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. You know that already. What I say a lot of times in my intros is that what distinguishes Mixergy from so many other new business podcasts that have come on since I started is I always keep real entrepreneurs in mind. I know I can broaden the audience if I go after the wannabes.
I know I can broaden the audience if I go after the same kind of audience that goes to YouTube to look at guys lean up on their Lamborghinis, right? That’s a big audience. But that’s a very empty audience to go after. I intentionally really dive deep into how an entrepreneur built his business because I know that real entrepreneurs don’t want to see the leaning up against the Lamborghini or boast about how I quit my job and started a business.
They want to hear clearly where did the idea come from, how are you adjusting the product, how are you hiring? Where are you getting your traffic? How are you getting your customers? Real detailed stuff that the guys who are looking at those YouTube videos just would be bored with. In fact, you just get into deep numbers the way I do here on Mixergy and they’d be bored.
What makes me especially proud is when I have somebody on here like today’s guest who’s been listening for a long time, somebody who is actually there with you listening to these interviews. I’m really proud to have this guy on. His name is Brian Moran. He is the cofounder of SamCart.
What’s SamCart? You know how everyone talks about all the different pages on your site and how you can improve them and really dramatically build and grow your business? Well, the truth is, there’s actually one page that might have more impact than all of those combined, one page that if you make one change to can actually 4x your sales, says today’s guest. And that’s the page where people actually pay.
So, today’s guest created a page, site, a business that helps you really focus in on that one page and have it have big impact on your business. The company is called SamCart. It’s an ecommerce shopping cart that actually helps small businesses grow their businesses. I’ve actually heard that some people are doing nothing but that one page to grow sales. I invited him here to talk about how being in the content space led him to build an audience that he could sell this product to and how it helped him find the product that he should start selling and creating.
This interview is sponsored by two great companies. The first is a brand new one for me. It’s GoToWebinar. I’ll tell you later on why I use them when I have webinars. The second sponsor is a company that’s going to help you hire your first developer. It’s called Toptal. I’ll tell you more about them later.
First, Brian, welcome.
Brian: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Andrew: Brian, I was looking at you as I described your business and I decided I couldn’t keep looking at you because I couldn’t read your face. Am I describing your business right or not? If you saw me hesitate a little bit it’s because I felt like maybe I got it a little bit right and you were excited and a little bit wrong and you wanted to correct something. What did you think as I intro’d you?
Brian: No, you got it. It’s pretty simple and straightforward.
Andrew: All right. The first business that you had or the previous business taught people to do what?
Brian: How to market on Facebook. It was a site called Get 10,000 Fans.
Andrew: Where did that idea come from?
Brian: That idea came from a mentor of mine. I got my start, graduated college in early 2009 and was an All American baseball player in school. I thought I’d be playing baseball right now at 29 years old, not running a software business, but that didn’t work out. So, anyway, long story short, I landed a boring desk job back home here in the DC area working for the government. Anyone working for the government probably knows you’re not excited going to work every day normally.
One thing led to another and I started my first website, which was a site TrainBaseball.com, where I created baseball hitting videos and eBooks and coaching programs and all kinds of content to sell. It took me a while. I think it was over a year to make my first sale. It was a struggle. It was a big time struggle. Luckily I found a mentor, a guy named Paul Reddick who runs a site called 90 MPH Club, which is a pitching site. He’s as good of a marketer as he is a baseball coach. He’s one of the best I know.
I met with him after a couple of months of kind of nurturing a relationship with him. He was helping me with my business. I showed him what we were doing with Facebook to grow our baseball site. We were running Facebook ads. This was like right when they came out. We were using our fan page to drive traffic. We had over 10,000 fans in our first 30 days. So, we just kind of figured out this one traffic source that was really, really working.
I don’t know whether he gave me this advice to get me out of his niche or because he really thought it could be something big, but be basically said, “Dude, you’ve got to get out of the baseball niche and start teaching people how to do this stuff on Facebook because no one knows how to do it yet.”
That was it. He came up with the name on the spot. One of the gifts he has is naming stuff. He helped with the name for SamCart. But yeah, six weeks later I came home and had Get10000Fans.com, started making courses and it just blew up pretty quick. So, that was how we got started with that.
Andrew: How much revenue did it earn? Actually, it’s still running right now. How much revenue did it earn in 2015?
Brian: 2015, so that’s last year. We are so focused on SamCart revenue, I don’t even know that off the top of my head. It was to be probably like $1.5 million, maybe $2 million. I should know that. It shows you how much I’m worrying about that business right now.
Andrew: How much of that was profit, roughly?
Brian: Most of that should be because all of our costs are kind of on the SamCart side–the office, employees. So, probably the only big cost is ads, which we probably spent like $500,000 or $750k, somewhere around there, so less than half. But that’s kind of the scoop.
Andrew: There were no affiliate sales or anything like that.
Brian: Oh yeah, affiliates. Duh, yeah. It’s not a big part of our business, but a lot of our big promotions are. So we probably paid another couple hundred grand for affiliate commissions.
Andrew: I heard you were doing so many webinars, so many conversations about 10,000 Fans that at some point you just got sick of it. Is that right?
Brian: No. I didn’t get sick of it. Facebook, they evolve constantly. It’s what kind of helped that business out. Every time Facebook would change something, we would create a new course. They’d change their ad platform. We’d have to update our courses and give us a reason to release new versions. So, I’m not sick of it. It still works. We use Facebook to promote SamCart. I just four years of creating info products about one subject can essentially get old.
One of the big reasons we created SamCart was I kind of wanted that next challenge, that next struggle in my life. I wanted something hard that I had to kind of break down and dissect and reverse engineer and figure out something new, kind of a new business type that had a higher ceiling. That was one of the big reasons we sort of decided to move on a little bit.
Andrew: Brian, how much of the idea for SamCart came from you experiencing a personal pain versus you looking around saying, “What’s the next thing I could create that’s not the same line of info products?”
Brian: It was all of it. We originally built SamCart not even with the plan to sell it. I always had in the back of my mind that if we make something great and it works for us, we might as well share it with our community. Our community was small business owners like me.
Andrew: Sell it to your community, right?
Brian: Yeah. We built it for ourselves. But SamCart was finished–I’ve got to get my years right–a couple years ago right when we brought out on our first developer. We got it built in a couple of months and we used it internally without letting anyone know it even existed.
Andrew: All right. Let me pause there because I want to understand how you got the developer, I want to understand how you work with them. But first, I need to understand the problem. What is the problem? You were generating revenue.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: You got somebody to actually hit the buy button and go to a buy page. How did you know that was even a problem for people?
Brian: So, the problem for us was it took too long to do all this stuff, to setup our checkout process, which for us, we were using Infusionsoft at the time and their order forms are terrible. They’re just bland, generic. They don’t convert very well. So, we had to pay developers and designers.
Andrew: How did you know they don’t convert very well? They don’t give you data, do they?
Brian: We had our own internal data that we paid developers tens of thousands of dollars to setup analytics and track all of it. So, we knew we had a problem.
