Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart and the original startup interviews.
And you know what? I’ve been doing this for a long time and a lot of my guests come from friends and friends of friends who refer me to great guests. The first time that I was referred to or suggested that I have today’s guest on, I turned him down. I said the company was too small. But I was wrong. My friend emailed me back. He gave me a little bit more insight and I said, “I had no idea.” I had been looking at the site for a long time. I just thought it was a little side project. I had no idea it had gotten big. So, I invited today’s guest on to do an interview about how he did it.
Today’s guest is–there you see him up on your screen–he is Marc Köhlbrugge. He is the founder of BetaList, which provides an overview of upcoming tech startups and gives its readers early access to beta test those products.
This interview is sponsored by HostGator. So, you’re going to listen to this interview and a few people in the audience, maybe even you, the person who is listening to me, are going to say to themselves, “Hmm… I can create a site like BetaList. I can create a BetaList of something else, of watches. I can create a list of upcoming watch apps of a list of new hardware that’s going up on Kickstarter or whatever.” And they might sit back and say, “Oh, that it so easy. I should do that.” Some people might journal it. Some people might sketch it out.
But the ones that are real doers are going to just go on a site like, frankly I recommend HostGator, and within five minutes, setup a WordPress account, have a fully functioning domain, fully functioning website and actually kick around the idea for creating a site like BetaList for themselves by really building it. We’re talking about in under an hour you can build the site and see what you think of it, see if it feels right, see if you think it has legs as an idea that you can turn into a real business.
And if you go to HostGator, it won’t cost you much, won’t take you time at all to really put it up and get it up and running and see how you feel about it and see how others feel about it if you want to show it to them. And it will scale, which means that as you get more and more traffic, you will actually be able to support that traffic and you’ll have tech support, a real human being that will actually take your call and help you out if you have issues.
So, if you have an idea for building a site like today’s guest did in a different industry–don’t start copying, it’s not going to work–or any other idea, don’t sketch it out. Don’t just kick it around in your head. Go out there and build it within minutes and for under $10 you can have it up and running and see what you think of it.
All you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. Get the idea out of your head and put it out in the real world. If you go to HostGator.com/Mixergy, you’ll even get a 30 percent discount and I’ll get some credit for referring you. HostGator.com/Mixergy.
Marc, good to have you on here.
Marc: Thanks. Thanks for having me. And then great pitch–I would actually tell people to stop watching and go to HostGator and start a website.
Andrew: Yeah.
Marc: I think if you want to get something out of this interview, then go do something.
Andrew: You built the first version of BetaList. How long did it take you to build it?
Marc: A weekend.
Andrew: Just a weekend?
Marc: Yeah. Then I got featured on TechCrunch.
Andrew: Within how long?
Marc: Within the weekend.
Andrew: Within the weekend?
Marc: Like at the end of the weekend. Yeah. So, from idea to getting featured on TechCrunch within the weekend.
Andrew: And when I first saw it, I just said, “This is just a blog. This is what TechCrunch is covering?” But that’s the brilliance of it. It was just a blog. Get it up and running quickly and then iterate and improve and get it to the point where it is today. And the reason that you even came up with this idea is you had another business that had a major problem related to TechCrunch. What was the problem that you had with this other business?
Marc: We needed beta testers. We were working on an iPad application. So, we needed beta testers before we did the big launch. I figured one way to get a lot of publicity, to get a lot of beta testers is to get featured on TechCrunch.
But the problem with being a pre-launch startup and having no official product ready yet is that it’s very difficult to get publicity because technology blogs like TechCrunch, they don’t tend to write about startups that are still in beta. Maybe if you have like a major amount of funds raised or maybe if you’re like Kevin Rose, then you get the publicity or if you have like a full working product to show, then you might get the publicity.
But if you’re still building this beta app, this prototype, then it can be very difficult to get publicity and that’s why you need it. You don’t need a ton of publicity, but you need just enough to get some feedback from users.
Andrew: How many beta testers did you think you needed with this other business that we’ll talk about in a moment? How many beta testers did you think you’d need to just get a sense of whether the product was working right and get some real world feedback?
Marc: We had a pretty interesting problem in the sense that I won’t go into too much detail of the actual product because I think that’s not that interesting right now, but we needed around 200 subscribers or 200 testers. That’s what we aimed for anyway. We didn’t get anything done without setting goals.
So, we aimed for 200 subscribers and then maybe that’s optimistic, but then maybe 50 of those people become early adopters, actual users. So, that’s what we aimed for. We actually set the goal to, at the end of the month, get those 200 subscribers because, again, without setting goals, we didn’t get anything done. The end of the month was approaching and we had like ten subscribers.
So, this was a little bit over four years ago. So we had an iPad application. Back then, not everyone had an iPad yet. It was, I think maybe then it was like six months old, the iPad. I don’t really remember. But it was the first generation. We were working on this e-reader app for iPad. Back then, not everyone had an iPad. If you had an iPad, the chance you were reading books on the screen was still a little bit–
Andrew: Yeah. It was unlikely. First of all, the iPad was very big. So, it wasn’t the cuddle up and read your book before going to sleep-type of device for many people. Also, the screen resolution wasn’t that great. It was a little bit blurry, especially to somebody who already had a retina iPhone in their hands or had a Kindle.
So, I could see you just said to yourself, “Look, if I can have 200 people on my mailing list, on my beta mailing list, 50 of them might be willing to try out this reader app that I have in mind. But how do I get 200 people on my mailing list? TechCrunch isn’t going to write about me. I don’t have 200 friends who are potential users. I don’t have a big mailing list.”
And you had the exact same problem that many other entrepreneurs have and you noticed the problem and said, “I think I can come up with a solution.” And that’s why in one weekend you put together BetaList.
Marc: Right.
Andrew: You know what? Before we go into what the original idea was for BetaList, I just want to get the frame of mind that you were in. You were a guy who–were you still in school when you came up with the idea that you just talked about or just after?
Marc: It was my graduation project, along with two friends, two classmates. It wasn’t just me.
Andrew: So, you and two classmates, you had a need for a graduation project because school asked you to do it or the three of you decided, “Let’s try something together because we’re about to graduate?”
Marc: Yeah. So, school asked us or every student to come up with a project and you had total freedom. You had ten weeks. In those ten weeks, we didn’t build a full iPad application. I think, actually, when we started with the concept, the iPad wasn’t even announced. We actually were–maybe I need to like describe the product a little bit just to give some context. The idea was that during the reading of a book, you could highlight parts of the book and make notes and exchange those with other readers.
Andrew: It makes sense, right? If I’m reading–here, I’m on your website right now. The website is OpenMargin.com. The idea is that the margin of a page where people used to scribble their notes shouldn’t be kept to the person who’s scribbling the notes only. It should be open for other people to read and other people to learn.
So, if I’m looking at “Networking Awesomely” by Colin Wright, a book on how to network, and I’m writing a note for myself about what I should use, if you care about what I think about networking or if you want to see what I’m thinking about the book in general, you should be able to read it and there’s nothing secret about my notes, I might want you to read it so we can interact with the book. That was your original idea and this is before the iPad even had come out.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: But you didn’t have just that idea. You also had a second idea. In addition to *openmargin, you were working on–what was the other project?
