Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. It is, of course, home of the ambitious upstart.
I’ve been looking forward to doing this interview for so long. If you’ve been listening to Mixergy for long enough, you probably heard today’s guest. One of the things that I love about him was that he was one of the first Mixergy listeners. I remember when I used to ask for sites for feedback in past interviews or courses, he’d always send his site in.
So, his site was always top of my mind. I knew what his site looked like in my sleep. I could almost design it if I was a designer because he was so good about sending it over. He was so good about blogging. He was so good about reaching out. So, I always knew him. I always reached out. I always rooted for him.
Then he came on here and he did a course, so I loved him even more and appreciated him even more for doing it. Just before he recorded the course, he said, “Andrew, this is private but I sold my company.” And I was like–I saw the sense of excitement in his eyes and I was excited too, but he swore me to secrecy and I take that stuff very seriously. I don’t think I’ve ever even accidentally let slip what someone told me. I’ve just been waiting to be able to tell everyone this.
So, he sold his company. But first, let me introduce him. His name is Brian Casel. He used to be listening just like you. He is the founder of Restaurant Engine, which creates and manages websites for restaurants. This is a business that the guy created after he was doing freelance, work, after he was doing all the work himself and he said, “I have to build something that scales beyond me.” We’ll talk about how he did that. I think it’s really interesting to hear him talk about it.
Today, he runs a new company called Audience Ops. It’s a done-for-you content marketing service that will grow your audience. It will grow your email list. And it will grow your customer base and they do it all for you. The company–now that he’s learned so much from his previous business–his current company, Audience Ops, is doing three times what Restaurant Engine every did on a monthly recurring revenue basis.
So, his success from before is still going strong and I’m glad to have him on here. Brian Casel is–well, actually, I should say your interview in sponsored by two companies–Toptal, which is the company that will find anyone find the next great developer or designer, and HostGator, the hosting company, and I’ll tell everyone more about it later.
But first, Brian, welcome.
Brian: Andrew, it’s an honor to be on. Mixergy has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. So, I’m just thrilled to talk to you.
Andrew: I’ve really been looking forward to this. Do you remember when you finally signed that deal to sell Restaurant Engine, that business that took so much of your sweat, so much of your time?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So, it was midway through last year, 2015, and it was a long process, as you know, going through a sales process is multi-months of due diligence and the contract process and all of that. But yeah, absolutely. I remember the closing day and a big weight off my shoulders, for sure.
Andrew: Can you say what you sold it for?
Brian: It was a low six-figure exit. I want to be a little careful because I don’t that business anymore. But yeah, low six figures.
Andrew: And then you and your family decided to do something after that, something that led us to meet in person here in San Francisco.
Brian: That’s right. Just a short while after we closed on selling Restaurant Engine, I should say I was the solo winner of that. I sold it. My family and I took a long like six, seven-month road trip across the United States. We’re from Connecticut and basically went coast to coast and lived in a couple different places that we always wanted to experience for a little while. So, we made it from Connecticut, lived in North Carolina, lived in Austin for a while, made it to California, met up with you at Mixergy headquarters, which was really cool, Colorado for a little while and now we just recently returned back here in Connecticut where we’ll be settling back down for a while.
Andrew: That whole time you were running Audience Ops?
Brian: Yeah. I started it up shortly before we left. I was very much in startup launch mode throughout our trip. It was a lot of fun traveling and exploring different places, but I was very much working remotely and all that.
Andrew: And what’s impressive is I’ve got some of the numbers here, how fast that grew. You really used everything you learned at your previous business to supercharge the growth of this business. Let’s get into Restaurant Engine. You started Restaurant Engine after you did some freelance work. What kind of freelance work did you do?
Brian: Yeah. So, I was a web designer by trade. I had dabbled with it early on as like an amateur web designer. After college, I worked for a web design agency in New York. After that, I went freelance and I was doing websites for all sorts of clients and organizations for probably about four to five years or so.
Andrew: Okay. Was there anything fun about doing that?
Brian: Oh, yeah. First of all, I still enjoy the craft of designing on the web and the mix of design and technology. I’m still very much into that. It was great to go freelance and start to work from home and kind of do my own thing and run my own business in a way, but I didn’t really even look at it much as a business, it was really just selling my time for money.
Over the years of freelancing, it started to get more and more frustrating in a way, maybe because I had an itch to grow something a little bit bigger and I was watching things like Mixergy and other blogs and podcasts and things and I started to think about, “How does this turn in to a real business that’s not completely dependent on my time?” That’s what started to spark the idea.
Andrew: I get that frustration. Brian, I’m looking at an old blog post from July of 2008, it’s called “The Freelance Life: Six Months In.” “So, here we are, six months into my new career as a full-time freelancer. I must say, I’m absolutely loving it. It’s not just the pajamas and the later wakeup time I’m talking about.” Unfortunately I get a cache version of the rest of that article, so all I have is that.
There was a period there where it was kind of fun. It was kind of good to build websites. As I understand it, one of the frustrations that you had was that you told me about a time when you tried to get a customer. This is a guy who reached out to you, who kept asking you for stuff, you kept providing more stuff, you kept doing more customer discovery. Tell me about that and what happened in the end.
Brian: Yeah. It’s hard to pinpoint one instance because that kind of thing happened again and again with many different people. I think most freelancers and consultants can probably relate to something like this. The thing that really got to me was the proposal process. Some people call it a discovery process.
Basically what happens is a lead comes your way, usually from a referral. They say, “I want this, this and this done,” or, “I have this type of business. How much is that going to cost? How much time is that going to take? What do I need?” Then I’d go back and we’d have a long meeting or a phone call or multiple meetings where I have to figure out the discovery process, figure out what are the requirements.
Then I’d go back and spend half a day to a full day actually writing up a long proposal line by line, “Here’s what we’re going to do for you or what I’m going to do for you. This is how much it’s going to cost. This is how much time it’s going to take.” Then I send them the proposal and usually it’s like a 50/50 chance that they end up signing the contract.