Andrew: I see because you knew how many people were clicking the buy button and how many people were making it to the confirmation page.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: I see. And you knew that those numbers could be better.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: So, with Infusionsoft, you could hire designers to change the look of the page, to put logos on, testimonials, etc. You did that, right?
Brian: Yeah, we did. That’s how we ran our business for like a year, every time we released a new product, it would take a month of basically effort on someone’s part, whether it was designer, developer, me to create these checkout processes, both the checkout page and all of the one-click upsells. That was the bread and butter of our business.
So, it was just taking too long to develop all of those things. Every time we needed a new product, we thought if we had pieces of software, that we could say checkout page, upsell, upsell and it was done and it was effectively that easy that we would save a ton of time, save a ton of money and then hopefully one day be able to sell this thing.
Andrew: What was the problem with Infusionsoft for upsells?
Brian: You have to hand code them. It’s probably the most difficult task that I’ve ever experienced running a website was making a one-click upsell work Infusionsoft. I’m pretty tech-savvy. I’m a not a developer. I can code a little bit. But you have to buy your own URL. You need to put a cert on it. You need to take their order form and dissect the code and kind of hijack a couple of things and change URL strings. It was a nightmare.
Andrew: I had no idea it was that tough. And that explains why we have never done an upsell with them because it just seemed like another headache to get involved with. Paul Graham talks about how these schleps, these really tough parts of everyone’s lives go unattended to because we’re blind to it. Schlep blindness, I think, is what he calls it–the idea that we all have to wrestle with this. We just accept it because we’ve been wrestling with it for a long time. So, we don’t notice that it’s a problem and therefore an opportunity to be solved. How did you notice that this was an opportunity even?
Brian: I noticed it because of my own experience. That was the biggest driver saying, “This should not be this hard.” There were new tools coming out at the time like LeadPages that made creating landing pages so easy. I thought someone needs to apply this same philosophy to what’s arguably more important to your business, the checkout process and the post-checkout process when you can actually turn someone into a repeat buyer, whether it’s an upsell or a follow-up sequence or whatever.
So, I got sick and tired of building these darn things out and then they break because code was wrong or whatever the problem was. Yeah. It was just my own frustration was–I knew even if it didn’t solve any other problem, even if it didn’t increase our conversion, to be completely honest, it would save us two weeks off of every promotion because we would have to spend those two weeks designing pages and coding them out. It was my experience essentially that is what kind of showed me there was a problem there.
Andrew: What mic are you using?
Brian: The Blue Yeti.
Andrew: Okay. Watch the tapping on the desk. It seems to be picking up on that.
Brian: Oh, okay. Got it.
Andrew: I see the problem. I actually completely understand what you’re saying, that if you just pay money and build software for yourself, then it will save you time, which is just worth it on its own and you know how much time you’re wasting. So, you have a sense of what it’s worth to you. Let’s talk about finding the developer.
Our mutual friend, Nathan Barry, was in here the other day. He talked to another entrepreneur who came to scotch night who said that he spent a ton of money finding a developer–excuse me, a ton of money paying a developer to get the job done and couldn’t get the result that he wanted. We’re talking about how a non-developer could hire. How did you as a non-developer hire somebody?
Brian: I went to college with a buddy of mine. We kind of parted ways after school. That was 2009. Now we’re talking 2012-2013 when we started needing this developer. The first thing we did that kind of made us think software was going to be a good idea was we actually white labeled a tool for Get 10,000 Fans. It was a fan page creation software. That kind of showed us the power of the recurring revenue model. We sold to that to our Get 10,000 Fans community and it was one of our biggest drivers of revenue.
Andrew: Who created that?
Brian: A company called Webs.com. The tool was called Pagemodo. It was bought by Webs, which is actually based in DC right down the street.
Andrew: I know them. I interviewed the founder of Webs. Who built it for you?
Brian: Was that Haroon?
Andrew: Yeah.
Brian: Yeah. He’s an advisor to SamCart. He’s a good friend.
Andrew: And he’s local in DC, right?
Brian: Yeah. He’s a fantastic guy.
Andrew: By the way, anyone who’s listening to this should go and watch or listen to that interview on Mixergy. His process for creating Webs is just so brilliant, including the fact that he had a list on his site, which I saw on Archive.org of all the features from back when he launched. I asked him, “How did you build all these features?” He said, “We didn’t.” I said, “What if someone signed up and they complained.” I forget his response to it but I do know why he did it. He wanted to see, “Does anyone even care about these features before I build them?” He just advertised they were there.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: What I’m wondering is who built this product.
Brian: Yeah. This guy I went to college with–actually, in college I didn’t even know he was a developer. He was a political science major. I found out later through a mutual friend of ours that he was coding for a live chat company in the area and he had a startup on the side. I took a look at his startup and the software was really nice and he was just a one-man shop.
So, he had an eye for design. He was a very good developer. He was the only one I knew. And I thought, “This was my guy. He’s very smart.” So, it took us almost a year, but we convinced him to essentially do a side project for us, showed him we were serious because we gave him a lot of money to do it. We did kind of a rev share and slowly but surely we convinced him to jump ship and help us out.
Andrew: This was the Get 10,000 Fans app that he built for you?
Brian: Yes. He started building a small little tool. We called it Facebook Conversions. It just tracked your conversions from ads back before there was such a process for doing it.
Andrew: Yeah.
Brian: So, once that worked out really well and he had fun working with us and kind of saw the opportunity was big, we said, “Look, we have this idea for SamCart. It’s something we want to put all our time into and we need you.” It worked out.
Andrew: How about communicating with him? When you can’t give him exact direction for what to code, how do you guide him so that what he creates is in line with what you want and what your customers are going to buy?
Brian: I think it actually helps. For me, I don’t care how it’s built essentially. I care what the result is. So, I know what features I want. Hopefully you find someone who’s a decent communicator. If you have kind of a hermit of a coder, it’s going to be a little bit more difficult. We were lucky to find a coder that had a great personality and he liked to communicate and he was very good at communicating.
Andrew: How did you communicate? Did you draw out on a piece of paper what you were looking for or did you tell him in words?
Brian: A combination of both. I’m very visual. So, I’m always drawing. You can look at my whiteboard here and it’s a tough angle, but everything is visual for me. So, I’m very kind of ingrained to do it that way. I think that probably helped him. But he was local. So, we’re in the same office. We’d meet up. So, it’s just a lot of communication in all kinds of formats.
Andrew: All right. It seems a lot that that’s where first developers come for people, the old friendships, the old relationships.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: So, you built that out. You understood how he worked. It was time for you to create this new thing for yourselves internally with an eye towards eventually selling it to other people. What was your arrangement with him? Was it again a rev share?
Brian: For SamCart? No. At the time, his startup had got bought out. He was kind of enslaved to this other company who was an agency essentially. So, we basically became a client of the agency. So, I was just paying their hourly wage. The idea was the eventually he would leave. His contract would run out with them and then he would come be a partner. Long story short, he’s actually not with us anymore. He got snatched up by a huge company up in New York called LivePerson.
Andrew: Oh, I know them.
Brian: Yeah. We got away without–we didn’t have to give equity to anybody, any of our developers. Our developers now are partners. But that original guy, we just kind of paid them hourly because that was how the deals sort of worked out.