Marc: So, back then it was called PressDoc. It’s renamed to Pr.co. That wasn’t my idea. Again, like the *openmargin one, it wasn’t solely my idea. That was the idea of the three of us. But this other company, it’s currently called Pr.co, I actually cofounded with The Next Web, which is based in Amsterdam. I’m from the Netherlands. And with Stefan Borsje, who is currently CTO and cofounder at a company called Karma. The idea there was to create press releases optimized for social web. So, back then, people often sent out PDFs or Word documents to blogs, to writers, to journalists and journalists didn’t really like those because if you get a PDF then you need to get the image out of the PDF to place in your blog post. It’s a lot of hassle. So, we figured why not create the press release of the 21st century. That’s Pr.co. It’s still running. I think it’s doing quite well. So, I didn’t come up with that. I actually was invited by Boris, one of the founders of The Next Web if I want to join that company. That’s an interesting story as well, if we have time. I don’t know if you’re interested in airing that.
Andrew: Tell me, why would he come to you? I know Boris. I’ve actually tried to get Boris to do an interview here. He rejected me a lot of times, really nice rejection. But he rejected me.
Marc: Okay.
Andrew: Look at the way I’m saying, “He rejected me. How dare he.” But they’ve been really supportive. I don’t hold any grudges against it. But the reason I asked him for an interview is he’s got a really interesting story. He’s the guy who, years ago, tried to get TechCrunch to write about him by just popping into Michael Arrington’s house unannounced. He got a relationship with them. He got TechCrunch to let him in. Their app, I think, at the time, was something that would allow you to highlight the web and keep notes.
Marc: Right. It was called Fleck. Actually, I realized recently that it’s a very similar story to BetaList because Fleck was about annotating the web. And *openmargin was about annotating books. So, The Next Web actually created their own conference to promote their own startup and then the startup didn’t really work well and now The Next Web is very big.
Andrew: And their conference, which was a European conference for tech at the time, it didn’t really exist. So, they got a huge conference. To promote the conference, I think they created a blog. And now the blog and the conference are big. And then you connected with Boris how? Why would Boris just reach out to you and say, “Hey, Marc, come and help me?”
Marc: Yeah. That’s a good story–a good question and a good story, I think. So, I think I met Boris once before this all happened. He probably didn’t remember me anymore. I followed him on Twitter because it’s an interesting guy to follow around. And at some point, he tweeted a logo he was working on for his new company he was working on. And he asked his followers like, “Hey, I’m working on this logo but I’m not really a designer. Can anyone have a look at it?” I figured it might be a great way to start a relationship with a successful entrepreneur like Boris.
Andrew: And it turns out it was a good way to start a relationship. He asked for help. You help him out and the two of you guys become friends. Okay. And that led to him saying, “Here’s what the business is,” and he invited you to come help launch it.
Marc: Yeah. So, first he asked me, “Hey, can you do the website as well?” And I was like, “I’m not going to do the website for free.” I did the logo for free for networking purposes. But I wasn’t going to do the whole website for free. So, I said, “Let’s talk.” And then he basically asked me like, “Hey, do you want to be cofounder of this new company. We already have an investor lined up.” So, back then, I was working on this graduation project as well. We wanted to like make that into a real company as well.
So, I didn’t really know what to say. Here I have this great opportunity to work with The Next Web with the funding already lined up. I would be a cofounder. I would have equity, of course. I would get a lot of experience. But then I also had been working on this other thing with two of my friends. So, I have to choose. But then I realized, “Well, maybe I don’t need to choose.” I asked both parties like, “Hey, are you okay with me doing both things at once?”
I figured I could do multiple things at the same time. I always do multiple projects. To my surprise, in hindsight, anyway, The Next Web said, “Sure, why not. You will get reduced equity, etc.” My classmates were okay with it as well. Later, I realized it might not have been the smartest decision to start two companies at the same time right after graduating because–
Andrew: Why not?
Marc: Well, actually, I’m glad I did it, I guess, because I’m happy where I am right now. But when you start a startup, especially like in the early days, the early few weeks, months, I think you can do multiple things at the same time. But once something starts growing and becomes more successful, then it actually starts asking more and more of your time. If you want to reach the full potential of an idea, then you have to give it your full as well. So, if you only get 50 percent, then you’re not going to reach the full potential. If you’re okay with that, I guess that’s fine.
Andrew: Give me an example. So, you were working on *openmargin, which is the iPad book app. At the same time, you were working on the company that’s now called Pr.co, which is a way of sending out social media press releases. Give me an example of something that you couldn’t do because you were working on both, a project that you would have jumped on if you were really focused in on one of them.
Marc: That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a specific project I can share. But for example, at some point, we went to, I think it was called TechCrunch 50 back then. It’s currently called TechCrunch Disrupt. This conference was in San Francisco. We went there with Pr.co to promote the product. And if we were there for a week in San Francisco with the Pr.co team, then I don’t have time to spend on this other company, on *openmargin.
Sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes it was a week working on this company, then a week on that company, then half a week there, half a week there. And it worked out great. But sometimes, both companies needed me at the same time. And then comes the problem because you have to choose or you have to choose not to choose and be bad at both things. So, that’s a little bit difficult at times.
Andrew: Okay. All right. You’re doing both. For one of them, you discovered this really big problem, which is that you can’t get people on your beta list. As a result, you create the site over a weekend. What did the site have to have for you to launch? What did you sit down and say, “I can’t launch without.”
Marc: So, the idea was to create this website as quickly as possible, see if TechCrunch would feature it and if they would, I would post *openmargin on it on the front page and get publicity from TechCrunch anyway. So, TechCrunch would write about BetaList, then on BetaList I would post *openmargin and those TechCrunch visitors would click through from BetaList to *openmargin.
Andrew: So, it just needed to be something that TechCrunch would write about. They’re not writing about someone’s idea where they need people on their beta list. It’s too early for them. But they would write about this new resource for startups because their audience is startups.
So, you said, “That’s all I need. I don’t need great software. I don’t need anything. I just need something that TechCrunch would write about.” And for you, that meant a handful of companies that were going to be listed and that needed people on their beta list the way that you did and a quick design. So, what platform did you use to publish on?
Marc: Just to add to that, I couldn’t afford to spend more time on it because I didn’t know if it was going to work and I was working on two actual startups at that time.
Andrew: It’s a publicity stunt. Right.
Marc: Yeah. So, it’s either going to work or it’s not going to work, but I’m not going to invest a ton of time and try the simplest thing I can do, the MVP and that’s it. So, I used Tumblr for that. I just created a simple Tumblr page. I created this very simple logo in Illustrator. I used a theme from Tumblr which I customized just a little bit. I signed up for a Twitter account and that was pretty much it. I added three to five startups I found on Hacker News and other websites.
Andrew: And you did get your own domain, right? It was BetaLi.st. So, BetaList with the with the .st top level domain.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: So, we’re talking about under $10 you launched this thing.
Marc: Yeah. In a weekend.
Andrew: You launch it. TechCrunch covers you. Do you remember how much traffic you get from that?
Marc: No. I don’t remember the numbers. I remember it was probably like in the five figures.
Andrew: So, we’re talking over 10,000 people come over to your site.
Marc: I think so.
Andrew: Easy. And for a lot of people, getting traffic from TechCrunch is pretty meaningless because TechCrunch’s audience isn’t a natural audience for their stuff. But in your case, BetaList, everyone was a good candidate for being a BetaList reader.
Marc: Yeah. Great fit. Yeah.