The next week, another lead would come in. They’re a completely different type of business and they need completely different requirements for their website or whatever they want to do. Then I go through that whole process again.
It’s draining after a while when you don’t know exactly who your best customers are because I’m working with all these different clients. Some are great to work with. A lot are very frustrating to work with. You kind of touched on that idea of scope creep, where you kind of agree to that scope and later on it grows and you have to have that conversation, “This is going to cost more.” All of that really starts to grind on you after a while.
Andrew: So, is that why you started to create things like… What was it called? ThemeJam?
Brian: Yeah. ThemeJam was probably the first digital product that I did that kind of started to get me away from selling my time as a freelancer for money. I was pretty inspired by what the WooThemes guys were doing.
Adii Pienaar, who I know you’ve had on here, I probably watched his interview with you and that’s kind of what inspired me. I saw these guys were working with WordPress, which was a platform I was working with pretty regularly, and they were selling themes, essentially templates for WordPress at something like $50 a pop and you download them and it’s totally passive.
To me, this is like 2008 or 2009, that whole concept of passive income and selling a digital product I was not very familiar with that or I wasn’t really thinking about that for myself. I was still just thinking of myself as a freelancer. So, I got really excited by that idea that I could actually build a product and sell it and create a brand a real business. So, ThemeJam was a WordPress theme shop. It never really grew very big.
Andrew: Why not? I’m looking at it right now. It’s actually still up, ThemeJam.com for anyone that wants to see it. I’m looking at the Launch WordPress theme.
Brian: Yeah. I actually sold that one too.
Andrew: You did? Oh, so it’s not yours anymore.
Brian: Last year. What happened was it remained a side project that was generating a handful of sales every month probably for about five years there. I think early on I think a few things happened, like why didn’t it become a big part of my business, but basically number one, the WordPress themes market started to get very competitive and over-saturated. Today it’s nearly impossible to break into that. I was lucky enough to be not one of the earliest but in one of the early phases of that. So, it became more competitive.
Then also I was just very inexperienced when it came to entrepreneurship and marketing and new business. I didn’t focus on it very much. I was doing a lot of different things. I wasn’t really sure how to go about marketing and growing it and all that. So, I kind of let it run and I plugged away on it for a couple of years and then after a while I became focused on other things and it became maintenance mode up until last year when I decided to just let somebody else run with it. It’s something that I had pretty much abandoned but it was still making sales. So, I was like, “Somebody can do something with this.”
Andrew: We should talk about how you sold both of these companies in a bit. Let’s continue on with the story. You’re getting a taste of what it’s like to sell something other than your time. You’re continuing to do freelance. You’re continuing to sell your time. Then at some point you end up with this idea for a business that was going to help restaurant owners. Where did that idea come from?
Brian: Yeah. So Restaurant Engine essentially started as an idea that I wanted to build some sort of SaaS on top of WordPress. At first, I did not know I was going to work in the restaurant industry. The original idea was just that I wanted to build some type of website builder built on top of WordPress because the problem that I was seeing was that for a small business owner, getting a WordPress site setup was actually a complex process.
Now, everybody watching this interview, I’m sure you’re thinking it’s a super easy process. We do it all the time, a couple clicks. But to me, what I was thinking was getting a webhost, getting a domain, installing WordPress, finding a WordPress theme, installing that, installing a couple of plugins, configuring everything the way you want it. Most small business owners don’t even know what a webhost is, let alone what WordPress is. I thought there should be a more seamless way to build a website.
Andrew: Why did you pick restaurant owners? Is it because they used to have those crappy flash sites and you just had to stop it?
Brian: Yeah, well that was definitely one. The fact that so many restaurant sites are terrible, that was definitely one thing that drew me to it. At first, I wanted all the websites on this new platform to be pretty much the same. I knew that if we were doing websites for all different businesses, we’d have to build like all this bloat into the customization options and different features and all this. So, I knew I wanted to have the same set of features for every website.
I literally made a list of 10 to 15 different niche vertical industries–restaurants, hotels, doctors, real estate agents, car dealerships. I was like, “What kind of businesses would need the same type of website again and again?” I ended up picking restaurants because it seemed like a very big market. All their websites would essentially be the same thing. They need a food menu. They need photos. They need hours. It seemed pretty straightforward, so I just kind of went with that.
Andrew: Okay. And then you wanted to get some early customers, some people that are going to test out your ideas, give you feedback, let you interview them. How did you find those first people?
Brian: Yeah. I think the first thing that I did was I put up a landing page. I don’t even remember what the domain was. It was before I had Restaurant Engine as a name. It was just a single-page landing page kind of describing what the service would be and the benefits. I put some images of great looking websites and the fact that they’re mobile optimized.
I didn’t actually create any of these websites. I just had images and, “Here’s what it is.” Something like, “Coming soon,” or, “Coming next fall,” or whatever it was. I used an email signup to get in on early access. I think I ran some Google ads for a short period of time. I built up an email list of something like 100 or 150 emails. And then to me, I wouldn’t have done everything exactly the same today.
Andrew: You would not have?
Brian: Some things I would have done the same, some things not. What I did from there was once I had a list of 150 email addresses, I went ahead and basically had the whole system built. I started investing cash and a lot of my own time into building the system that is Restaurant Engine.
Andrew: What was the system that you were building?
Brian: So, the ability for somebody to register and sign up and have their website automatically generated and added to the network. I worked with contractors and designers and then the other thing I needed to do was design the first couple of design templates for them to choose from for their website. I think we launched with either two or three. But basically once I had that list of 150 emails, I went to work on that stuff and worked on it for something like three or four months.
Only at that point once we had something that somebody could actually sign up for, I emailed the list and I invited them to use it in beta. So, there was a free beta period of about three months. So, I emailed the list, out of 150, something like 60 people signed up an account to use the service for free. Then they started using it and setting up their websites. I was doing customer support and helping them get on-boarded. Through that, we’re squashing a lot of bugs and what not.
Near the end of that three-month beta period is when I emailed those 60 people and said, “Okay, we’re switching. We’re launching to the public with paid plans. You can lock in a 20% lifetime discount to become a paying customer of restaurant engine. If you’re not interested in that, your service is going to end.” I believe it was six customers.