Andrew: The first version that you created for yourself, since you know that it was going to be built for other people, what change did you make to it so that eventually it could be sold to others?
Brian: The big thing was just scalability to make sure it didn’t have to just handle our traffic or our customers, that it could handle hundreds or thousands. So, that was a big one. Everything else, to be completely honest, it was almost the same. We were our customer. Everything we built was for us and we knew most of our customers were very, very similar. So, we didn’t have to change a whole lot.
Andrew: What was supposed to be in that first version?
Brian: What was supposed to be in the first version? I’ve got to remember going back in time now. Basically, one of the things we did change, our first version we just wanted one template, one checkout page design is what we call these templates based on–that was the template we liked, that we used for all of our stuff for Get 10,000 Fans.
So, to go public, we knew we needed more. So, built a couple more templates. We built the ability for people to customize them and change colors and put their logos in just so you get a lot more opinions when you start bringing in thousands of customers, they don’t want to just use the same one that we had.
More integrations–we were at the time just using Infusionsoft and AWeber. We were using Stripe for our payments. That was all it had. We knew when it had to go–
Andrew: So, the first version was only Infusionsoft and only AWeber?
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: No Stripe?
Brian: I honestly… Yes. It had to have a payment solution. So, we weren’t using anything but Stripe at the time.
Andrew: Oh, right, because you couldn’t use Infusionsoft’s payment system. They won’t allow you to do that.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Which frankly, I hate that system. Nobody likes it.
Brian: Yeah. You can use Stripe with Infusion with us.
Andrew: Right.
Brian: But yeah, that was why we built it that way. It was just AWeber, Infusionsoft and Stripe for us version one and we added everything else under the sun when we started letting customers in.
Andrew: One of the things I always admired about your process was that you guys even included split testing, which I wouldn’t have thought of for a sales page because there’s so little traffic that goes to it. Did the first version have that?
Brian: Did the first version have split testing? No. It did not. We would still split test. We would just create multiple products that were essentially the same thing and use another third-party tool to redirect the traffic and split it evenly. But no, there was not native split testing for either the checkout page or the upsell process.
Andrew: Okay. So, you built it for yourself. Any issues with the first version?
Brian: Sorry?
Andrew: Any issues with that first version you guys internally used?
Brian: There are always issues. It was never anything catastrophic. It never broke or cost us a bunch of sales, but there are always little bugs with every piece of software. The integration doesn’t work or just little things that are kind of nagging.
Andrew: All right. Let me do a sponsorship message for a company you know and you now are going to be using. It’s a company called GoToWebinar. The interesting thing about them, Brian, tell me what you think of this–they’re asking me to just send people to just GoToWebinar.com, no unique URL, no way for them to figure out if I’m actually doing a good job for them.
Brian: Yeah. They should probably change that.
Andrew: Doesn’t that blow your mind? And Sachit kept telling them, “Guys, Andrew is going to kill for you.” These guys, they’re paying really good money. We charge more than our competition. I know we do, even per listener we do. I want to prove to them that we’re going to kill it for them, but they don’t care. They don’t care to track it.
So, I’ll tell you why I use GoToWebinar. I know you’re starting to use them, so maybe I can hear why you use it. There are a few reasons. I noticed that more and more people are now–first of all, let’s go back. Webinars sell, right? You’ve noticed it. I mean you, Brian, not the listener. You’ve noticed webinars sell, right?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew: Webinars are an incredibly way to sell. You get to talk to people in real time. You get to actually display the products in a way where people are actually going to watch to the end. I sometimes watch these five-minute vlogs that people put on YouTube. A minute into it, I check out and it’s only five minutes. But if it’s a live webinar and you know it’s going on live right then and there, you can’t tune away because you can’t come back to it later. So, it gets people’s attention. If you know you can ask questions it will get people’s attention. So, webinars actually sell.
Here’s why I like GoToWebinar. First, they make it easy for people to login with mobile devices. I’m noticing more and more people aren’t sitting at their desktop to check out a webinar. They’re sometimes even driving and listening in. Often they’re sitting in a coffee shop working. Sometimes they’re away from the office where they can quietly concentrate on it. They’re doing all that on tablets and on phones. So, I want a webinar software that actually just accommodates them. If they have nothing but a landline, GoToWebinar will even work.
I also like GoToWebinar because here’s my personal ultimate best feature of it–I don’t like webinars where it’s just a disembodied voice showing slides. I like to see the person who’s hosting the webinar. So, I’ll broadcast my video. But I feel awkward just me talking to the audience. So, I’ll bring somebody else on, sometimes someone else from Mixergy, sometimes it’s people from the audience.
What I love about GoToWebinar unlike other solutions is I can just kind of poke you, Brian, if you’re there and say, “Hey, do you want to come on camera with me?” If you click yes, you’ll come on camera with me and we’ll chat for a little bit. Really helpful, especially if you’re going back and forth with me by text or voice, to just have you on and have you ask questions right away.
I also love the polling features. If you want people to tell you, “Is this next thing that you’re going to talk about useful or not?” You could create that poll with GoToWebinar. I’ve got so many other features. Really easy to use. Works on lots of programs. Good quality audio and video. They’ve got that HD Faces.
I’ve got a bunch of testimonials here that I could read, but I don’t care to read those because I don’t know those people personally. So, let me ask you, Brian, why are you doing webinars? Why are you using GoToWebinar?
Brian: Well, for us it’s a perfect fit with SamCart because it’s a piece of software. So, it lets us share our screen and actually show people what this software we’re trying to convince them to invest in looks like. Even outside of software, we use it for Get 10,000 Fans, especially when we’re selling our higher ticket items. It’s just a more personal experience trying to sell something. Even if you’re not selling, it’s a great tool to communicate with your team or with anybody else. They convert. There are not many other techniques for selling online that converts better than a live call.
Andrew: Yeah. And that does it. You’re right. Sharing screen is incredibly powerful. Sharing one app on your screen is helpful. Sharing another app if you need to is helpful to keep switching around. Here’s where you go. Here’s a weird thing. I’ve heard Leo Laporte do spots for them for years and it’s kind of confusing because he says, “Go to GoToWebinar.com.” So, I’ll say visit GoToWebinar.com.
Please, if there’s any place in there for you to say who referred you, just say Mixergy. Let’s settle in on Mixergy instead of Andrew Warner and hopefully they remember to come back and do another sponsorship message. They’re paying a ton of cash here. I’d love for them to know that it paid off. And I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
Was there any one feature, Brian, coming back to your story, that you looked at your first version that you built for yourself and said, “How do we not add that? This thing stinks?”
Brian: So, one thing that we wanted, you mean, that we didn’t put in?
Andrew: How about that, yeah.
Brian: One of the things that we didn’t have at the beginning was split testing for your upsell sequence. That was one of the things we knew would add a lot of money to our bottom line and we didn’t have it at first. It was just a more advanced feature and we were more worried about speed and getting the software out in time.
So, that was a big one. But most of the core things that we wanted were in that first one, but that’s one looking back, it’s kind of sad doing the numbers on how much money we probably missed out on because we weren’t able to split test different offers on the back end.