Andrew: But that wasn’t even your main goal at first. Your main goal was to get more people to sign up for *openmargin. You finally get a lot of traffic and you say, “Let’s add *openmargin to the top of the BetaList pile so the first thing people see is *openmargin.”
Marc: Right.
Andrew: Okay. So, you do that. How many people joined your beta list as a result of this TechCrunch push?
Marc: A few hundred.
Andrew: That’s really good. That’s more than you wanted. You just wanted 200. You ended up with more than that.
Marc: I was positively surprised by that, myself. The other startups we featured on BetaList were very happy with the publicity as well, actually.
Andrew: I bet. Here’s what I see on the original version of the site. First of all, its’ nothing but a blog. At the top, it says, “Follow us on Twitter,” us is really just you, RSS, you’ve got a link to the newsletter and you’ve got a place where people could submit their own. You say, “Submit your beta list,” but you mean, “Submit your startup to be on BetaList.”
Marc: So the mailing list startups have, which you can sign up to, to get notified.
Andrew: That’s what you mean beta list, the list that they have.
Marc: Yeah. That’s actually where the name came from originally as well because it’s a list of beta lists. Most people interpret is as a list of betas, which works as well. But that’s not actually the origin of the name.
Andrew: That makes sense. And on there you have About.me. You also have something called Ben the Bodyguard. I don’t know what that is. But you do have now, I see, *openmargin, available soon and for everything you have a screenshot of what it looks like and a couple of sentences and a link over to join the beta list, the mailing list for people who are interested in being part of the beta program.
You get all that. You’re still not satisfied. You want more from TechCrunch. So, you go to–what was it? Medium at the time?
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: And you published what on Medium?
Marc: So, this was a year ago, like three years after launching. Just to give a little bit of a backstory, people often ask me like, “How did you start BetaList? Why did you start your startup?” It’s a common question. And then I tell the story we were just talking about right now. I presented it at some meetups. People really seemed to like the story. Over time, I was able to craft it in a way that it really resonated with people. So, I told it probably like a few hundred times.
At some point, I realized instead of like retelling the same story to every person that I meet and like every time someone emails me like, “Oh, how did you start BetaList?” I wanted a definite page I could refer them to with the whole story. So, one day, I decided to write an article about it. I called it, “How I Tricked TechCrunch Into Writing About My Startup.” I posted that on Medium with some screenshots and photos and the original email I sent to TechCrunch. I still think it’s a pretty interesting story for people to read.
Andrew: It is. You even have at the top of it a photo of your notebook where you sketched out names for it. It was going to be possibly called LaunchDB or maybe you were going to call it BetaList.ly or maybe NotLive or maybe BetaLi.st, which is the name you needed up with. So, basically, what did you call this post?
Marc: “How I Tricked TechCrunch Into Writing About My Startup.”
Andrew: How you tricked TechCrunch into writing about your startup. And that got you more buzz and more people linking and more traffic. You still, to this day, get a lot of traffic from it.
Marc: Yeah, quite a lot. So, it got picked up by a lot of media outlets. Business Insider, actually, republished the article. It was one of the top stories that month of Medium. I think right now it has about 40,000 page views with a lot of people actually reading the full article and it’s quite long. So now when I meet people and they ask you, “What do you do?” “I’m the founder of BetaList.”
A lot of times, they actually know what BetaList is. They also ask, “How did you start it?” And then I start telling the story. And then they’re like, “Oh, actually, I read about it a few months ago.” So, yeah, that’s been a great PR stunt as well, I guess, writing about how I wrote to TechCrunch. It’s a little bit meta at this point. I actually thought of writing an article about how I got press coverage by writing the article.
Andrew: Yeah. Just keep going meta and meta and more meta, more self-referential.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: Right. I see where you were. What I’m curious about is at what point did you say, “This publicity stunt of creating a website called BetaList is so powerful. It’s satisfying such a big need in the community of other entrepreneurs who need people on their mailing list. It’s got so much potential. That will be my business.” At what point did you say, “That’s the thing?”
Marc: I think at the point where we got about $1,000 in monthly revenue.
Andrew: $1,000 made you say, “This has enough potential to be a standalone business.”
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: $1,000 in monthly revenue.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: What was your first source of revenue for BetaList?
Marc: The first source was an advertiser. So, the way that worked–we only feature startups on the site, of course, like early stage startups. But more like bigger companies started to notice as well. So, at some point, a bigger company, I don’t remember which one, they asked, “Hey, can we get featured on BetaList as well because we can use some publicity as well?” At first, I was like, “No, you’re not a startup, so I’m not going to feature you.” Then I figure like, “Wait a minute, they’re a big company. They might have some money saying around. They asked me something. Can I give them a yes somehow?”
I was trying to find a way to say yes somehow. So, I figured, “Oh, maybe I can make some money with this thing called BetaList.” So, I told them like, “Sure, you can get publicity on the website. We have this advertising package. Are you interested?” And they were like, “Yeah, sure. How much is it?”
And I had no idea what to charge for ads on the website. I had never done that before. So, I just came up with a round number of $99. It sounded professional. So, I said, “That’s $99.” They were like, “Sure, that’s fine.” I was like, “That’s easy money.” So, next time someone asked, “Hey, can we advertise on the website?” I’m like, “Sure, it’s $199,” like as if it always has been $199. They were like, “Okay, sounds good.” So, I kept increasing the price like that until at some point people started saying, “That’s way too much.” Then I knew to decrease the price again until I knew a few months alter to increase.
So, a lot of founders ask me, “How should I decide on my pricing?” In my experience, just start somewhere and experiment with it. Start relatively low and go up and up, up, up until customers say, “That’s too much,” or start maybe higher and go lower until they say, “Sounds good.” So, that’s the first revenue. Yeah.
Andrew: And what you did was you put their ad in stream so that it looked like all the other sites that you were listing on beta list except there was a sponsorship note to it?
Marc: No, no, no.
Andrew: No? How did you feature them?
Marc: How did I feature them in the beginning? I think the same as I do right now, as a small banner or kind of on the side. And then maybe I did a tweet as well and I have a daily newsletter where I put the regular rectangular ads in as well. So, it wasn’t designed like the other startups because I felt that would be kind of cheating my audience, if you know what I mean.
Andrew: I still feel like it’s kind of in the stream. When I’m on the homepage right now–and I don’t see it as a bad thing, no one is going to confuse it and say, “I thought this was a beta site that they’re featuring and now I’m ending up on a sponsor. What I mean is if I’m looking at the homepage, I see six thumbnails of the homepages of companies that are in beta or it seems like they’re in beta.
Five of them are actually going through a beta period and need people on their beta list. The sixth one is Recurly. They are a sponsor. If I click Recurly, I go over to their site and they’re tracking to see how many people who do what I just did end up signing up. They’re a sponsor. It says sponsor right above.
Marc: Yeah. We label it as sponsor as well. Yeah.
Andrew: I see. What I guess the difference is it’s not in the stream in the sense that it’s not underneath it in those bigger thumbnails that you have up on the site.
Marc: Yeah. I thought you were referring to the initial design, like when we first started out four years ago. Then it was really off to the sides. Now because we don’t have a side column anymore, I had to place the ads somewhere else. I figured we could post it between the other sites, kind of in stream like you say. We make sure to only advertise relevant products. So, when an advertiser comes to us, we only allow them to be featured or to be on the website if we think it’s a great fit. So, we don’t use any ad networks or stuff like that where you don’t have control over it.