Andrew: Six people ended up buying.
Brian: Yeah. That was the first six customers.
Andrew: The original thing that you built, was it going to be SaaS software that just did it all where they could just pick the templates they want, pick the plan they want and then the whole thing was created. No human actually has to do any of the work. Is that right?
Brian: Yeah. That was definitely the original idea. It was supposed to be do it yourself. I wanted to build a system where people would magically come to the site and create their own website using customization tools that we give them and I spent a lot of time and energy on building those.
Andrew: So, that’s wrong with that? Why not do that?
Brian: Well, what I learned–it took me a long time to learn this, a good year or two to really start to embrace this idea that restaurant owners in particular are so busy, number one, and a lot of them don’t have the tech-web-savviness to be able to use a website builder. Some of them do, believe it or not. A lot of them don’t. Frankly, for the most part, they’re way too busy running their businesses. They don’t necessarily want to have the ability to build their own website. They just want a website done.
Andrew: I see. They’re not impressed by this whole thing being done for them. They don’t even want to fill out the forms for that.
Brian: The done for them is what they ultimately wanted. They were not impressed with the do it myself.
Andrew: I see.
Brian: What I started doing was people would come in to our live chat or people would sign up and I’m noticing that they’re not making a lot of progress. So, I would reach out to them and say, “We’ll setup the website for you.” I started offering that setup service for free. That was me doing all that setup work for free just to get them on board as subscribers. That’s how we landed a lot of our first customers.
Andrew: You saying, “You know what guys? I built this whole software. You don’t want to use it. How about I fill out all the forms for you? I make the selections. You talk to me.” Talk to you on the phone, is that right?
Brian: I did a lot over the phone. Yeah.
Andrew: Wow. That’s what you would have started with if you could go back in time, not the software that did most of it itself–you doing all the work.
Brian: If I could go back in time, I would have launched to beta users and then launched to paying customers much faster. I would not have spent so much time and money investing in building the system first. I would have just setup one-off WordPress sites, which I could do much faster than setting up this whole automated system. Then once we had paying customers, I would have maybe built out the automation.
Andrew: Okay. Let me do a sponsorship message, actually, speaking of setting up your own website. The sponsor is HostGator.com. Actually, before we started I told you HostGator is going to be my sponsor for this interview. Do you have any conflicts? You said, “No, but actually I signed up for HostGator.” You did for somebody, who was it?
Brian: Yeah. Just the other day I was helping my brother set up a website. He and his wife are starting a farm in New York, a farm business. They needed a simple website. I was like, “What’s a simple host?” HostGator is the one.
Andrew: And you went with HostGator. What did you do? Just install a WordPress site letting people know about their farm?
Brian: Exactly.
Andrew: Are they selling it? I mean are they selling anything on the farm or are they just using it to tell people about their farm?
Brian: Yeah. They’re selling a CSA program and selling the vegetables.
Andrew: Got it. What’s the URL? Let me take a look.
Brian: MoveableFeastFarm.com. And they’re literally just starting up right now, so whatever you see is in progress. They’re like in the process of launching this new place and they’re probably going to get an influx of traffic now.
Andrew: That’s good, actually, because we know that HostGator is going to keep them up even when they get extra traffic. This is beautifully done. Of course, because you’re the guy who does WordPress sites for people.
Brian: Well, we used a WordPress theme.
Andrew: I can see that. I can see how well it’s done. There is a membership platform on here. Why’d you pick HostGator for it?
Brian: It’s easy. It’s low cost for a startup like them.
Andrew: That’s really why a lot of people go with HostGator. It’s such an easy, inexpensive option. You have an idea for a website, you go to HostGator. You sign up. They get your website up and running. If you have any questions, there’s always a human being to answer those questions for you.
If anyone is out there listening to me and they want to start up their own website for a farm or an idea they have for creating websites for other businesses, maybe copying what Brian has done but doing it in a different industry, all you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy and they’ll give you 30% off.
Brian, let me ask you this. What you did was create websites for the restaurant industry. Do you think that somebody listening to us could say, “I actually think that creating blogs for speakers could be a thing,” or, “Creating websites for farms could be a thing. I’m going to take whatever Brian did and I’m going to start creating WordPress-based sites with nice themes for one other industry.” Do you think that would still work?
Brian: Yes. And I receive that same question probably on a weekly basis for the last three or four years.
Andrew: And you consistently keep saying yes, this would work. Copy the Restaurant Engine idea but apply it to a different industry and you got something.
Brian: Well, what I usually say is something like, “Yes, but…” You just really need to understand who your market is. Every industry is completely different. Restaurants think about their website in a very different way than a car dealership would think about their website or a doctor office. They’re thinking about patients and scheduling. It’s really about how they use it in their business. These days it’s not just about a pretty website. It’s so much more integrated.
Andrew: All right. Let me come back and ask you how you figured out how restaurants use this in their business. I will say to anyone who’s listening, if you want, you can go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. They’ll give you 30% off, a really good price.
If you can copy this model, you can do what many other freelancers and other designers and other web companies do, which is setup sites for your clients on HostGator, really simple, inexpensive and if you ever need to transfer ownership to your clients, it’s easy to pass it on to them too–HostGator.com/Mixergy.
Of course, if you hate your hosting company, switch to HostGator. They will even switch for you. They’ll migrate for you if you have a WordPress site. So, HostGator.com/Mixergy for that.
One last thing, when you’re ready to upgrade, they have a really cheap process, a really cheap hosting package for anyone who wants to get started fast and have a low price, but at some point, you might want them to manage WordPress for you, meaning they should upgrade WordPress. They should upgrade the plugins and make sure the site is safe and so on. They have that too. They will grow with you. Just ask them and they will give you those other packages–HostGator.com/Mixergy. I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
Brian, when you had those original customers, the 150 email addresses, what did you learn from them that you didn’t know before you started, that helped inform the product?
Brian: A lot of it was just kind of squashing bugs. There were certain features that we built–again, going back to I would not have built all these big features and automation. I would have just got it out to users quickly.