Andrew: Why is split testing an upsell something that you’re remarking on and not split testing the shopping cart page?
Brian: Well, at the time when our first version was out, we had already split tested the design of that checkout page in the years past when we were spending tens of thousands of dollars every promotion we ran to build these custom checkout pages. We would split test designs then. So, we had sort of perfected what we call the perfect checkout page, which is the core template behind what powers SamCart.
So, the upsells, what we’re split testing more for an upsell is the actual offer, what we’re selling, not so much the look at feel of the page itself. It’s trying to figure out once someone buys product A, what is the best fit, the best upsell or cross sell or down sell for that new customer. That changes for whatever you’re selling on the front end, if that makes sense.
Andrew: Yeah.
Brian: It’s something you’re constantly split testing, even if you find the perfect checkout page that converts across the board, your upsell is always is always going to change based on what you’re selling on that front end.
Andrew: I see. That makes sense. What did you use to test your shopping cart before SamCart?
Brian: Well, way back in the day, when I first got started we used PayPal. There wasn’t really a way to check anything.
Andrew: I mean A/B test it.
Brian: Oh, to A/B test it, yeah.
Andrew: You said that you ran a bunch of split tests on your shopping cart.
Brian: Okay. You mean when we were custom coding these ourselves?
Andrew: Yeah.
Brian: We would use–like Visual Website Optimizer was kind of our go-to. We still use them today, fantastic tool for split testing any kind of page. It worked really well for us.
Andrew: Who designed it? One thing I’ve always admired the hell out of with you guys is the design, it’s just beautiful. Who designed it?
Brian: Our first designer was me. I kind of figured out early on how to do some stuff by myself. I guess when things got more serious, when we started doing more serious revenue, we had money to spend, we found a guy overseas in the Ukraine. I think we used Dribbble to find him. He’s been with us for probably going on four years now. So, he’s done a lot. But we just hired our first in house guy for SamCart who started three or four months ago who’s fantastic.
Andrew: All those sales pages, the first ones that I used to see, that was you?
Brian: Yeah, that was all me. Well, me with the help of Google and awesome sites like Iconfinder. I did my fair share of swiping cool graphics from anywhere I can find them. I was a resourceful designer, I guess you could say.
Andrew: I’m surprised. I don’t see anything in your history that says you were a designer.
Brian: Well, I was never an actual designer. I never got paid to design.
Andrew: You just kind of figured it out by winging it and seeing what the numbers looked like after each test.
Brian: Yeah. I and I always enjoyed design. It’s something I appreciate. I admire great designers. It’s one of the skills I wish I was better at. But I’m glad there are people out there that spend their life doing it so I don’t have to.
Andrew: So, it’s time for you to launch it for the public. Before you actually get it out to the public, do you test it with a few people? Do you make sure this is actually needed by them?
Brian: Yes and no. We tested it with ourselves for over a year. We ran a couple million bucks through it. The months before we got some close friends on there and put another couple million bucks through it to make sure it was stable. But I sort of knew the desire was there. It’s one of the things I kind of trust my gut on probably more than I should. I should do more surveying and testing and all that kind of stuff. We were using it for almost a year.
We got tons of messages from our customers saying, “What is that? What are you guys using it? It looks awesome?” We would drop hints and show screenshots of this thing that we built for ourselves. We got a good amount of feedback saying they wanted it. So, I could have been more empirical about it, but it’s one of those things I’d kind of like to trust my gut and say if I want it, chances are a lot of other people will.
Andrew: Who are some of the people who tested out the first version, some of your friends?
Brian: A good buddy of mine, Will Hamilton. He runs a tennis website. Adam Linkenauger runs a basketball website. It’s called FreakAthletics.com. My mentor, Paul–a lot of sports guys.
Andrew: Did they give you any feedback as they used it that helped shape the product?
Brian: Oh yeah. This was two and a half years ago. So, to remember the exact feedback each one of them game would be kind of tough.
Andrew: Even if it’s just one thing that stands out for you.
Brian: One of the biggest things that they would find are little bugs or little things that are in the wrong place that we didn’t notice because every customer uses the software differently. So, I could be in there spending 20 hours a day in SamCart running my business but I’m not using certain features because they just don’t apply to me, like something like coupons, adding a coupon to a checkout page. We just don’t do that in our business. So, we never really tested that feature, but other people would. To be that second and third and fourth pair of eyes was the biggest thing, just to find little stuff like that.
Andrew: I could see that, how discount codes, for example, are helpful.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. So, your first customers came from where?
Brian: They came from our list from get 10,000 fans.
Andrew: I figured. How many people do you think you had at the time on your list?
Brian: Probably 120,000.
Andrew: That’s pretty sizeable. Do you remember what your sales were the first time you launched it?
Brian: We put 400 people in the first week.
Andrew: 400 people in and what were you charging per month?
Brian: The special discount for them was $79 a month.
Andrew: $79 a month. That’s really sizeable. How did you get that number?
Brian: We probably just did what we normally do. Yeah. It was basically a Jeff Walker-style product launch where we created a bunch of vides to hype up the product. We let people know a month ahead of time that hey, something big is coming, just kind of drop hints along the way to get everyone super excited and then created a great set of videos to kind of explain what it is and why they need it, how it’s going to help them and then have a special offer for just a week and it got a lot of people to take action because they saves a lot of money by jumping in and that was that.
Andrew: I do see a lot of people who used to sell information switch to software and have a much easier time both coming up with the product idea and also getting the first set of customers. Several people who I’ve interviewed–Laura Roeder was not doing software when I first interviewed her. Today she’s got Edgar.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Clay did not have LeadPages–actually, yeah he was just getting started with it. Today he’s got LeadPages doing really well. Nathan, who wrote “Authority,” now has got–why am I blanking on the name right now?
Brian: ConvertKit.
Andrew: ConvertKit. He got customers. And he got his developers from his audience. It’s just dramatic how different it is. Frankly, on the higher end, I see Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot who started with content first and then software afterwards. I’m sure if I spent a little time, I could come up with an even bigger list. It does seem to really help out.
Brian: Yeah. I think it’s that natural progression where we sold content for so long, teaching people how to grow their business and we thought, “What’s next other than the next course?” Hopefully you can keep coming up with great content to sell and it’s going to keep moving the conversation forward and helping people continue to get results or you can just create a piece of software that does it for them.
For us, so many of our people were beginners. They were basically newbies when it came to marketing online. They were in the idea stage or they just had a couple people on their list and it’s tough. There are a lot of things coming at you at that stage. I remember it very well. It was a rough time trying to figure out the best way to get started.
So, software gets over that and says, “As long as you apply it, everything I taught you before is built into this tool,” whether it’s a ConvertKit or a HubSpot. So, I think as a content creator, it’s kind of the ultimate solution where you create these courses and people hopefully go through them, but as we know, everyone goes through every piece of content.
Andrew: I could see people creating whole businesses off of just your products, like landing pages from LeadPages feed into a mailing list that’s run by ConvertKit that leads to conversions that happen on SamCart.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: $79–that’s a really gutsy number to come up with. How did you come up with $79?