Andrew: Okay. So, that was getting you to about $1,000 a month when you said, “Here is my next business?” There’s something else that you noticed was another problem people had, which was you were getting how many submissions when you felt overwhelmed by the number of people who were just flinging their submissions over and hoping to make it on your site?
Marc: I don’t remember the exact number. What I do remember is that at some point–so, in the beginning, we found startups online and we posted them on the website and we sent them a link like, “Hey, we featured you.” And then like maybe after a few weeks of doing that, people started coming to us. So, that’s when what I call the startup submissions started coming in. Initially, we just went through the startup submissions and if it was interesting, we would post it on the website pretty much the same day or a few days later.
And then every now and then people asked me, “Hey, can I get featured on the website a little bit quicker because I have this investor meeting coming up and I want to show some nice numbers,” or whatever. So, I would move them to the front of the queue and it was fine. But after a while, too many people started asking to be moved to the front of the queue. So, I had a new queue before the original queue, so people waiting to get featured.
So, that didn’t really work out. So, I came up with the idea to charge to skip the queue, basically. Not to make money, but to limit demand. Too many people were asking to skip the queue. So, how do you limit demand? Well, you ask money for it, so more money. But in this case, we didn’t ask money yet, so now we started asking $15.
Andrew: $15?
Marc: $15. Yeah.
Andrew: And what did people say when you told them it was $15 to ask to jump the line and get to the front.
Marc: Some people said, “Sure,” and other people I didn’t hear back from. So, they were like maybe not that important to jump the queue anyway. So, that was what I wanted, right? I didn’t want everyone to say yes because then the problem wouldn’t be solved. So, it worked. Some people paid $15 and got some additional revenue. But as the website grew, the amount of submissions grew as well.
So, more and more people started paying the $15 and you can see where this is going. I had to increase the price again because too many people were paying $15. So, I had this new queue before the original queue. So, I increased the price from $15 to $24, I believe, which, again–
Andrew: $29.
Marc: Oh, $29?
Andrew: I think it was $29.
Marc: Yeah. It might be $29. Yeah. We, again, decreased demand by doing that. Normally, that’s what we’d want. But we wanted to decrease demand at least for that specific thing. That worked. And then over time we increased supplies. Right now, it’s at $99 to get reviewed within five days or $199 to get reviewed within 24 hours.
I think it’s important to point out that you don’t pay to get featured. You pay to have your submission reviewed. So, if you have a quickie startup or maybe you don’t really have a startup but you want to promote some kind of scam, for example, then if you pay, you still don’t get listed, but you get your money back.
Andrew: I see. If you think it’s inappropriate, even though they paid, you’re not going to keep the money. If somebody says, “Here’s my new startup list. It’s get paid for stuffing envelopes,” you’ll give them back your money and say, “No, this doesn’t fit with the scope of my site. Take your scam somewhere else.”
Marc: Yeah. And that happens a lot, actually.
Andrew: I bet. Is that really one of the scams, the stuffing envelopes? Does that still exist?
Marc: No, that’s one. But in general, we refund quite often, like multiple times a week because people think they can get away with getting around our criteria by paying, but that’s not what’s happening.
Andrew: What share of your revenue comes from advertising versus this pay to jump the line?
Marc: So, I believe it’s around 30 percent for advertising and 70 percent for what I call expedited reviews.
Andrew: 30 percent advertising, 70 percent expedite. Really? Wow. Okay.
Marc: Again, I didn’t expect that. The idea wasn’t to create this revenue.
Andrew: Those are your only two revenue sources?
Marc: They are the two main revenue sources.
Andrew: Main ones. Well, we’ll get to the third one in a moment because you had some issues with that one, right?
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: It became a little tough. You’re building those two things up. Actually, why don’t we just jump into the next one? Bundles–where did you get the idea for doing a bundle?
Marc: People often ask me, “What software should I use for project management or what should I use for web hosting or what should I use to accept payments?” Before I started BetaList, no one asked me. But the moment I started BetaList, people thought I was this expert at startups, which I wasn’t.
But they ask me all kinds of advice, but also like which tools to use. So, I kept recommending tools for people to use. And at some point we came up with the idea to, “Why not work together with all these different tools we are already recommending ad maybe give our customers some discounts on them?”
Andrew: Weren’t you also seeing that other sites had been doing bundles both for the Apple world, people would create bundles of Apple apps and also software in general, people were starting to put those lists together, like AppSumo initially started that way.
Marc: Definitely. Yeah.
Andrew: So, you were watching them and saying, “Here’s any opportunity. Our audience really cares about software. If we could create a bundle like this, we could make a bundle, a bundle of money.”
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: And the idea is you go to these guys. Tell me if I’ve got this wrong. But you go to people like Stripe. You go to people like Amazon and you say, “Give me a free account to give to my members. I will only give it to paid members only if they pay,” I think it was $49. They pay you $49. The company doesn’t get anything except they get a highly qualified user who is more deeply engaged because they just paid for this bundle. So, they’re more likely to try Zapier for three months and then stick with it and pay than a random person. That’s the deal.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: So, your expenses are zero. Your revenue is coming in for people who are paying for access to all the software. That’s another business idea that other people should just jump on. And you had your audience of people from your mailing list.
Marc: Right.
Andrew: It sounds easy. How hard was it to get to, say, Amazon? I looked online to see what people liked in your bundle. The one that they talked a lot about was the Amazon. I think you had $500 of AWS service for people, something like that. How hard was it to find the right person at Amazon who was going to give you $500 worth of services for you to give to people who paid $49 for this bundle?
Marc: Amazon was surprisingly easy. I just looked at the Amazon website and there was this contact page for business development. I just filled out this form. Apparently they do this quite a lot with accelerators and conferences and stuff like that. So, I just said, “Hey, I’m working on this bundle. This is our type of audience. This is our reach.” That’s important, to have a reach and to have a very specific type of audience and that it was a great match for Amazon.
I think by then I might already have some other partners locked in. So, I could use them as examples, like those guys are working a beta demo as well. So, that’s some credibility there. And then like maybe like a few days later, I got an email like, “Hey, we’re interested.” Then I had a Skype call, etc. Pretty soon we had the deal.
Andrew: Okay. All these guys give you a discount code that your users can use when they go to their sites to sign up. I think I said Stripe gave you–here, actually, I’m in there. Why don’t we talk about, then, what the problem was? Right now it sounds so easy. Anyone thinks, “I can call up Zirtual and get them to do this in Treehouse.” Who else did you have? You also had Clicky and Contactually and Stripe and Fancy Hands. What was the problem that you had with this?
Marc: So, at first you still need to get those deals together, like if they don’t know about BetaList, then I can’t use my reputation as BetaList. So, I have to like explain to them like why this is a great idea for them as well. I didn’t have any previous bundles to show. For me, this was new as well. For me, this was an experiment. So, it was a little bit of a risk for the companies involved. They didn’t know what to expect.
Andrew: Right. Your users could have been pain in the butts who constantly got a lot of customer service and demanded everything because they paid $47. But they didn’t pay all these companies any money. So, they were demanding a lot of them without having been paying customers. All right. So, that’s a problem, getting these guys on board. Once they were, there was some issue that you told our producer, April. What was the issue?
Marc: So, the issue was like while we were selling the bundle and we set a limit of 1,000 bundles to sell, but after we started selling the bundle, one of the included partners–and I prefer not to identify which partner it is. You can probably find out it out if you want, but I don’t think it’s relevant for this conversation.