For example, one feature that I thought would be cool and thought it would be useful was a page to showcase the staff at your restaurant, like maybe the chef would have a profile and the wait staff would have a profile or the owners would have profiles and pictures and stuff. I thought that would be cool and useful.
So, we built that as a feature into the website builder. It turned out literally zero restaurants made use of that feature. We didn’t spend a ton of time, but we spent some time working that out. So, just things like that, noticing what are they not using and where is the emphasis placed and what are the things that they really care most about?
Andrew: I could have sworn that you used to do customer development calls. I could have sworn and I can’t find it. I’m looking while we were talking even and I still can’t find it. There was a period there where you did a blog post that said, “I basically use Mixergy’s interview process to do customer development, to understand what my customers want.” I thought that’s such an interesting thing to do. Do you remember doing that?
Brian: I think I did a little bit of that with Restaurant Engine. I definitely did a lot of that later on when I developed the Productize course, which I released in 2014 with my audience on my personal blog. I did plenty of calls and surveys and interviews and that informed a lot for that. Yeah. I think I did some early calls as well.
With that initial 150 email addresses, I think I got on something like five to ten calls with restaurant just asking them. This was a few years back so I’m trying to remember. I think I was asking about how are you currently managing your website? Who do you use for your website? What are the big challenges you have? What’s important to your restaurant?
A lot of the feedback that I heard was, “We hired some web guy who setup our website a couple years ago and he’s disappeared and we have no way to contact him or make updates to our own site.” That seemed to come up a lot. Or, “My brother made me a website.” All these random stories where they lost control of their own website was the theme that I kept hearing.
Andrew: I get that. You mentioned this phrase productize service, which took me a long time to understand even though I’ve heard you explain it. I remember when we sat down to talk here on Mixergy when you did a course teaching the basics of productized service. I still got it wrong when I tried to–before we started when I was trying to repeat back to you what I understand about it. I think it’s an important thing to talk about. What is productize service? That’s a direction you took your business.
Brian: Yeah, very much so. Restaurant Engine turned into a productized service. Audience Ops is purely a productized service. I love this business model, to be honest. That’s why I talked about it. I teach a whole course about it. What it is, is essentially a done-for-you service that focuses on solving one specific problem for one specific type of customer and doing it in a very systematic way that can then–when you do it systematically and in a streamlined way, that gives you the ability to scale it.
It’s not only scaling the productized service alone. It’s a vehicle to launch a scalable business which you can then leverage to launch additional products and a line of products from the same business for that same audience, which is essentially what we’ve done.
Andrew: So, a standard service would be you saying, “I’m going to help restaurants build their websites.” The customer calls you up, tells you their issues. You ask a few more questions. You then go back and create a website design for them. You show it to them. If they like it, then you build it, if they don’t you adjust until they do like it. You build it. You show it to them. You give it to them. You move on. The problems with that are there are too many different variations. There are too many different sales processes, too many people ask you–the questions and the needs are all different. What you create is all different. So, you’re basically selling your time at that place.
Productized service is, “We only do this collection of services. If you buy into one of our packages, here’s exactly what you’re going to get. We know behind the scenes exactly the steps we need to take to build this out for you.” So, you can say you want this design with these pages, our team will go through the process of creating it and giving it to you. It seems like it’s software doing it, but it’s really real human beings doing it and giving you a result.
Brian: That’s essentially it. With Restaurant Engine, we had our own website building tools which then our team used our own tools to setup customer’s websites in just a day, maybe two days. So, it made it a very streamlined process. Even though you can go and create a fully custom website in many different ways, we decided to do it in one particular way with a limited feature set by design and scale it up that way.
Just looking ahead to audience ops, which we use some software, but for the most part, it’s a manually delivered service. We can do a thousand different things in different ways, but we focus on doing one type of content marketing for one type of client. And that’s what allows us to have a system and a team and to execute on it.
Andrew: One of the challenges with Restaurant Engine is you’re not a restaurant guy or at some point you kind of get tired of being that. Talk about that.
Brian: Yeah. That was a big challenge. I think that’s one of the main reasons I ultimately decided to sell the business. Just the decision to sell the business was a tough one. That took me many months of debating and driving my wife crazy just talking about it and going back and forth. One of the reasons I decided to exit was because I didn’t have that personal connection to the restaurant industry, which meant that it was tough.
After four years of bootstrapping this thing, it was tough for me to really double-down on it again and again year after year. What I mean by double-down is do something that can take this growth to the next level, whether that’s fly out to Chicago for the restaurant industry conference or walk into restaurants and really get ingrained in that culture.
Those are steps that I just personally am not interested in doing. I didn’t really have any motivation to really get in there and build a whole audience in the restaurant industry. So, I knew that if somebody else had this kind of connection and inroads in the restaurant industry, they’d be much more successful with it. I was starting to get more network effects in the online business founders, entrepreneur circles.
It ultimately led me to decide to build a business in that world because now I can think about really going long with it, whereas Restaurant Engine, it was more of a temporary thing. I thought I’d work on this a couple years and see where it goes and not necessarily sell it. I didn’t have that thought from the very beginning, but maybe I can just work on this, put it aside, let it run on autopilot and then move on to the next thing. I ultimately decided that selling it would be–it just didn’t make sense to hold on to it because it’s so disconnected from the audience that I’m focused on now.
Andrew: Yeah. You’re really into this, I guess what Rob Walling would call the micropreneur audience really likes you. The people who are building businesses on their own, no funding but also kind of a little different.
Brian: Yeah. I’m very much in that community, for sure. Next week I’m flying out to MicroConf.
Andrew: Perfect.
Brian: Yeah. Bootstrapping, self-funding, whatever you want to call that. What interests me about that is running a business that I enjoy working on and I enjoy the team that I’m working with and the clients I’m working with and it’s profitable. We sell a service, a product that has value to another customer that’s willing to pay money for it, like that’s as simple as it gets. For me, that’s all that ever really made sense to me. The whole idea of a VC funded businesses, I see where it’s useful and where it makes sense in certain situations, that whole idea never really…
Andrew: The idea of selling something clear, something that’s clear where the transaction makes sense for both sides.