Brian: Well, we knew our go-to price retail was going to be $100 a month, so, $99. So, we thought we want to discount it and get these people to take–
Andrew: How did you know $99? How’d you know $100? Frankly, a lot of entrepreneurs, me included, I wouldn’t think $100 made sense. I would think it’s a lot of money. Or I would charge per use and I would charge even more so that when people have a launch they’d use it. But $99 every month, $79 every month–that sounds like a lot. How’d you come up with that and have the guts to charge it?
Brian: So, the $100 came from my experience–the first shopping cart we ever used was 1ShoppingCart. Good tool. Not a lot of features, but it got the job done. That was about $130 a month for us. For us, it was probably one of the cheapest tools we used in our business. It made sense. So, we knew the ROI was there. If we could help people double sales, then $100 is actually too cheap.
So, we knew we thought let’s go right for the slice of the crowd they’re going after who are willing to pay $100 a month. We knew hundreds, probably thousands of people were using them. So, we knew that was our base, where we wanted to start. We could have gone cheaper. But honestly for us, we wanted to build something really great.
Andrew: I’m sorry. I’m looking at 1ShoppingCart’s pricing page, they have a $99 a month option too–excuse me, $19 a month option.
Brian: What does it come with? I haven’t looked at their pricing in a while?
Andrew: Let’s have a look. It is hard to know. My memory of all these shopping cart sites, these web 1.0 or 1.1 shopping carts is they just stink and they do charge $100 and I’m still paying for one of those years after I’ve stopped using them because you still have customers who have recurring payments going through them and you can’t get out.
Brian: You and me both.
Andrew: I can’t tell what’s actually in the $19 a month plan. It just says, “Looking for something a little less expensive to get started? $19 a month.” I can’t even tell what’s in it. There’s an asterisk that leads me to the bottom, doesn’t tell me what’s in it. It does tell me that it’s a monthly billing cycle. All right. I guess what you’re saying is we were paying $100 to 1ShoppingCart. A lot of other people are paying $100 a month. That’s the place. That’s the field we want to play in.
Brian: Yeah. Honestly, we’re going to move up the scale price-wise pretty soon with SamCart with kind of a business-level plan and an enterprise plan where we can deliver even greater value. But for us, we’ve kind of wanted to be seen as the higher tier cart to use. Our design is better. We convert better. You’re just flat out going to make more money if you use us versus a PayPal–
Andrew: I like how you sat up. Anyone who’s watching this should just rewind. You sat out differently when you were talking about comparing yourself to them. I get it. You’re right. Whenever I see people use–I don’t have any relationship with 1ShoppingCart, so I can say this–1ShoppingCart just stinks. It stinks on ice.
I can’t believe when I see SaaS guys use 1ShoppingCart for their shopping. It just stinks. First of all, they spend so much time creating their whole site, why are they not creating even the shopping cart page? Second, if you’re not going to create it, why go with 1ShoppingCart?
Brian: Yeah. It’s a good question.
Andrew: I admire the business. I’ll have the founder on here and I’ll be super excited by what the founder built because I think they’ve got deep penetration. They’re making really good money. But as a product, no way.
Brian: Yeah. That’s kind of where we saw ourselves fitting in. We thought if someone can’t really justify $100 a month, it’s probably not the customer we want right now.
Andrew: By the way, you know who owns them now? I just looked it up. It’s Web.com that owns them.
Brian: Yeah, that’s right.
Andrew: I see. But that’s different from Webs.com. Webs.com is the one that we were talking about earlier–two different businesses. All right. I’ve got to tell everyone about another sponsor. Let me tie it into your experience, Brian. What I like about what you did is you figured out what you needed internally and you just had it built. A lot of times, we all would save money if we build our own internal tools to grow our companies. But you first of all realized that. And second you said, “I bet there are other people who could use this tool.”
Now, what’s keeping a lot of others who are listening to us from doing that is they don’t have developers. They don’t have a friend from high school, college or wherever that they can tap into and say, “Hey, can you build this thing for me?” They don’t need to. They’ve got something I would even say better, no offense to your friend, but a much better resource. It’s a company that can actually introduce you to your developer, be there as the intermediary to help you out but also let you go and work together as two old friends. The company that I recommend for that is a company called Toptal.
You guys probably have hear me say this so much that you’re sick of it, but I think it’s important that you understand what worked for the SamCart guys, how Brian internally built a tool for himself and then made it into a product that he could sell to others. If you need an internal tool built, maybe not with an eye to sell to people, but hopefully with an eye that you’re eventually going to sell it the way that SamCart did–go check out Toptal. In fact, go check out Toptal.com/Mixergy.
When you do that, they’re going to give you 80 free developer hours. They’re going to get you on a phone with someone who can help you think through what you need internally, what that tool is, what language you want to code in based on where you want to go, how many hours you’re going to need that person for. Will it be just a few hours? Is it just a project, part-time, full-time?
Some people work with Toptal developers for months and months and months. All that is taken care of for you. You don’t even have to do the paperwork to pay their taxes and everything. Toptal will take care of it for you. As a person who’s hired people, I hate all the paperwork involved in hiring and frankly even with firing.
Toptal takes care of it all for you. Just go to Toptal.com/Mixergy. When you do that, they’ll give you 80 free developer hours. They’ll give you that guarantee that you will be happy. Go sign up and show me what you built.
Cool. Brian, you don’t have any experience with them. Have you heard of Toptal before?
Brian: Just from your podcast.
Andrew: Right. Yeah. You’ve heard me talk about it enough.
Brian: I think you were saying people probably heard it 100 times. I’ve probably heard it I don’t even know how many times. But now I actually want to go check out the site and see what they’re all about. It took probably six or seven times.
Andrew: Now that I tied it into an interesting example. You’ve been listening for a long time. You said you heard one of the latest–actually, at this point right now today that we’re recording, it is the latest. It’s the interview with Brian Clark. What did you get out of that interview with Brian Clark, the guy from Copyblogger who’s now doing Rainmaker?
Brian: What I kind of liked–it’s always fun seeing people in your shoes, especially the people like him who I kind of see as so far ahead of us, what they’ve done at Copyblogger and then with Rainmaker has been awesome. To kind of see that they’re going through the same decisions we are–whether to raise money, who to talk to, what’s life going to look like after you raise or if you don’t. So, yeah, just kind of hearing someone else’s brain turning on some of the same questions for me is a lot of fun. So, I like interviews like that.
Andrew: And you’re fully bootstrapped.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Everything is coming in from the revenues you’ve earned. We talked about where your first orders came from. I quickly did the math that said $79 times 12 months in a year, $948 a year per person. But that’s not where lifetime value ends up shaking out, right?
Brian: Yeah, you hope so.
Andrew: What ends up really happening in your business? Do people have one launch, they sign up and they leave? Do they sign up, their business doesn’t do so well and then they leave? Is it a long-term commitment? What’s going on?
Brian: Yeah. It’s definitely long-term. We don’t have people come in, sign up, create a checkout page for a launch and then leave. Normally these people, they’re hoping they’re making money every day. So, even if that is their business model, they’re not going to take their checkout page down because now they have absolutely no way to generate revenue even if it’s on accident.