But they decided to step back off the deal, even though we already were selling the bundle as is with that partner included. And the reason they decided to step out of the bundle was because of miscommunication. They thought we would only sell the bundle to the startups we featured on the website. But actually, the bundle was available to anyone.
Andrew: Oh, I see.
Marc: So, that was a little bit of a miscommunication. We tried to come to a solution, but it became very difficult to reach that contact person at the business, at that partner over time. At some point, they were just unable to get in contact. I left four voicemails, etc. I just didn’t get a response. So, at some point, I had to reach out to my customers, telling them, “Hey, this bundle you bought with those 23 or 22 different services, one of them isn’t available anymore.” I don’t know if you say that. It turned green a little bit.
Andrew: Oh, yeah. What happened?
Marc: It’s a Stripe payment coming in.
Andrew: Oh, so when Stripe payment comes in to you and someone buys, you have a light go off in your IFTTT?
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: Interesting.
Marc: LIFX, it’s a Kickstarter campaign from a few years ago. It’s Wi-Fi connected light bulbs. I have it connected to IFTTT, If This Then That.
Andrew: Yeah.
Marc: So, anytime someone pays me, you see a green light flicker in here.
Andrew: Oh, that’s cool. All right.
Marc: But right now, it’s still quite light outside.
Andrew: So, it’s hard to see that it’s coming in.
Marc: But you see it down there, that’s good news. If you see my smiling every time the room turns green, now you know why.
Andrew: How much revenue comes in from that? It’s at least $200.
Marc: What are we talking about again?
Andrew: The revenue that comes in when the light goes green?
Marc: It’s the other way around. If money comes in, the light turns green. It’s not when I turn a light–
Andrew: Yeah. I’m asking how much money has to come in? What’s the minimum amount?
Marc: $99.
Andrew: $99. So, it could have been at least $99.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. Great. So, now you say, “I lost this company. I have to go and talk to my customers and tell them that it’s not there.” What happened? You were saying to them–what did you tell them you could do about this, give them a full refund?
Marc: Yeah. So, initially, I wasn’t sure if I was able to work out a solution with this service. So, at first, I just told my customers, “Hey, the code isn’t working right now, but we’re trying to resolve the situation. So, please sit tight and hang on. We’re actually working on this.” Most people were quite understanding. And we were trying to work out a solution over time, like it became quite difficult to come to a solution.
So, for me, there was no specific point in time where I knew we were not going to find a solution. That was, for me, quite problematic because I am quite optimistic. So, I was just telling my customers like, “We’re really trying to solve this,” and I was really trying to solve it. But at some point, I realized that I basically had given up control of the situation because I couldn’t force this–
Andrew: I think I know who the company is. I mentioned them at some point in this interview.
Marc: Maybe. Maybe not.
Andrew: All right. Oh, wow. I was just looking at both of my computers to try to figure out which one it is. I think I got it. If it’s the one that I’m thinking–why can’t we say it? What are they going to say? Let’s live dangerously. Let’s not hold back. Can I say who it is?
Marc: The reason I prefer not to say who it is is because I don’t know why it became difficult to reach that person and I don’t want to put that person into a difficult situation.
Andrew: Okay.
Marc: So, the person I dealt with was a very nice guy.
Andrew: And you actually know the person. All right.
Marc: So, yeah.
Andrew: If it is who I think it is, it’s a pretty substantial–
Marc: It’s a big company.
Andrew: It’s a substantial part of the bundle. It’s something that’s interesting, that enough people talked about that I can understand why you’d have some hesitation about calling up your customers and letting them know. How do you communicate this to your customers that this thing that they signed up for is gone?
Marc: So, the first few emails I sent them were about me trying to resolve the problem, situation. That didn’t work out, unfortunately. So, I started looking into, “Okay, maybe we can find an alternative service that will provide something similar.” I was actually talking to the big competitors of that service. But then I realized, “Well, if that doesn’t work out, then I’m totally screwed. So, I figured, “I’m just going to tell my customers like, “I’m sorry I’m unable to resolve the situation. I’m going to send you a 25 percent refund proactively.”
Andrew: Wait. How much percent?
Marc: 25 percent initially.
Andrew: 25% of your revenue now goes away because of this one customer, this one partner.
Marc: Only the people that had a problem with it.
Andrew: Got it. If they told you they had a problem with it, then you said, “Tell you what, I’ll give you 25 percent of your money back.”
Marc: Yeah. And if there’s anyone listening and they’re like, “Well, I want 25 percent discount,” then they will email me and they will get it.
Andrew: Don’t email him.
Marc: Actually, so that was option one. Option two was if you really want your full money back, then we can do that as well. Some people ask for that and that’s fine.
Andrew: How much money did you have to give back overall?
Marc: So, maybe I can actually tell you the numbers because I said we had a limit of 1,000 bundles to sell. We didn’t sell all of them but we came pretty close. So, that’s 1,000 times 47.
Andrew: So, let’s say roughly $45,000 if what you brought in for revenue.
Marc: Yeah. It was a little bit less. Let’s say around $40,000. I think we refunded around–I don’t know the exact number–between $5,000 and $10,000, which was quite a lot of money, but still, it was just less revenue for me. My expenses were very little.
Andrew: You didn’t lose your business. Your expenses were low. It was mostly upside revenue. You ended up with more than $30,000 in business from it. That’s a pretty sizable amount of revenue. Why didn’t you do this again?
Marc: Actually, I’ve been considering doing it again. But it’s a lot of work. I think maybe like–I don’t know how you say it English. I don’t know how you say it in Dutch, actually. I had this bad experience. I think for me it was quite, in a way, like an emotional experience as well because I felt I didn’t have control and I felt I let down my customers. So, I didn’t want to be in that position as well.
Andrew: Right, to now suddenly depend on Fancy Hands to keep your revenue in place and Fancy Hands could just dump out at any point, not that they would, but I’m just throwing out the name of one company from here.
Marc: That wasn’t the company.
Andrew: It wasn’t. I see that they’re still on. It was Rob Walling from Drip. He was in there for a 90-day free trial. He’s a jerk, right? He pulled out? No. It wasn’t Rob. Rob is a nice guy. Rob would never pull out. Rob would eat the loss.
Marc: Sorry?
Andrew: Rob, the founder of Drip, would never cut out on you like that. I know Rob. Rob would eat the loss and suffer in–actually, he wouldn’t even suffer. He would just be happy. He wouldn’t do that. I know who it is. I won’t hurt your business by bringing it up.
All right. I get it. I see it. I think you’ve got something here. The business is continuing to grow. There’s no huge tech here, though it does look like you’re coding up the site yourself, right? You’re not using a CMS anymore. No more Tumblr. You’re not using WordPress. You’re a tech guy, so you decided you’re going to build your own software for it, right?
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: Why? I’m looking at your site. You could do pretty much everything in WordPress. Why did you decide to build your own thing? I was hunting through your source code to try to figure out what you did. I said, “This guy really is sitting down and he’s coding his own CMS?”
Marc: Yeah. I started with Tumblr, like you said. That at some point I switched to Ruby and Sinatra and now it’s on Rails. And the reason I switched to a custom solution, maybe part of it is because I enjoy coding and that’s not a business way of looking at things, but I enjoy doing it. But also we did at some functionality that wasn’t easy to add, at least in Tumblr.