Brian: Exactly.
Andrew: I get what you’re talking about with the lack of excitement for the restaurant industry. My dad was born in Iran. He got to the US and he used to have this store selling jeans and sneakers in one of the worst neighborhoods in Queens or Brooklyn, actually. I remember these guys would walk in and my dad would sell them sneakers, but he didn’t get what they were talking about, like little references like, “Do you have a do-rag?” “What the hell is a do-rag? What encyclopedia is going to tell me what a do-rag is and how to even find it?”
He couldn’t relate to them, two different languages, literally. I could see that he didn’t enjoy going to work every day because there was this disconnect between him and his customers and he eventually closed it down.
Brian: It’s a grind.
Andrew: It’s not fun. Even if you’re making money, it just feels like a drag and you can’t get curious. You can’t get excited. You can’t feel like you even understand what your customer is going to want next because you can’t figure out what the asked you for right now. What is a do-rag?
Brian: It’s so true. I was doing sales calls with restaurant owners on a daily basis for years there. Eventually I had a sales person take over that role, but it was a big learning experience for me, for sure, but it was a grind. Talking to restaurant owners every single day to sales calls, doing customer support, it’s exciting in the beginning when you’re bootstrapping this and people are paying for a product you built, where after a while I’m doing sales calls with people, friends who I’d be talking to already about their business.
Andrew: I saw that on your website.
Brian: It just makes it more enjoyable.
Andrew: You had Allan Branch from LessAccounting, Josh Ledgard from KickoffLabs–you’d want to know those people anyway.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Is that why you gave into what you told our producer was shiny object syndrome somewhere around 2013?
Brian: Yes.
Andrew: What did that mean? What’s the first thing that took your attention away from Restaurant Engine?
Brian: Yeah. So, I think in 2013 Restaurant Engine was starting to grow to a point where I could start to ramp down my client work, the freelance web design client work stuff. That started to open up all this extra time in my day and in my week. What I should have done was take that extra time and reinvest it into Restaurant Engine and find ways to grow it even faster. Instead what I did was started getting into different projects.
I wrote an eBook about designing marketing sites. I started to kind of grow my personal audience a little bit on my blog. I got involved in–I cofounded a separate SaaS with two other partners called SweetProcess, where I was kind of doing the design work for that. That started to do fairly well in 2013. I basically sunk about eight months or so into that.
Andrew: Into SweetProcess and the book?
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Let me break that down. Why did you decide to write a book on design?
Brian: I became interested in the idea of growing an audience because I saw how powerful that can be from other people, guys like Rob Walling, Nathan Barry, Brennan Dunn. These guys have built businesses around–what I learned which was pretty clear, we see it again and again in interviews is when you can build an audience in a strong email list, everything else gets easier. It’s not just from a sales standpoint, but it’s also you have a network of people that you can learn from and figure out what are their challenges and then you can really serve a growing audience.
Andrew: I see. You mentioned Nathan Barry. Was he here the day that you were here for scotch?
Brian: No.
Andrew: It was such a great scotch night. There was a guy there who was talking about how hard it was for him to find the right developer and how much he paid the wrong developer. We then went around the room and we talked about how everyone found their developers and Nathan said, “I had this audience and I told everyone what I had in mind and I found somebody from the audience.” It really was a much faster process for the person for getting started with the person but also continuing to work together because the guy got the way Nathan thought.
Of course, Nathan and others, as Laura Roedder was recently on Mixergy and she was talking about how she got her first customers for Edgar, the software that publishes to social media from her client list and from her email list. So, I get it. The thing though is that writing a book on design doesn’t get you more restaurateurs, does it?
Brian: Exactly.
Andrew: It doesn’t?
Brian: No. It’s completely separate. That goes back to, “Okay, I’m getting bored in the restaurant industry. I want to talk to my peers. I want to talk to other web workers and entrepreneurs.” I started to write and teach about topics that I think would make sense for them. Then a year later in 2014 I did the productize service course.
Andrew: Before we move onto that, let’s talk about SweetProcess. I have the post here where you blogged about launching sweet Process. Check out this headline. “Meet My Mistress: SweetProcess.” Really, that is what it is. You’re kind of cheating on your main business with this new business.
Brian: That’s it.
Andrew: I love the idea for SweetProcess. It’s a way of organizing a system so you can pass it on to people who work with you, outsource to employees, assistants, whoever it is and frankly even for yourself. It was a great idea. You partnered up with somebody to do it. Why didn’t that go well? What happened there?
Brian: So, it is a great idea, great problem to solve, basically a tool to build standard operating systems, process, something that I’m still all about, productized services and all that. The challenge for me personally was that it was not the only thing that I was working on. I was still very much running Restaurant Engine. It’s not like I completely abandoned Restaurant Engine. I was literally 50/50 splitting my time.
So, I’m dabbling in this–I’m doing a lot of work in SweetProcess, designing the whole thing, the marketing side, the application and all that, working in that partnership and still trying to run and still trying to grow a bootstrapped Restaurant Engine, which was kind of like my baby that I had started two years prior and doing everything that I can to avoid going back to client work.
All of a sudden, after six or seven months of that, I find myself like the summer of 2013, money is getting really tight now because all these projects are doing okay. They’re not flops. They’re not failures. But they’re not like hockey stick growth. So, that makes everything feel a lot tighter in terms of where am I spending my time? Where is my paycheck coming from? Random bills come up. We got pregnant leading into 2014. It got very stressful.
By the end of 2013, I had to make the really hard decision to just strip out things that I’m committed to and I had to pull out of SweetProcess I decided to focus back on Restaurant Engine, which is the thing that I had started first.
Andrew: I want to get back to that in a moment and figure out how you got your customers and how recurring revenue helped you. First I’ve got to tell everyone about Toptal. If you’re looking for a designer, let’s suppose that you don’t have Brian on your team who can design the hell out of any website, but you want someone who can do it for you and be there and not suddenly disappear midway through the project, someone who you can depend on, someone who does the kind of work you’re looking for.