So, yeah, we’re in it for the long haul with these people, whether they just kind of are just starting out and have a blog and a small email list or they’re a seven or eight-figure business who is selling products every single day and they do more advanced stuff, like customizing the design of their pages and split testing and all that kind of stuff.
Andrew: How long does someone stay with you guys?
Brian: Well, that’s still climbing. We’re so new, these customers that we put in, it’s probably only been, I guess, coming up on two years. So, we have a huge chunk that are still in with us. So, we don’t even know what our average is yet. Last time I looked, lifetime value was up over $1,700 per customer. It climbs every month. So, we’ll see kind of where that peaks out and hopefully we can keep it going on the right track.
Andrew: What do you use to measure lifetime value of a customer?
Brian: A couple tools. One of our favorites is Baremetrics because we use Stripe. We have an account with almost all the other Baremetrics-type tools like ChartMogul and first officer and some others.
Andrew: What are some of the other ones? I’ve been considering trying others.
Brian: Yeah. So, there’s one called ChartMogul. And then there’s one called FirstOfficer.
Andrew: What do you think of those in comparison? Anything that you don’t get from Baremetrics?
Brian: They’re all good. I love Baremetrics. Their design is gorgeous. All of them have different numbers. So, nothing is an exact science. Everyone calculates these things differently. So, it’s kind of cool to see different opinions on where your business might be at, even if it’s slightly different. They all have different features.
We use all three of them, to be completely honest. Baremetrics does cool stuff like set your goals for your revenue. ChartMogul has really good different charts and spreadsheets and stuff that really give us some cool insights. So, I like all three of them.
Andrew: You tapped your list. Where did you go to get the next batch of customers?
Brian: Right back to our list. We go to that list all the time.
Andrew: How do you go to it all the time without exhausting them about this one product enough already?
Brian: That’s kind of the trick, I guess. You try to reframe it as a different conversation. So, it doesn’t seem like you’re just hammering the same thing over and over.
Andrew: How do you do that?
Brian: Well, one of the beautiful things about software is we’re constantly creating new features. So, one of the things we’ve been doing recently that’s really been working well, we’ve actually doubled our user base in the last six months because of this one tactic. Basically every time we push a new kind of core feature, something really cool that’s worth bragging about, we will essentially do a mini-product launch over that one feature.
So, for example, three weeks ago, we wrapped up our new PayPal integration. So, we’re now officially the only shopping cart on the planet that you can accept PayPal and use a customized checkout page, keep the buying experience on your website, so on your SamCart page, they never have to go to PayPal and you can use one-click upsells. So, we store the credit card on file. You can basically with one click sell other products without ever sending them back to PayPal.
So, that was a really cool thing that our developers spent a long time building and we knew our marketplace was really going to like it. So, we thought well, let’s go right back to that list again. We have a list with SamCart now too that we’re building. So, we kind of go to both lists at the same time.
We created a huge promotion around it, kind of hyped it for a couple of weeks, kind of created three different videos kind of explaining what it is and why they want it and demoing it and then having a special release period where they can basically what we did was if they signed up during the week, which was our, “Hooray, PayPal is here,” week, they get two free months of SamCart. So, a 60-day trial, plus a bunch of other bonus trainings and marketing material and some other cool stuff. We put 300 people in, in a week.
Andrew: So, what did the email sequence start with? Do you remember the first email?
Brian: What do you mean?
Andrew: What’s the first email, the first message that goes out to them?
Brian: It’s probably something along the lines of, “Something Big is Coming…” is probably the subject line and the tone of what we’re saying and then we’ll send people to basically an opt-in page, like a coming soon, give us your email to basically check out this new feature we’re about to release.
Andrew: Okay and then what’s the next one?
Brian: The next one would be we just keep getting people to opt-in to that coming soon list, different ways, whether we’re posting on social media or wherever. But the first big kind of announcement is video one in the three-video series that we’ll use when we do these product releases or feature releases. Video one, most of these are probably like 10 to 12 minutes long but that one is kind of telling the story. It kind of lays the groundwork for why did we build what we just built and what’s the story behind this PayPal feature.
Andrew: What’s the story behind the PayPal feature that’s so compelling that people would want to read it?
Brian: It’s really my story. When I first got started online, all I used was PayPal and I realized it was killing my business because I couldn’t do everything I can do now with SamCart and it cost me a ton of money and we ditched PayPal and we went to 1ShoppingCart and then we were on Infusionsoft.
For four years, we didn’t even accept PayPal. And people thought we were crazy, like you’re turning away all these customers because we don’t accept PayPal. We were actually making more money because we would only let people pay with credit cards. The reason was one-click upsells and all kinds of stuff that if we accepted PayPal, we weren’t able to do those things.
But now, the story turned because we brought PayPal back into our business and it’s helped grow sales even more than they were before. That’s kind of the short story that we kind of use.
Andrew: Got it. And then what’s number two and three?
Brian: Number two is basically the transformation video. So, we show what my life or their life as the customer would look like before this feature versus after. So, it’s all about results and demoing the feature and the benefits behind it to kind of show them their own story. So, it’s kind of my story, their story and then the actual sales pitch video.
Andrew: And those three videos only go to people who gave you their email address or does it go to everyone?
Brian: Yeah. It’s kind of a mix. It’s mostly to the people that just opt-in and tell us they’re interested. We’re not going to hammer these people every single day on something they’ve told us they’re not really that interested at all.
Andrew: I see. So, you go their main list. You find a way to let them know there’s something brand new.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: The people who are interested in this brand new thing enter their email address or I’m guessing they also could just click a link and then they go into a separate list and once they click that link and they’re in a separate list, that’s when you tell the full story via video.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: You guys use Wistia for video like I do. Why do you use Wistia?
Brian: It’s super easy. Again, I’m a stickler for design.
Andrew: So is YouTube. YouTube is easy. You can actually create design around it.
Brian: Yeah. But it’s not pretty. Their player is pretty ugly and Wistia gives you all kinds of cool reports and numbers on how your videos are doing. I like their player better, even if everything else was the same, I think their design kind of fits our style and looks better on our pages than a kind of check looking YouTube.
Andrew: Do you keep going back to your main list, the fan list?
Brian: We always do. Yeah.
Andrew: Did you read out outside of it? What’s the next thing that you did outside of your own personal list? By the way, not to take anything away from it–the fact that the first group of people came from your list, huge. The fact that you found a system for making every new feature into a show almost that would also get new customer–incredibly useful for us to know. But did you go outside of your list to get new customers?
Brian: We have. We haven’t done it at scale like we did with Get 10,000 Fans. When we were at our peak with Get 10,000 Fans we were probably spending $2,000 to $3,000 a day in Facebook ads or just any other pay per click traffic and doing a lot of affiliate marketing. We haven’t done a ton of that with SamCart now almost by design.
This is the year all that’s going to kick in. Literally after we hang up this phone call, I’m back to work in making that happen. Our goal is in the next couple months that our ad spend is going to ramp up. Our affiliate program is going to ramp up and we’re going to really start to branch out in a way that we haven’t up until this point.
Andrew: I see.