Andrew: For example?
Marc: For example, we have regions on the website. So, for example, if you want, you can see all the startups from the Netherlands. I guess you could do that with categories in WordPress.
Andrew: And tags, yeah.
Marc: Tags. We have relevance or related startups. I guess you could do the same with WordPress. I don’t have a lot of experience with WordPress. I think for me it would be faster to put something together on Rails than to figure out how it works in WordPress.
Andrew: I get it. Here’s one thing that’s a lot harder to do. You have a situation here where when I want to do something like submit myself to your system, you tied in with Twitter and then, frankly, now I’m on the signup page to do that. If I want to go back to the BetaList homepage, as soon as I do, you say, “Hey, you started signing up. Complete your signup before you can continue,” right?
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s not something that’s easy to do. You’re much better off creating it yourself. It is really clever. I don’t even know that I’ve described it well. Let me see how I got there. I went to the homepage. I said, “I would like to submit myself to BetaList.” I started the submission process. You connect me in with Twitter.
I got to a page that asked for my email address. I said, “I’m doing an interview. I don’t have time to enter my email address. Let’s just go back to the homepage here.” I went back to the homepage and said, “Complete your registration. Here’s what you have to do.” So, of course, I’m going to complete my registration. Hang on a second. Let me bang the keyboard.
Marc: And one thing we have on the website, which is, I think, very difficult to do in WordPress is–I don’t know WordPress too well–you can submit your startup, you upload a screenshot, a description, etc., etc. and then it’s immediately a startup object in the website, but it’s just not listed on the homepage yet. We have to review it. We have a system for that on the back end.
We can totally customize it to what we want. I think WordPress and Tumblr and systems like that are great too start, but if you want to customize it too much, you kind of start running into limitations and then at some point, it might actually be more work to implement a certain change than it is to create it from scratch yourself.
Andrew: I get that. I think what you did is right. Start off with something that’s easy to do, which is Tumblr. You can put it on over a weekend, get a sense of what you need to add and what is just superfluous and then when you start to feel like you’re reaching limitations, build it yourself. I can see you’ve added some things that aren’t easy to add into WordPress. As I hunt around in here I see more and more of those features. Now that I hunt around with that in mind, I can see more of those features that wouldn’t be easily possible in WordPress and definitely not in Tumblr.
All right. You’ve built it up. What kind of revenues are you doing now?
Marc: So, annually, we’re doing low six figures in revenue.
Andrew: What’s low six figures mean? Are we talking about like $300,000, $400,000 or $100,000?
Marc: So, for me, low six figures in theory means anywhere between $100,000 and $300,000.
Andrew: Okay. I talked to you before we started. I know your revenues, but you’re saying, “That’s all I feel comfortable revealing to an audience of strangers here.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. I get it. Your traffic–what kind of traffic are you doing?
Marc: So, that’s a good question. I actually looked it up today because for some reason I’m not too worried about traffic. But we do about a quarter million page views a month.
Andrew: A quarter million page views a month. I think that’s what I saw from Similar Web too. What about subscribers? That’s what you care about, how many people sign up, right?
Marc: Yeah. That’s a little over 10,000.
Andrew: 10,000 people who signed up to read about the next beta list that you make available.
Marc: Yeah. Most of them are subscribed to the daily newsletter. So, that’s quite a lot of emails we send out.
Andrew: I know. I can’t believe that people would do that, that they subscribe to get more and more email, but they do. You told our producer that if you could teach one class to other entrepreneurs, that class would be about how to communicate your value proposition. It’s not the same as describing what your product is. It’s different. How would you teach it and what do you mean by that?
Marc: So, by now, we have featured over 5,000 startups on BetaList and we’ve received over 20,000 submissions. So, I’ve seen quite a lot of pitches. A lot of the time, people describe their product, they basically–how should I put this? So, for example, if I would describe BetaList, I would describe it as, “It’s a list of startups,” but that doesn’t really get you engaged. That doesn’t really tell you the value you will get from it as a user or as a customer.
Andrew: So, how do you describe it instead?
Marc: So, to a startup I might say, “BetaList helps you validate your idea so you’re not building the wrong thing. You don’t waste time building the wrong thing.” So, that resonates with people. Also, it actually resonates where people actually say, “You can get 200 signups by getting your startup featured on BetaList.” That’s what engages people, but I don’t think that’s where the real value lies, but it’s a good pitch. And then we also have the other side, the early adopters. To them, I might say, “Discover tomorrow’s startups today.” That’s still a little bit unclear, maybe. I often use some of the examples of some of the startups we’ve featured a while ago.
Andrew: Like if this, then that that we talked about.
Marc: Or Pinterest. I might say, “You could discover the next Pinterest today before it even launches, before anyone else does.” I don’t know if I’m doing a great job pitching my BetaList.
Andrew: I think you are. I have to think about before an interview starts, “How do I explain to an audience what the site is about?” And I want them to understand the value prop, but I also want to understand what specifically, what concretely the product is. So, it’s a challenge. You’re saying the easy answer is not the right one. The easy answer is, in your case, a list of startups.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: Nobody cares about a list of startups. It sounds like the Yellow Pages. No one gets excited about the Yellow Pages. But if you say to someone who’s interested in reading up on startups, “Discover the next hot startups today,” then they’re more interested, especially if they’re investors or just really rabid fans of the startup community.
And again, as you said, if you’re talking to startups themselves, telling them, “Easy way to get 200 people on your beta list,” that’s exciting enough that they would get into it. I get it. You say focus on the value prop not the description. I
‘m actually looking at your homepage right now and I see Ripelist. They are focusing on–let’s see… Ripelist, on this homepage, it says, “Neighborhood food movement,” which is awful. What the hell does that mean? Is it a blog? I have no idea. But on your site, you guys describe them as–you changed their title to say, “Exchange local food in your community,” and that’s what they’re about, a place for someone who grows tomatoes in his backyard to trade with someone else who grows limes in his backyard.
Marc: Yeah. Many startups confuse a tagline with a pitch. If Nike says, “Just do it,” you know what it means because you know Nike. But if Nike was a new company and they said, “Well, just do it.” Then you don’t know what it is.
Andrew: Right. And these guys jumped to the “just do it,” but saying, “Ripelist: neighborhood food movement.”
Marc: Yeah. That’s fine if you are a big company or once people already kind of know your brand. But if you’re trying to get people to your website, then you really need to–
Andrew: I made that mistake. I used to say, “Mixergy: were startups mix.” What the hell does that even mean? It means that I picked a name that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. So, I had to try to fit the word mix into the tagline. It didn’t make sense. Then when I went to something a little more concrete, I think I went into territory that you’re still warning me against. The concrete example is, “Over 1,000 interviews with proven entrepreneurs.” That’s not enough. We need something more, like, “Learn from proven entrepreneurs,” or, “Get trained by…”
All right. I’m also curious about where you get your traffic. We talked about the size of traffic you get. But everyone seems like it’s publishing today and struggling to get traffic to their site. I looked to see where you’re getting your traffic. I don’t think I see enough of a pattern. Help me understand what you’re doing to get traffic.
Marc: So, that’s a difficult question. There is no one specific way we get traffic. I think there are few different tactics we use. So, for example, what seems to work really well is when a startup we have featured writes about their experience with BetaList. So, we started noticing that. If a startup gets featured on BetaList and they write a Medium article about it, that Medium article is great for our credibility.