Well, I haven’t talked about this because I haven’t used them yet, but it’s incredible that when you go to Toptal, they have a team of developers, of course, but they also have these designers that are ready to go and I just talked them the other day.
These are designers that you can talk to somebody like–I’m not a designer. I don’t know how to talk to a designer. You can talk to someone over at Toptal, let them know what your vision is and then they match you up with a designer who will understand that vision who can help you articulate it, who can help you lay it out and create it for you.
That’s an amazing thing to do because I actually get so intimidated by even going to design sites because I don’t know how to express what I need. I don’t know how to tell them what I’m looking for. I can’t even create the wireframes. All I know is here’s the problem my audience has. Can you help solve it with design?
So, what Toptal does is they listen to you, they hear you out and then they go back and they find within their network of designers the perfect person. They match you up and you can get started pretty quickly. I was going to say right away. It won’t happen instantly, but it will happen within 24 hours or within a week.
The part that I have worked with them on is developers. We needed better search for our site because people kept complaining about how bad our search was. I went to Toptal and I said, “Here’s the deal. My search sucks. Here’s what people are telling me. Here’s what we built out site on, WordPress. Do you guys even do WordPress?”
I just assumed they were Ruby on Rails and much more sophisticated software. They said, “Yeah, we do WordPress.” I told them how we worked. They introduced us to someone. We said, “That person isn’t there for us. It’s not the right fit. They went back. They found someone else.
That next person was a stunner. He was so good. We signed up with him. He redid the search on our site, really did it beautifully, design-wise anyway. We looked at it, we tried to integrate it into our site and we couldn’t make it fit. We redesigned the whole site just because the search was way better than our site. We needed some way to display the results that he gave us much better than what we were doing. Anyway, you can see on our site much better what that led to–much better search, much better discovery.
It’s all because of Toptal. That’s what they’re good at. They find you the right developer so that you actually get the work you need even if you can’t fully articulate what that looks like. if you go to Toptal.com/Mixergy, they will give you after you sign up and pay for 80 developer hours, they will give you another 80 developer hours and they’re going to make sure that you are 100% satisfied with the work that you get from Toptal. Look for the details on Toptal.com/Mixergy. All right. I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
Brian, you did end up getting customers, of course. From the first 150 email address list you got some customers. You then went on and got more customers. What was the best source of customers for Restaurant Engine?
Brian: Over the long-term. It was a long, slow build. Again, not hockey stick growth, it’s the long slow SaaS ramp of death that we all hear about, right? So, mostly content marketing. That led to really strong Google search results.
Andrew: What’s one piece of content that did especially well for you?
Brian: It wasn’t really one piece. It was just the consistency of it. I think the business is still doing it, but for years I was having my team write weekly blog articles on the blog about issues that restaurant owners care about.
Andrew: For example?
Brian: Early on it was more about how to market your restaurant online on your website in social media. Then we started to branch out to how to hire strong wait staff, how to keep food costs down and educational topics. That consistency of content marketing and social media promotion and building up the email list for Restaurant Engine was ultimately what helped us get really strong standing in Google search results.
Andrew: It was SEO that was your number one source of traffic?
Brian: Definitely the number one source of customers. Where did you find us? They’ll say Google or web search or something like that.
Andrew: I see some of these articles, “How Do You Deal with Employees and Scheduling?” That’s one of the posts. “How Long Should Your Menu Description Be?” That’s another post. “Why It’s Important to Ask Customers if Anything is Confusing?” “Opportunities to Automate Your Restaurant,” “Five Ideas to Help Your Employees Get Better Tips,” “How to Improve the Content on Your Restaurant Website Homepage.”
All right. That was it? What was number two beyond that?
Brian: Just going along with content marketing, I was also doing guest article writing on restaurant industry blogs where I would submit an article there and they would link back to Restaurant Engine. I dabbled in some PPC stuff, retargeting. Retargeting helped quite a bit. This went along with switching to a productize service model was in terms of the website, we started to focus less on signup now and create your account and more on request a consultation. That’s like the main call to action.
Andrew: Interesting.
Brian: So, all traffic, like if you want to become a Restaurant Engine customer, you basically have to request a consultation, fill out this form, it goes into our system and in the early days, I would call you up that day or the next day and do a sales call with you. Later on we had a sales team who would call up and then we’d essentially close all the customers over the phone. What would happen is we would call over the phone, do the sales call, sometimes actually sign them up over the phone, do the sales call, sometimes sign them up over the phone, other times follow up over email where they can go and sign up online.
Andrew: I was actually going to say let’s talk about how behind the scenes you automated your business so you can actually keep delivering consistent service and not go nuts and not have to hire people who are expert designers for every single customer. We talked about that in that productize service course that you did on Mixergy.
So, I’ll just move on to the final step of the business, which was selling it. You went to FE International, whose founder actually did a course on Mixergy about how to sell your business. Why did you pick FE International to sell your business?
Brian: I was introduced by them from a mutual friend who I trusted and had worked with them before. So, that’s essentially what happened. I had heard Thomas–I think it was Thomas who did the course with you, right?
Andrew: I think so. Yeah.
Brian: I had heard him on a couple of podcasts before. So, I was a little bit familiar with him and their company. Then I had the introduction from someone who’s worked with them before. So, that was a pretty good referral. Then I had a consultation with him. At this point, when I reached out to Thomas, I was not set on the idea of selling the business. I just wanted to figure out if I was going to sell it, what would it look like.
Andrew: I see.
Brian: He was really helpful with me in that call. He laid it out. I had never sold a business before. I had no idea what kind of numbers we’d be looking at, what the process looks like, how this would even happen.
Andrew: Did he give you a sense of what it could sell for?
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Really?
Brian: He gave me like a range of what to expect.
Andrew: Was it accurate?
Brian: It was like dead-set accurate. It ended up selling for right on. It was in line with what I had kind of expected or kind of hoped for. He was right on.
Andrew: Was there a bidding process?