Brian: We’ve done a little bit of it. We spent probably $50,000, $60,000 on Facebook ads so far. We have some affiliates promoting. But we really haven’t stepped on the gas because we’ve been so focused on the product and making sure it’s ready to go in that it’s at a point where we really want to tell the world about it, not just keep it small and just to our list.
Andrew: You mentioned affiliate programs. It got my mind on how what so many people tell me I should be doing is doing an affiliate for the products that I’m talking about in an interview. I might as well. We’re talking about it so much, I know people are going to sign up. But as much as like money–I like money at lot–it just doesn’t feel like the right way to do it. It feels like it taints the interview and makes people feel, I think, makes them think pretty reasonably that I’m promoting the product, that I’m talking it up instead of digging into your story.
Brian: Yeah. I guess I’m the wrong person to ask because I don’t have the podcast interview. I commend you for making that call. But I wouldn’t blame you for putting affiliate links on there either. I’m a capitalist like anyone else.
Andrew: I’m putting it out there just so the audience knows I recognize what they’re saying.
Brian: I think we all know that and we all respect you and that’s why we are loyal listeners and I think it plays a big part.
Andrew: Thanks. You know what? I’m now looking for the challenge. So far, everything seems look such a happy go lucky story. I’m looking at my notes and we asked you what was your biggest challenge? You said, “Going from an info product business with a lean team to a products company that has 15 people in the company.” What was the challenge with that?
Brian: It’s not what was. It’s what is. It’s a challenge every day. We were very lean before. It was me and my brother and a couple of support people essentially running a $2.5 million business that was really profitable and that’s not exactly the hardest thing in the world to do.
There wasn’t much to worry about. There weren’t 15 people running around. There wasn’t an office with overhead. There weren’t benefits to pay. There weren’t people to keep in line. That challenge is why I’m in love with the business we’re doing. It’s why we kind of set on that path to go create a business that could be a business where we have an office and we have people and we have a ton of fun and can really impact more people than we could ever have before.
But it’s absolutely the challenge for all the reasons I said before. As the CEO, you think everyone’s going to be as committed and do everything that you do for the company and stay up all night. They feel like they’re part of the team, but that’s normally not how it happens.
Andrew: That’s a big challenge and now people aren’t staying in late?
Brian: Well, I don’t ask people to stay in late. I don’t want to have an office like that.
Andrew: What is the challenge of having more people?
Brian: Well, it’s more things to worry about. It’s one of the reasons the office I’m sitting in right now–my wife and I just finished. We’ve been in our new house for over a year. We just finished this office basically a week ago because I just needed a place that I could escape to and be productive because I find it very hard to be productive in an office–we basically have a put. It’s an open atmosphere. I don’t have an office at the office.
So, everyone’s got questions. The CEO is sitting right there–I know it’s only 15 people. So, it’s probably not like Mark Zuckerberg walking around. But people naturally come to me for everything. I’m sure every CEO kind of experiences that. When you’re in an office, if you’re a remote team and someone can Slack you, you can turn Slack off. I can’t make that person go home. I can’t just say, “Hey, don’t turn around and look at me and wave your hand and tell me you have a question.”
Andrew: That is a really hard thing. What else? By the way, that’s incredibly hard. Even frankly if someone’s Slacking you, they expect a response right away or I get text messages sometimes in the middle of an interview and I feel the urgency to respond, but I’m not going to. I get that. What else is about now scaling to this software business that’s a challenge for you?
Brian: One of the other challenges is that I’m no longer in control of the product. I’m not a developer. I can’t control if there’s a bug. I can’t fix it. I can’t build the feature that I want. I can’t stay up all night and get it done.
Andrew: Was there something that you would have done if you could do all that?
Brian: There are dozens of things that I would do.
Andrew: What’s an example that recently came up that’s something that in the old days, you might have been able to control but because today it’s someone else’s work, you can’t dive in?
Brian: Well, I have a feature kind of wish list on my wall back at the office. All of those things would be done if I could code. I’m sure coders probably laugh when they hear me say that because it’s not that easy, but all those things–there are new features, new templates, new integrations. There’s all kinds of stuff that if I could code, I would just not sleep and get them done and be excited to do them.
I’m at the mercy of the talent that we have. It’s a fantastic team. I would never knock my team. We’re doing awesome things. But it’s never what the CEO wants. It never happens as fast as they want. It’s just kind of the nature of–
Andrew: What’s your hiring process now for bringing new people in?
Brian: We use a tool called Resumator, which I think they just renamed it to Jazz. I have no idea why they named it that. That’s a great tool. We have all of our applicants going through that process. It kind of filters them in and then we narrow it down. We use them to recruit a lot. They kind of automatically post to a bunch of sites. I think there are a lot of tools out there like them. Craigslist has actually been really big and obviously word of mouth brings in a lot of applicants too.
We just kind of follow a dumbed down version of topgrading where we do multiple steps in the interview and kind of really try to take our time.
Andrew: A dumbed down version of what?
Brian: Topgrading. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book. It’s a fantastic book on kind of the hiring process. I forget the author’s name. But it’s a great, great book just all about how the cost of a mishire can be a huge, especially for a startup. So, we have three or four interviews to really get to know the person, make sure they’re going to be a good fit and that’s essentially it. I’m not a part of every step. If it’s a developer, the development team kind of–they sort of take the reins and get the person down to a point where they’re ready to talk to me and then we make the call.
Andrew: “Topgrading” is written by Brad Smart and Geoff Smart.
Brian: There you go.
Andrew: Sounds right?
Brian: Yeah. It’s an awesome, awesome book.
Andrew: I’ve got to close it out with a bunch of really rapid fire questions here. The first is we asked you before the interview started what books are you into just to see if there’s anything that stands out for you and it was “The ONE Thing” by Gary Keller. Why?
Brian: That book is probably the best book I’ve ever read possibly. It’s definitely top three.
Andrew: Why? What it’s about that you like?
Brian: I’m a very task-oriented person. I love lists. I love to be organized. I love to get things done and his approach of focusing one thing–so, I can look at this whiteboard next to me that has 500 elements on it, but I have my one thing that I’m focusing on that I’m not allowed to go chase after all these other shining objects until I cross the finish line with that one thing.
Andrew: What’s the one thing now?
Brian: The one thing now is building our list and executing on these product launches. So, that’s the core of where we get our customers from. So, for me to go spend time trying to get our Instagram following up because I saw a cool product about it or getting all these shiny objects–
Andrew: One thing that you’re focusing on. You also told our producer that you are really into productivity. You need to be efficient. You’re a productivity nerd, you actually called yourself. Did you call yourself–I saw your eyes do something as I said that.
Brian: No, you got it.
Andrew: I got it. Okay. What makes you a productivity nerd? What are some productivity nerd tips that you can give us?
Brian: I think it’s like I want to answer the question and then I don’t. On one hand, I love productivity. I’m always looking for that next hack. I think that’s what kind of holds most of back is we always think there’s some system. There’s some software. I’ve kind of gotten off software as far as productivity goes.
I have a little notes thing on my iPhone that if I don’t have paper, if I’m not in my seat in my office where my systems are sort of in place to write things down on sticky notes or whiteboard or whatever, then that’s where I just quickly put them down, but I try not to keep lists electronically because things just get lost and it’s just a nightmare. I’ve never found anything that works and I’ve tried everything.