People read the story of this startup that had success on BetaList and then people submit their own startup to BetaList because of that or they start subscribing to the newsletter. So, that was really helpful. So, at some point, I realized like, “Hey, maybe we can ask the startups we featured to write about us. Some already do, but if we ask them to do it, then maybe even more people do it.” So, that works quite well.
So, every time we feature a startup, we send them an email like a day later, “Hey, hope you have a great day, blah, blah, blah. You could really do us a big favor by writing an article, for example, on Medium.com if you don’t have your own blog, about your experience with BetaList. Include some data.” We don’t tell them what to write, but we give them some examples of what makes an interesting story.
Andrew: What does make an interesting story?
Marc: Data–so, showing how many signups you got, what the conversion rate was, maybe comparing it to other traffic sources as well, having nice graphs that go up and to the right. For example, if you paid the $99, whether it was worth it, how much you basically paid per lead, if you want to look at it that way.
Andrew: The $99? Oh, right.
Marc: To skip the waiting queue. And if you have an interesting story to tell about how you came up with the idea for a startup, like anything interesting story you can tell plus some data points–that generally works quite well and try to make it visual too. And I’m still amazed by it.
Maybe this is not super relevant, but last week, I posted a side project online, Submit.co, which has like a list of three BetaList alternatives, basically all our competitors in a nice spreadsheet, like if you don’t get featured on BetaList, you can try those websites. I just put it online and like it got picked up on Product Hunt and Hacker News.
I didn’t do any PR. I just posted one tweet and then someone else posted it on Product Hunt, etc. And I think anything that helps other startups get publicity gets spread across the internet really fast because people want to get publicity for a startup and for some reason, media outlets like to write about media outlets, like they like to write about themselves as well.
Andrew: Yeah.
Marc: So, anytime you have some success with media coverage, then I would suggest to write an article about that and that might actually be picked up as well.
Andrew: I see. So, one way you get traffic is by asking the people who you write about to promote you and you give them specific things that they could do to promote you. And they’re in hustle mode at that point. They’re willing to write about anything, where later stage entrepreneurs aren’t as eager to go to Medium to write about an experience and they don’t value whatever traffic would come to them.
Like my interviewees, if I interviewed the founder of–I’m trying to think of a company–One-and-Only. He sold his company. It’s now part of Match.com. He has no interest in writing a Medium post to get a little bit more hits. He’s fine. He’s an angel investor. He’s getting what he needs. But I can see how the younger guys would have more of an interest.
Still, there’s a lot I could learn from that because we ask our guests if they could help promote the interviews after they’re published, but we don’t give them some clarity on what they could do. I like that you do that. The other thing you do is you go to other sites like Product Hunt. I’ve seen you on Product Hunt a few times and you list the latest projects that you have on there.
Marc: No. I actually, I don’t do that too often.
Andrew: The bundle was on there.
Marc: Oh yeah, the bundle was on there. I thought you meant me featuring or submitting the startups we feature on BetaList and then submitting them to Product Hunt.
Andrew: That’s’ a great idea. Why don’t you do that?
Marc: I don’t have time for that.
Andrew: You don’t have to. Here’s what you do. You could actually use Zapier, which I know you like, I love Zapier. Anyone in tech should know and use Zapier. You could actually setup a Zapier Zap that would automatically list to Product Hunt anything that you list on BetaList to come from your name and have your description.
You don’t even have to do it. I know you use Zirtual and Fancy Hands. Zirtual could do it for you, not Fancy Hands. You just tell them, “I want this in here.” And then what you do is you use Zapier to post it to Product Hunt at 12:01 a.m., which gives you a leg up over other people.
All right. You’re smiling as I say this. It’s kind of a fun hack. I don’t know how long Ryan is going to let you going to get away with it. But it does actually add value to Ryan’s site. How do you feel about Ryan Hoover? Let’s be honest. Do you feel a little tinge of jealously that now he is becoming the guy and his site is becoming the site that people go to to find out about startups?
Marc: I did feel maybe a little bit jealously and a little bit worried, like maybe a year ago. They’re still growing, but when they were surpassing BetaList because I felt like–actually, a lot of media outlets were writing about Product Hunt and they said, “Here’s this website to discover the latest startups. You can discover the next big thing.”
And I was like, “Well, actually, we have been doing that for a few years.” We’ve featured startups like Pinterest and IFTTT and [inaudible 01:03:12] and About.me. So, it already exists, but maybe they didn’t know about it. I’m based in the Netherlands, so it’s a little bit more difficult to get connections.
So, I was a little bit–I don’t know what the emotion exactly was. I think at some point I realized that the market is big enough for multiple players and BetaList is focused on a specific niche, very early stage startups, whereas Product Hunt is for any type of product. They actually don’t have too many pre-launch startups on there.
So, your idea from earlier, for me to cross-post things to Product Hunt, one reason I think it might not work is because their audience is not super interested in pre-launch startups. They want something they can use right now.
Andrew: Okay.
Marc: I think that’s an important difference between the Product Hunt audience and the BetaList audience.
Andrew: And you know what? I was also wrong about Zapier. Zapier wouldn’t be the tool you would use about that. I don’t think their APIs allow other sites to submit. But you could create a macro. There are so many great macro apps that you can use to submit on sites like Product Hunt at 12:01 a.m.
All right. But the site is continuing to do well despite having competition. It’s basically you and you’ve got a freelancer who does customer support and you have a virtual assistant.
Marc: Yeah. That’s correct.
Andrew: All right. And I see you’re also doing interviews as a way of getting people to come to your site. How are interviews working for you?
Marc: We haven’t one in a while. My colleague used to do them, Jeff, because I’m not good at scheduling stuff. So, for an interview, you need to schedule it. So, the whole operation you have setup, that works very well with the pre-interview.
Andrew: Yeah. You were watching as we did it. You see that it’s tough to get interviews going because there are so many people to coordinate with. What did you see about our process for booking you and getting you through here that you liked or that you noticed that will help you?
Marc: So, I don’t know if I’m going to use what I learned because I don’t think interviews are the focus for BetaList. So, we have some interviews on the website, but I don’t know if we’re going to add any new ones. But what I really appreciated from your process is–what’s the service you use to schedule?
Andrew: I use ScheduleOnce. We embed it on our site so you don’t even see their domain name. You just are on our site and it feels like one solid experience.
Marc: So, I keep getting reminders from it, like, “Hey, your meeting with Andrew is in like a week,” then it’s in two days, then it’s in one day, then it’s in an hour. And in those reminders, you link to a page that has a nice video on it that describes how to setup your lighting, to make sure to turn off Dropbox and Backplane and all those different services. It’s actually like a nicely produced video. So, it’s interesting to watch. And then of course, we did the pre-interview with your producer. So, you know what questions have interesting answers, hopefully, so you know now to go into any boring stuff.
Andrew: Here’s an example. “Were you always entrepreneurial?” Some people have really interesting entrepreneurial stories of what they did as kids, like a lawn mowing service or selling their Lego blocks after they made them into something to their friends. You had nothing. You said, “I was always a bit of a hacker, kind of in a bad way, more like using unconventional paths to do something.” It didn’t seem like there was enough of an entrepreneurial story there. So, I said, “Let’s not bring that up.” Right.
Marc: So, you do all these things to make the guest look good, basically. Also like this, I shouldn’t be like this.
Andrew: Right. Not so much space over your head. It’s weird. People will judge you as less important if they see you look like this on the screen.