Brian: Yeah. I was really surprised at how fast we had offers. So, after I spoke to him, I thought it over for a little while and then we decided to move forward for sale with them representing it. I think we had something like three offers within the first week or two. I think there were a lot of other questions and inquiries. They do a good job of handling those. Then they kind of pull me in when needed.
But I think we had three offers and then we went with one for basically accepted LOI, letter of intent, went through the whole due diligence process and then that kind of fell apart in the last minute contract stage. And then we kind of went back, fell back to another buyer.
Andrew: Why? What was it about the contract that got them to move away or you to back away?
Brian: Yeah. There were some sticky negotiations where they tried to pull a lot of technical loopholes that were not originally agreed to. There was that. I just had the sense that they would not be–they didn’t have the best people or infrastructure to take on this type of business where it’s so technical and exists on the web. They weren’t really web people. I thought that it would require too much of my time post-sale to help train them and help them get up and running with it.
So, ultimately we fell back to another buyer who was a much better fit. He had a background in web design and development. He had also ran a previous SaaS. So, he was pretty well-suited for it. We went with him. It was a long process. We did due diligence for two months with the first guys and another two months with the next guys. So, it was a long, stressful, grueling process.
Andrew: That’s the hard part, when it falls apart after you’ve really committed yourself to doing it. It looks like you sold to Drew Adams. Is that the guy?
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Adams Technology Ventures. That’s what I see here on their about page. Then you took some time to travel but you also started a new business. The idea for the new business, where did it come from/
Brian: Yeah. I talked about how I did content marketing with Restaurant Engine. That wasn’t me writing the articles. That was a team of writers and my team on Restaurant Engine doing the weekly email newsletters, the social media promotion, posting those articles, editing them and getting the images right. That whole system was happening without me working on it. Again, I didn’t want to be writing for the restaurant industry, I just wanted content marketing to be done.
So, that became the idea for Audience Ops was to offer this plug right in, this content marketing service that can relieve the founders from having to write articles themselves or relieve them from either hiring a full time employee to run their blog or hire a freelancer, which normally requires a lot more management and oversight.
Andrew: How did you know that other people would be willing to pay for that and they’d be willing to pay that price for it?
Brian: A lot of the conversations that I’ve had at places like MicroConf and through my blog. I started to teach and talk a lot about what I was building with Restaurant Engine in terms of content marketing for Restaurant Engine. So, I’d get a lot of feedback and questions and inquiries, like, “That’s a pain that I have.”
I literally came up with the idea for Audience Ops while I was at MicroConf last year, 2015. I remember the day after MicroConf I was still in my hotel room for a couple hours just furiously writing notes and concepts and next steps and planning.
Andrew: What do you mean? What is it about MicroConf?
Brian: I was having conversations there.
Andrew: With other people who said, “I’d love to have this system that automatically gave me new articles and just did it for me and got me new email addresses from it?”
Brian: Yeah, blogging and doing content marketing, doing it effectively, building a list. It’s such a painful process for most founders. So, that’s what started to get me thinking. I knew I wanted to do some type of productized service. That too allowed me to think bigger in terms of I can solve a bigger problem if I’m doing it as a productized service with a higher price point and I can put more resources into it. It’s still very focused. We work with like B2B software companies and we do weekly blogging and promotion.
So, I started to figure out a streamlined process for that. The other thing about how did I know this would work? The other thing about launching a productized service is I don’t have to build any software. I have to launch it. I had a landing page. You don’t even need a landing page, but I built one anyway. It was less than two weeks. I think within 30 days after I got home from MicroConf, after the concept for the business, within 30 days I think we had three paying customers.
Andrew: Where did those three paying customers come from?
Brian: I sent a warm email out to about 20-25 friends, contacts in the industry. I said, “Hey, here’s the new thing that I’m working on. I’d love any feedback or ideas. If you or anybody you know you think would make sense for me to talk to about this, I’d love an introduction.” I think a couple of those contacts became clients or they introduced me to someone.
Andrew: I see. You said that you did some customer interviews before you launched it. Do you remember what you learned from those?
Brian: Well, Audience Ops, that happened over a long period of time, just talking about the content marketing stuff with Restaurant Engine. So, it wasn’t so much customer interviews. I guess you can say the early sales calls I did for Audience Ops double as customer interviews. I had previously done a heavy amount of customer research when I built the productize course on my blog.
Andrew: I see. That’s when you researched what people want to learn and put that into your productize course.
Brian: Yeah. Going back to 2014, I had started to build a list. I had something like 800-900 people on my email list at that point. I knew I wanted to do something around productized services because I was starting to build my business that way. I put out a survey to my audience to hear what are you working on? What’s the most challenging thing that you have on your plate right now about your business model?
Then I got on maybe 10-20 Skype calls. I recorded those. I would go back and listen to those calls. What I’m looking for is their language. So, I started to hear things like, “I’m sick of selling my time for money,” or, “I’m only earning an income if I’m at my computer working.”
Andrew: I see.
Brian: I heard that kind of sentiment a lot. That’s the argument for building a productized service or building some sort of business that can grow and not require you sitting at your computer.
Andrew: All right. Let’s get back to Audience Ops for just a little bit more. You told our producer that you got within nine months $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue and that after you emailed your network, you got to $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue. My sense is that part of the reason why you grew so fast is that you increased the price, where before you were charging tens of dollars a month. Here you’re charging $1,000 or $2,000 a month, right? So, you get to really focus in and all you need is a handful of customers to do that well, 30 or less. Am I right?
Brian: No doubt about it. Yeah. Higher price point. You can definitely grow much faster in terms of revenue. What that does–this is why I like to talk about productized services as a vehicle to making this leap from freelancing into building a real business is that you can grow revenue very quickly and that gives you the cash flow to buy your time and focus and double down on this business and really leverage it and go forward.
Andrew: How did you know that people would be willing to pay that much? I don’t know that I’d have the guts to charge that much. I think if I came up with this idea, I’d say, “We’re going to do $200 per article. Let’s give them three articles, $600 a month.”