Andrew: So, you don’t do anything for productivity except reduce that productivity tools you have?
Brian: Yeah. That’s probably the big one.
Andrew: I can see that.
Brian: I guess I try to apply “The ONE Thing” to productivity and the one thing for me is I love sticky notes and I love whiteboard. So, that’s kind of where the whiteboard I’m sitting next to now is visual. I have pictures drawn. It’s something I can look at quickly and it’s not just huge list. But everything for me has to be written down or else it will get buried in the memory of my iPhone or on the 86th tab I have open in Chrome and it just will never get done. So, I try to keep everything offline as much as possible and that seems to help me quite a bit.
Andrew: Your dad was in Amway–still going rapid-fire here.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: What did you think of your dad being in Amway? This is the multi-level marketing group.
Brian: As a kid, I didn’t know what it was. It’s funny looking back. I’m not a huge fan of MLMs, but it’s what drew my dad into entrepreneurship and it’s what made me as a little kid watch my dad try to grow this business and have meetings at our house. We used to steal products off the shelf in the basement as kids. They had like little Binaca things and gum. We would just kind of rampage the stuff. But he was building a business from home. He was doing it because he wanted to spend time with us and with my mom. He wanted us all to have better lives.
I think that’s what put that motivation in me to never be an employee and to always kind of do things, play by my own rules and that it could actually be done. I think most people don’t realize it can actually be done. But for me, I was lucky enough to have a dad growing up that I sort of watched him chase that dream and it put that in me, I guess.
Andrew: Okay. Revenues–where are your revenues right now for SamCart?
Brian: SamCart, we are over $100,000 a month in revenue, quite a bit over that. We’re growing really, really quick. So, this year, if we talked a year from now, it’s going to look a lot different. It’s going to be a lot of fun. So, that’s where we’re at now. We’re about 1,500 paying customers. We have about 7,000 users in the tool, people using it. So, that’s kind of the quick scoop.
Andrew: Our producer asked you what’s one thing you can teach the audience. You actually gave us two ideas. One of them was shortcuts to get to $100,000 a month in revenue. What’s one of the shortcuts?
Brian: Well, I guess the shortcut–it’s kind of unfair to people who don’t have access to something like this, but our list. We essentially cheated. Everyone writes these articles on growth hacking and how to get your software business up to $100,000 a month or $10,000 a month or whatever it is, but for us, we didn’t have to do any customer acquisition apparently. We had all of them ready to go. They were fans of another business.
So, whether you’re using content marketing or pay per click or whatever, just building some sort of audience that follows you, whether it’s an iTunes subscriber base or an email list. If you already have a list of people, your customer efforts are basically done. All you have to do is let them know about this new product.
For us, our audience was big enough that through a year of promoting to them, we were able to get to $100,000 without spending any money in ads, without hiring any sales guys. It was all pretty much ready to go.
Andrew: Finally, why am I interviewing you instead of Sam? Who’s Sam from SamCart?
Brian: We get that asked all the time. There is no Sam. I should probably name my next kid or dog or somebody, just pretend they’ve been here the whole time. You can say Sam is for sales and marketing because that’s kind of what we focus on for the cart. It’s the shopping cart hat actually converts, not just gives you the ability to accept payments. We do more than that. We can make the argument that’s what it’s for.
Andrew: It is a nice, easy name to remember. SamCart.com is the URL. Thank you so much for being here. You were one of the original Mixergy Premium members, I think. You’ve been listening for a long time and I really appreciate you being out there. I’m especially proud. I don’t remember, but I used to say, “I’m doing this so the person who’s listening to me could eventually be here doing the freaking interview.”
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: This is more for me maybe than for you a dream come true. I’m glad to see you both be here and so proud of what you’ve built. It’s incredible.
Brian: It’s an honor to be here. Thanks for having me.
Andrew: I don’t think I did it justice here. I know I sounded like I raved about it. Actually, no, I’ve raved more in the past. The day I stop raving about what I’m interviewing about is the day I shouldn’t be doing it. If I’m not excited about the products or the businesses, I shouldn’t be doing it. But I think the better way to see it is to go see one of the sales pages. Oh, there’s a demo at the top of your page, right? How does someone see one of your sales pages, one of the shopping cart pages?
Brian: You could go–our new site will be up pretty soon so they’ll be plastered all over it. You just have to find one of our customers. I’ll try to think of one. We have a guy selling ski goggles. I’m trying to remember the name of his site.
Andrew: I like Videofruit, what he did. Didn’t he use you?
Brian: Actually, no, I know Bryan very well. At the time of this call, he has a SamCart account, but he’s still using his Infusionsoft checkout page.
Andrew: No. He showed me what–well, maybe he showed me something that he’s not showing other people. He showed it to me. It looked great.
Brian: Oh, really?
Andrew: Yeah. He showed me–I guess that’s where I got to really see your account. He and I get on a call, it used to be once a week, now once a month, I said, “What’s up with SamCart?” He started walking me through it. Maybe that’s what it was. So, if not him, who else can we take a look at?
Brian: Let me see if I can find this guy’s URL. One of the guys that’s probably one of our biggest customers, he’s selling–
Andrew: Bryan needs to change the copyright at the bottom of his page. I don’t know why that’s become my thing. I guess once you start looking for copyrights that are out of date, you start to see them everywhere.
Brian: Yeah. I’m trying to find a customer you can go quickly. A lot of our customers, their checkout pages are buried in their marketing funnel, so you have to like opt-in to a list.
Andrew: Do you guys do it? If I go to buy from you am I going to see it?
Brian: Yeah. If you just go to Get10000Fans.com, you should be able to–
Andrew: It’s Get10000Fans.com.
Brian: And then products up at the top right… Most of these are going to send you into sales funnels. Let me see if any one of them is a straight checkout page.
Andrew: Maybe the best thing to do is go over to SamCart.com, see the video under demo.
Brian: Yeah, or our blog too.
Andrew: Or your blog.
Brian: I can send you a link right now if you want just to look at one of the live ones.
Andrew: I’d like to see it. Cool. All right. Guys, go check out SamCart.
Remember, my two sponsors for this interview are the company that’s going to help you with your webinar. It works with every single platform that your people are really on, including the telephone, like dial in phone number. GoToWebinar.com–wait, I was going to say go to GoToWebinar.com. I’m glad I just stuck with GoToWebinar.com. It just works. It works really well.
And if you need to hire a developer to build your first product the way that Brian did, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy. Frankly, if you have a big developer team and I know many people do and you need another great developer or a team of them, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy.
And finally, if you like this interview, please subscribe to the podcast and you’ll get every single interview delivered directly to you for free. You know that we ordinarily sell these interviews as part of our membership. But if you subscribe to the podcast, you get each new one automatically delivered to you for free. You could keep it forever and never have to pay anything.
Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. I see that Brian is working feverishly to get me a link to one of the shopping cart pages. I’ll get it offline and hopefully it will be something I can share with people in the comments. So, if you ask for it, let me know and I’ll post it. Bye, everyone.