Marc: And then do I look more important like this?
Andrew: Right. Cut off your head.
Marc: I don’t know if that works. Now I don’t know where it was at.
Andrew: And of course, once the interview is over, you will get an automatic email–I don’t even have to do it–that tells you who you can contact if you have any issues with what we do. And the reason that happened is there were a handful of people who, the day after the interview is up, would Skype me and say, “Hey, Andrew, I wonder when you are putting this up. Hey, Andrew, can you hold it off until this date?” And they were sending it in on Skype because that’s the only way they knew to connect with me.
They were all doing it, I think it was like the day after. It’s been so long I forgot. So, I went back in our system and I said, “The day after an interview, here’s the big problem everyone has. I’m going to solve it by sending an email the day after, just when they have that problem.” I’m very proud of this process, as you can see.
Marc: Yeah. You should be. It’s very fine-tuned. I can definitely see that. For me as a guest, it puts me at ease as well because I know when we start, you have this list with preparations I should look at. So, I know everything is going to work out.
Andrew: Yeah. I’m going to be on someone else’s site tomorrow. I don’t know what they want me to talk about. So, I’m just going in there with this feeling of uncertainty and this unease. I know once I get there, it’s not going to be as good because I didn’t have time to think about a story that would be different or I don’t know where it’s going, so I’m always going to answer in a hesitating way because I’m not sure if this is what they’re looking for.
All right. One other thing that’s going to happen after we finish is I’m going to tell you that I’ll hit stop, I’ll thank you and then I’m going to say something like, “We’re going to really help promote this interview, by putting it up on our site, by getting attention for it in other ways. Would you help us promote it by getting it out?”
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: How would you be able to get this out? What are the methods that work for you?
Marc: So, it’s different for products and content. So, for content, I would tweet it from my personal account. I would tweet it from the BetaList account. I would make sure to include like a [inaudible 01:09:23]. Visual tweets get way more click-through. I would post on Facebook. I would include it in the BetaList newsletter. Those are all obvious. So, I’m trying to think what other ways. So, maybe the audience can come up with ways to promote this.
Andrew: Oh, I’d love to hear if somebody has a better way. Maybe it would help me with future interviews too. Sorry?
Marc: So, the audience can try to promote this interview and we can see who comes up with the most creative way to promote this interview.
Andrew: I would love to say if people have more creative ideas than this. What you said is helpful too–Facebook, Twitter, including it in your newsletter is fantastic. This is such a great interview that I would be really proud to have anyone listen to it.
Marc: If you want one more suggestion–
Andrew: Yeah. What else have you got?
Marc: I think it’s Maker Hunt that does interviews with product makers, especially from Product Hunt, but like pretty much anyone. They do AMAs, ask me anything interviews. And then they transcribe the interviews to a Medium article. So, I saw you transcribed these interviews as well and you put them on your blog, but Medium is actually a nice distribution channel as well.
Andrew: So, you’re saying if we take key ideas from this interview or turn it into a small summary and put it up on Medium, we’ll get more people to come to our site.
Marc: Potentially. Yeah.
Andrew: Interesting. I never thought of Medium as a traffic source.
Marc: Yeah. I’ve seen people use it that way.
Andrew: All right. That gave me something to think about. I’ll have to get a writer to do it. But if it produces traffic, that’s something we could do on a consistent basis.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. This has been really fantastic. If anyone agrees with me, first of all, help us by just coming up with any ideas that we haven’t thought of for promoting our interviews. I want to get the word out as much as possible and I’d love to hear your feedback on it. If you do, guys, like this interview, you can subscribe to the podcast in whatever podcast app you like.
Once you subscribe, you’ll get every single interview automatically added to your phone or other device. You’ll know that we do a membership where you get access to the archive of interviews, but if you’re subscribed to the podcast, you’ll just get to save them up and get to keep them all for free. So, go to your favorite podcast app and subscribe to Mixergy. If you’re on iTunes and you want to help out, leave a review. It will help other people find Mixergy.
And of course, the company we’ve been talking about all this time is called BetaList. It now actually has a domain name, BetaList.com. How much did it cost you to get that?
Marc: $1,000.
Andrew: $1,000, that’s it.
Marc: And three years of waiting.
Andrew: Right. Yeah. That makes sense. I guess if you would have jumped on it right away, it would have seemed a little too eager. You spent three years just pinging the guy and then you finally got it for $1,000. That’s a good deal.
Marc: I think so. Yeah. He initially asked me for $3,000. It’s a long story. I think we’re at the end of the interview. Maybe another time I will tell you about how I negotiated it to $1,000.
Andrew: What did you do to negotiate to $1,000? I know we’re over time. If you have a moment, I’ll do that.
Marc: Sure. Yeah. So, when I first started BetaList, I used a BetaLi.st domain because .com was taken. Like a month after I started, this guy reached out to me like, “I have BetaList.com. Do you want to buy it? It’s $3,000. I already have two other potential buyers and I really need the money because I want to buy a lawn mower for $3,000.” It was like very specific–
Andrew: That’s actually a really good request because first of all he’s putting you on notice that other people are interested and second, he’s telling you that he needs a lawnmower, which maybe means he’s telling you that he needs a lawn mower, which maybe makes you feel like he’s more eager right now and needs it.
Marc: It makes it feel more real, like who comes up with that story.
Andrew: Right.
Marc: But for some reason, I didn’t buy it. Literally, I didn’t buy the domain, but I also didn’t buy the story. So, I was like, “You should totally sell it for $3,000 because you’re never going to get that from me because that’s just way too much for me.” And then I was waiting for him to come back to me.
I noticed he didn’t sell it and I was waiting for him to come back to you with another offer because then I was in a strong negotiation position. But he never came back to me. So, at some point, I had to reach out to him and I was working on this redesign. I figured, “If I put this redesign live, he sees it’s turning into a real business, so the price is going to increase.”
So, I had to act and I removed the advertising prices from the website so it didn’t really look like a business. And then I reached out to him and I said, “Hey, I noticed you still haven’t sold the domain,” to lower the value. A friend of mine reminded me that I still don’t have the BetaList.com domain and I figured maybe some people are accidentally typing in BetaList.com, so I might be losing some traffic, which I knew wasn’t true.
So, I asked, “Are you still willing to sell it?” And he said, “Yeah, sure. How much do you offer?” And I asked him, “Okay, how much traffic does it get?” because that’s why I want it, supposedly. And I know it was low, so, he knew it as well, so he said, “Well, I don’t have those numbers in front of me.” So, then I said, “Well, in that case, I can offer you $1,000, but that’s all there is because this may not be much valuable to me if it doesn’t get that much traffic. It’s $1,000 or nothing. I’m not interested in negotiating,” which was a little bit of a risk.
But he said yes, so I bought it for $1,000, which for him was a nice topic because I think he bought it for $50. He saw it in some domain name forum like years ago. For me, it’s a really cheap price because by then BetaList was already doing quite well.
Andrew: Yeah. What he was trying to do with it wasn’t working out for him. I think he was trying to create a BetaList Games or something site. It just wasn’t working out. All right. Worked for him. Worked for you. Now anyone who’s out there listening can go check out your site, BetaList.com. It’s a really interesting, simple business that just keeps growing and it’s fun to see how you’ve been doing it all. Thanks so much for being on here, Marc.
Marc: Thanks for having me.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.