Brian: To be honest, to my surprise, most of the feedback that I got early on and that I still get today is that the prices are too low, that businesses would pay more.
Andrew: How’d you come up with your price at first?
Brian: Pricing is like an art and a science. I started to do some kind of back of the napkin math in terms of what my costs would be and that took a little bit of learning with a team and writers and what not. But I essentially picked a number that I thought in my mind what types of businesses am I going after? What kind of price point do I think would be palatable to a B2B SaaS business of a certain size?
Then I basically came up with two plans which are very simple–an article every week or an article every other week. You can manage the budget that way. I don’t know when this is publishing. At some point we might increase the price. We’re developing a line of different products for later this year.
Andrew: It does look like it. Now that I see old archive images of the site, it does look like you increased your price. You started out charging $500 for an audience roadmap or $500 for launch service or the third option was $1,000 a month for the audience growth, which includes email automation, audience research, content upgrades, weekly blog posts. So, you were doing even more blog posts for $1,000.
Brian: Exactly. That’s also what goes into the price. We’re not just writing the article. We’ve got a writer. It goes to another copy editor. We’ve got a graphic designer. We write and send your email newsletter. We send social media posts. We go onto Quora and answer questions to link back to your post.
Andrew: Oh, really?
Brian: We’ll syndicate them to Medium. We do the whole end-to-end–the thing is if you’re going to do content marketing, it’s not just about writing blog posts. It’s not going to be effective that way. You have to promote them. Now we’re developing a part of our service where we’ll run retargeting ads for you to get people to come back and subscribe to your email list.
So, that’s the thing. If you’re a small software company, you really need to hire someone full time to work on this stuff. Just a solo freelancer is not exactly going to cut it unless you as the founder are going to spend time doing all these other things. So, we wanted to build it as an end to end service and price that accordingly. But again, we’re still kind of–we’re only about 11 months in now. We’re still kind of playing with it.
Andrew: It’s profitable.
Brian: Yes.
Andrew: It’s a great idea. I really like the idea of having somebody else do the content marketing, not just content marketing for the sake of content marketing, but the goal–and this is what you have right at the top of your homepage, “Grow your audience, grow your email list, grow your customer base.” So, it’s not just you’re going to create content. But you’re doing it towards a goal that has business impact, which is going to get me more email subscribers, get me more customers.
All right. Let me close out with this. If we were to use you for Mixergy, what would you do for Mixergy at Audience Ops?
Brian: That’s a good question. I think you’re a bit of a unique case because Mixergy is very much you, Andrew. So, if you were to start a branch of content for Mixergy that’s a little bit more business advice or startup advice and it’s not necessarily coming from your voice personally, it’s coming from the Mixergy brand, that would be somewhere where Audience Ops would kind of fit in.
Andrew: And you’d write the content, put it up on different sites like Medium, put it up even on our site.
Brian: Yeah. It would start on your site where we’re basically publishing articles to your blog and then we can send those articles out to your email list as newsletters, send social media posts to promote those articles, syndicate them to Medium, go to Quora and kind of link back to them and just kind of get that piece up and running.
Andrew: I like how you even do content upgrades, which is such a good way to grow email lists. Sorry?
Brian: That’s another piece that we’ve been doing where we’ve built our own plugins too, the content upgrades plugin, which allows you to do like a one-off bonus download to gather an email address on a blog post. So, these are like the byproducts of our own tools that we use for our clients. We’re now selling those as WordPress plugins. We’ve got another one now to put up a landing page.
Andrew: Oh, I see. The connection is breaking up. But I can see that you do that now. So, you’re also selling landing page software. You’re also selling software for content upgrades. Content upgrades are when someone says, “Here’s how to hire the right person,” and then on the bottom of the article about how the hire the right person, there’s a link you can click that says, “Do you want the checklist for hiring the right person?” You click the link, it asks for your email address, as soon as you enter your email address you get the checklist and the site gets your email address so that they get to grow.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. I see how you’ve done that. You’ve got a whole site at Shop.AudienceOps.com with that. All right. Thank you so much for doing this. Congratulations on all the success.
Brian: Thanks, Andrew. This is awesome to be on.
Andrew: I feel like you’ve hit your groove. You’ve found the market of people who you love spending time with. You’ve proven to them that you know what you’re talking about there. You’re not just coming out as some guru. You’ve started a business using this process you’re teaching. You’re teaching it and you’re selling this new software and new service you’re excited about. You’ve come a long way. It feels good, huh?
Brian: It does feel good. There were many years there of bootstrapping it. It’s tough. I don’t want this interview to sound like it was so easy and it happened overnight. Most of us out here doing this self-funding, bootstrapping, it’s a grind. It takes a lot of learning things the hard way, which was definitely the case for me. But yeah, it does feel good. I feel like I’m in a pretty good place now and I feel good about where things are going.
Andrew: The site is AudienceOps.com. That’s the new site if you want to check it out. Of course, my two sponsors are HostGator.com/Mixergy or Toptal.com/Mixergy. HostGator, of course, for webhosting, Toptal for hiring the top talent.
You might have heard me talk about courses that we did with Brian. One of the things I do at Mixergy. One of the things I do at Mixergy in addition to interviews is I bring these incredible entrepreneurs on to teach one thing they’re especially good at. Brian is especially good at and has this great course on how to do productized service. I said, “Brian, can you teach an overview of it? Can you teach us enough people can use it?” Then if they want to sign up for the full course, they can go to your site and sign up. You came on. You taught it. It’s one of a couple of things you taught here.
That’s what makes Mixergy great. It’s people who are really doing it that come back and get to teach. I don’t want the guy that just wrote a book on it that’s like a book report on how something is done because he studied other people doing it. I want the guy who’s really doing it, who’s suffered to do it, who’s figured it out, who’s doing it quietly and not enough people know about it. Brian, you’re one of those people.
Anyone who wants to sign up for that, that’s all part of Mixergy Premium. You can find it at MixergyPremium.com. I’m grateful to you, Brian, for doing it. I’m grateful to you all for being a part of Mixergy. Thanks, everyone.
