I did it. Tons of people are at that stage that need to know that. You’re good at pulling that out.

Andrew: I know what you’re talking about. I used to read books about entrepreneurs and business people and, they would get such praise for knowing exactly how to rally the troops. And I go, ‘Jerk, tell me how you frickin got a company with all those troops.’ You know, if I get troops, I’ll figure out how to rally them and, by then I’ll understand. Tell me how the guy built a company with so many people there and, then talk to me about how to rally the troops.

Garrett: Yeah.

Andrew: All right. Thank you so much for doing this interview. Thanks for breaking the whole process down. I hope people don’t just end up using this but do what I’m going to do right now which is find a way to say thank you. If they got anything of value, apparently you are so much more accessible [??] than I even imagined. They should find a way to say thank you directly to you and, I’m going to do it right here in the interview. Thank you so much.

Garrett: I had a great time, it was really fun. An honor to be on mix with you, Andrew. Thank you, for what you do.

Andrew: Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you all for a being a part of it. Bye, everyone.